There’s a famous scene in the Robert Altman film The Player in which a group of self-infatuated movie producers are enjoying a lavish lunch. Between calorie-counting bites and frequent sips of wine, they talk animatedly about the topical intrigues of their industry until producer Griffin Mill, who’s got issues, challenges his colleagues to change the subject. Naturally, they can’t. After an awkward pause, the group retreats to the familiar terrain of Hollywood chatter.
The characters who populate John Guare’s Rich and Famous, now through February 8, 2009 at A.C.T., are similarly obsessed by their chosen milieu, except they are even more shallow than Mill’s lunchmates. Lacking the talent and brains that might have enabled them to converse about their industry as knowingly as Altman’s players, Guare’s creations are focused entirely, pathetically, on their narcissistic, infantile dreams of fame and fortune.
They work hard at their folly. Guare’s protagonist, a playwright named Bing Ringling (Brooks Ashmanskas), cranks out 843 scripts before a masterwork of pretense called Etruscan Conundrum is picked up by the wildly successful producer Veronica Gulpp-Vestige (Mary Birdsong). Veronica has reaped the rewards of hit after vapid hit but she’s never had a comeback, so she resolves to produce a string of flops with Bing so that she may eventually stage for herself “the greatest comeback since Easter.” Like Bing, she’s prepared to go to a good deal of trouble to achieve failure.
Then there’s the insufficiently revered composer Anatol Torah (Stephen DeRosa), who has been minting money his entire career by cranking out meager variations of the same predictable melody. So severe are the pressures of genius on the addled cranium of poor, sensitive Anatol that he routinely flees his pink bedroom-cum-music studio for a quick trip to Hamburg, where he visits a lethal Fight Club to pay for the privilege of strangling a fellow human being to death with piano wire. “It’s delectable,” he purrs.
Okay. The desire to be rich and famous clouds the mind, causes us to do insane, unforgivable things and corrupts everything it touches. Got it. And the string of events that litter Rich and Famous are obviously surreal, so it would be a mistake to take the particulars of the plot too literally.