WHEN the beautiful and elegant young editor notices an odd smell in the apartment of the handsome and elegant young novelist, she jokingly speculates that “behind that door, there’s some horribly twisted gnome who does all your writing for you.” She has, in jest, hit on the truth.
Richard Greenberg’s 1987 play “The Author’s Voice,” now being done as part of a double bill by the Drama Dept., is a brilliant and macabre three-character comedy about fame, image and suffering creativity. It has that satirical edge so prized by the Drama Dept., where the celebrity-satire “As Bees in Honey Drown” started.
Portia, ideally incarnated by Paige Turco in a tight miniskirt and black jacket, is the sexy, glib editor. Todd is her prize author, a coiffed, gym-going stud with Armani model looks, played with just the right vanity and nervous hollowness by Christopher Orr.
It is Greenberg’s wicked conceit to split his author in two, to separate image and reality, body and soul. In that next room, there does indeed lurk a twisted but scribbling gnome, called Gene. Gene doesn’t walk; he crawls, clad in a legless gunny sack. Not talking but whining or yelling, he is smart and angry and funny and full of pain.
Philip Seymour Hoffman (of “Boogie Nights” and “Happiness”) delivers an extraordinary performance as Gene. A cross between Peter Lorre and a Beach Boy, this amazing guy throws himself into the role of with a possessed power, getting all of Gene’s passive-aggressive whining pathos and fierce anger.
The backstory is acceptably vague. Todd has rescued Gene from the gutter and uses him to get fame. Gene lives vicariously through Todd. Their eerie symbiosis, intense and violent, is not exactly homosexual, since Gene is obsessed with getting a glimpse of Portia and then orchestrating a love scene between the beauties.
But when the love scene goes awry, Gene shouts, “Am I the only one left with a sense of loveliness?” Portia faints. Disaster. The humiliated Gene then exacts an especially malicious revenge.
Evan Yionoulis’ direction realizes all the strange terror of this haunting and magnificently performed piece.
Leave, however, at intermission. The second play, Peter Hedges’ “Imagining Brad” (1990) – about two women who meet at a church social in Nashville – is a nasty, witless and misanthropic parable.
