Playwright: Frank Pullen and
Jean-Paul Menou
At: The Journeymen at Gerber/Hart Lib.
Phone: (773) 857-5395; $10
Runs through: July 17
In life and literature, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) placed sex, lust and manliness on one side and sensuality, love and beauty on the other. He rejected the notion that physically strong, handsome men could love him. Instead, he chose young, thin boys as his long-term lovers, fulfilling his need for accessible, delicate beauty.
His semi-autobiographical novel Le Livre Blanc uses this conflict as its principal theme, as adapted for the stage by director Frank Pullen and actor Jean-Paul Menou. This history of a man's psycho-sexual development from boyhood to mid-30s was sensational when published anonymously in 1929, even though it steadfastly eschews the graphic in favor of the suggestive. Cocteau is more concerned with states of mind than with states of arousal. There are no descriptions of sex acts, for example, and the word penis is never used, let alone its slang substitutes. Cocteau would rather describe the male organ as 'the only thing about a man that cannot lie.' He would rather describe a man's swagger than the satisfaction of holding that man. Nonetheless, gay men will identify with many images and incidents, from the hard-ons of high school to spiritual struggles to rough trade.
The Journeymen give Cocteau's intimate story a simple, classic chamber theater staging in an unadorned room seating only 30. The power of words is paramount in a production that respects the discretion of the language. Menou plays Cocteau while tall, sturdy dark blond Victor Holstein and tall, trim brunet Christopher Zimkowski play everyone else. Dressed in three-piece suits, they remain clothed throughout. Closely fitting trousers outline the well-rounded buttocks of Holstein and Zimkowski, but that's as far as this production goes. There are no naked bodies, no kisses, few embraces, movement is unhurried and deliberate, suggestion is stronger than passion. Menou's slight French accent and slow, precise patterns of speech seem affected at first, but become part of the texture of the 70-minute work. Holstein and Zimkowski are perfectly suited to their assigned types, respectively the attractive lout and the self-aware beauty.
Cocteau's own drawings provide the only graphic imagery. Projected on a small screen, they are Picasso-like cartoons of well-built naked men and boys, cocks sometimes erect and tongues stretching to kiss. In 1929, these homo-erotic sketches probably were more scandalous than the narrative of Le Livre Blanc. They amplify the text's circumspect language, yet remain static images not kinetic ones.
Le Livre Blanc ends with the unfulfilled narrator suppressing his homosexuality. The manly men Cocteau felt could not love him in real life do love him in the novel, but he walks away from them all, breaking their hearts and driving one to suicide. Cocteau was nothing if not perverse.