Old story, same ending
‘Looped’ captures the little bit of light left in Tallulah Bankhead’s fading star
By Jana J. Monji 07/24/2008
Before Britney Spears went panty-free, before Paris Hilton became famous for a sex video, long before Madonna’s sex book, Tallulah Bankhead was flashing people at parties and bluntly declaring that she came to Hollywood to fuck Gary Cooper.
Matthew Lombardo’s intriguing play, “Looped,” making its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse, is just filled with four-letter words and crude and shocking proclamations by a woman desperately attempting to get anyone’s attention as the wattage of her celebrity dims.
Valerie Harper is marvelously witty and fabulously lewd with her husky voice and Bankhead mannerisms, yet the underlying melancholy of a has-been haunts this play.
Lombardo’s play is inspired by a 1965 audiotape made while Bankhead was in a recording studio to rerecord, or “loop,” one line of dialogue to a British B-movie, “Die! Die! My Darling!” featuring some up-and-coming stars such as Stephanie Powers and Donald Sutherland. The looping session should have taken only five minutes, but instead consumed eight hours.
The daughter of a Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the niece of one US Senator and the granddaughter of another, Bankhead came from a powerful Alabama Democratic political family and was both a stage and movie actor.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 “Lifeboat,” in which she plays a journalist, is considered her best film performance. She appeared as herself on “I Love Lucy” and as Black Widow on the campy 1960s TV series, “Batman.” By the time she died in 1968 at age 66, she was more a celebrity than an actor and her hard-partying lifestyle had devolved into heavy drinking and pill-popping.
The first act deals with Bankhead arriving late, much to the consternation of the man in charge of the session, Danny (Chad Allen). She was lost in Los Angeles because of its “freeways leading into more freeways.”
She can’t remember her line, admits she doesn’t believe in underwear, asks for booze, soon takes some pills and snorts some cocaine. She then asks for a break — and a 10-minute break stretches into three hours.
Yet there’s only so much entertainment one can get from a verbally abusive drug user. In the second act, we learn secrets that Danny has repressed and Bankhead reveals she is dying.
While the idea of a drug addict giving good advice on life seems a bit far-fetched, it does keep Bankhead from seeming depressingly self-centered.
Harper as Bankhead quickly erases any memories you have of her Emmy Award-winning role as Rhoda Morgenstern, and Allen is convincing as an uptight assistant who loosens up and learns something about life, including why people liked Bankhead as a person.
“Looped” continues through Aug. 3 at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. For tickets, call (800) 378-7021 or visit www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org.
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