‘Cleo’ an origin story for celebrity obsession
Halfway through “Cleo,” at the Alley Theatre through April 29, the slick-and-sweet crooner Eddie Fisher says he’s tired of living a life of superficiality, depravity and lies. “I’m going back to Las Vegas,” he says.
It’s one of the better jokes in the world premiere of Lawrence Wright’s historical drama about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s romance on the set of the disastrous 1963 film “Cleopatra,” but the irony isn’t simply that Hollywood makes Vegas look good. It’s that Vegas profits off greed, lust and loneliness but doesn’t apologize for it, whereas Hollywood does the same under the guise of prestige.
Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Texas journalist, is likely used to the question, “Why this story? Why now?” The answer for “Cleo” lays itself bare. The dressing-room drama between Taylor and Burton serves as an origin story for the world of Stormy Daniels, Anthony Weiner, Jay-Z, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
That’s just one interpretation of what “Cleo” shows about today: that fame, power, sex and gossip are intertwined. The production also illustrates that the Taylor-Burton scandal unraveled a mythology held dear by consumers of American entertainment — that well-respected actors, by virtue of doing Shakespeare, winning Oscars and having European accents, could never also be horny, manipulative, self-obsessed drug-addicted teenagers.
Burton is played by Richard Short with the sexual verbosity of a genius man-child. Magnetic and repulsive at the same time, Short, directed by Bob Balaban, moves in a way that’s so openly confident and desperate that you almost forgive him when, halfway through speaking about the tragic ironies of this thing called life, he shoves his hand up a skirt.
Wright, faced with mountains of both well-documented material and unreportable mystery surrounding “Cleopatra,” is strategic in his fictionalization. In “Cleo,” Burton bets rival actor Rex Harrison (Mark Capri) that he’ll be the first to bed Taylor on set. He thinks he’s the better actor, perhaps destined to be the bigger star and, most important, more of a man.
So he asks Taylor, played by Lisa Birnbaum in a balancing act of cool, mythical aloofness and fiery Shakespearean desolation, if he could “read” the lines on her foot. In other words, he thinks he’s some kind of magician. He touches her. She giggles. Taylor is well weathered in her Hollywood world, so she knows Burton’s game. She plays it nevertheless because he makes her feel something, even if that feeling isn’t healthy.
Burton, often written into the Taylor story with a tone of hopeless romanticism, is seen here under the bright interrogationroom lights of a MeToo world. Burton rushes to brag about his conquest over Taylor, mentioning that the sex wasn’t that great even though she’s beautiful and “top heavy.” This is Wright’s sharpest observation regarding the birth of modern-era celebrity — that we love, obsess over and idolize people whose behavior makes us sick to our stomach.
Wright stops short of presenting a neat thesis about what we should think about all this, be it an open embrace of sex in the workplace or a more rigid protection of morals and consent. It ends in an ambiguous fall back to Taylor and Burton’s world of beautiful language and seemingly deep expressions of love and death, which feels both suitable and slightly unsatisfying.
Even though the play ends with the famous couple, it’s Fisher, played by Adam Gibbs with aw-shucks charm and an elegant, rose-colored singing voice, who gets the last word. He’s a player in this game as much as Taylor is, but experiencing the scandal as a loser makes him the closest character to an audience surrogate.
Everyone drawn to his story is by definition drawn to glamor. But then, what’s the point of the story besides looking at a glamorous set filled with glamorous people? Filled with Shakespearean iambic pentameter, the play bursts with poetry. The mirroring narrative of Antony and Cleopatra, Burton and Taylor, is great drama that’s hard to relate to.
What does this story say about the attraction between a man and a woman? Fisher shrugs when he ponders this point. Fisher wants the opposite of poetry. He wants Vegas. His answer, preceded by a pause, is a cop-out. It’s not the one we wanted. But at least, Fisher suggests, it’s a step away from mythology.