"Frankie and Johnny": Moonlight Becomes You

By Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

As the unseen radio commentator puts it in New Rep‘s current production of a 1987 play, “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” by Terrence McNally, “maybe I’m crazy, but I still like to believe in love”. What better holiday gift than a play with a point like that?

With this latest choice by New Rep Artistic Director Kate Warner, she continues her season-long theme of transformative storytelling. This time it’s about two seemingly ordinary co-workers in a downscale eatery, Frankie the waitress and Johnny the cook, on a first date that ends up in Frankie’s bed. McNally is on record as having first identified with Johnny as he was writing the work, only realizing as he saw it first performed (in a workshop by Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham) that he was really Frankie. He saw the play as a romantic drama with overtones of a modern day fairy tale, where passion is what connects his characters and thus transforms them.

Initially, Johnny states that there is “no such thing as too hard when you want something”, to which Frankie retorts “yes there is….the other person.” Johnny is perhaps too ready for commitment, whereas Frankie bears both physical and psychological scars from a previous horrific affair as obstacles to her ability to commit. Yet as they listen to the radio broadcast of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, declaring it “the most beautiful music in the world”, they begin to discover uncanny similarities in their lives. How these two apparent opposites end up dancing to the same inner music in the last traces of moonlight, even as the radio programming progresses to Wagner and Dvorak, makes for an engaging evening in the theater.

Though they may seem at first a rather uncultured couple, some of the things they have to tell one another are surprisingly profound. Frankie declares that “romance is seeing somebody for what they are and still wanting them, warts and all”, expressing her dream to be a teacher, adding “I hope I have what it takes to be something.” Johnny affirms his conviction that “my life was happening to me; now I’m making it happen.” By evening’s end, they’re ready for anything, even simultaneously brushing their teeth. Life doesn’t get much more intimate than that.

As presented in the real intimacy of New Rep’s Black Box Theater, the performances by the cast of two have to be pitch-perfect, and that they most certainly are. Robert Pemberton, in the showier role of Johnny, and Anne Gottlieb in the even more challenging part of Frankie, couldn’t be better. Director Antonio Ocampo-Guzman has drawn two impressive, emotionally (and often literally) naked performances from them. The scenic design by Erik D. Diaz illuminates the claustrophobic clutter of Frankie’s life, and the costumes (what there are of them when the two actors aren’t providing just what nature gave them) by Deidre McCabe-Gerrard and lighting design by Chris Brusberg create the perfect mood.

As Johnny says, “Something is going on in this room, something important; don’t you feel it?” To paraphrase Johnny, pardon my French, but this is one %#&-ing great show.