"Man In The Ring", Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Tremont Street,
Boston, MA
December 16, 2018
"Man In The Ring" is a poignantly sad, strangely sweet story of a man whose hands could make a beautiful hat for a show room and deliver thunderous haymakers in the boxing ring. It will stay riveted in your memory long after you've left the theater.
It’s the story of two Emile Griffiths told in parallel, opening with scenes of the 70 year old mentally demolished (pugilistic dementia) older Emile searching for a shoe then ping ponging back and forth to the younger Emile, the kid filled with dreams who immigrated to New York from St. Thomas, V.I.
It’s painful to watch young off-the-boat Griffith enter the world of boxing when his employer in the hat making district discovers how strong and muscular he is and brings him to the gym to become a fighter. He had fast hands and could box - a natural.
We know where the play is heading and can’t close our eyes as we know how those dreams of fame on the baseball diamond or as a designer on the floor of a hat making business give way to a life of boxing that will give him the fame then crush him for being open about the kind of man he is. This is the 1950s and 60s. Homosexuality was taboo. Bisexuality was unthinkable. Combine that with the fact we're talking about a world champion boxer and it strains credulity. And it's true.
The characterizations of Griffith (1938-2013) lean on liltingly accented island English, poetic and filled with colorful local colloquialisms that eerily underscore what happens in Griffith’s life. The recurring rhymes of childhood songs that Griffith faintly remembers, songs that teach them how to behave in male/female relationships, hold the both the play and the older Griffith together as his brain struggles to focus on where he put his shoes, and wracks him with nightmares about a 1962 prize fight for the welterweight championship in which he killed Benny Paret with a brutal onslaught of punches. Paret had made fun of Griffith's sexuality at the public weigh in before the title fight. We are left to decide whether or not Griffith intentionally savagely beat the man senseless.
The six time world champion made and lost a fortune. A scene as he sells the belts he won as a world champion in the welterweight and middleweight classes to make ends meet breaks your heart. The champion is an emotional wreck, relentlessly remorseful for the fatal night in the boxing ring and deeply yearning for forgiveness and understanding for the life he chose to live.
'I killed a man, and the world forgave me, yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me," Griffith says uncomprehendingly.
He never tried to hide his sexuality and hardly seemed to understand his bisexual nature himself. Considering the era in which he lived, his openness, naive or intentional, was as brave as his valor in the ring. The result tormented him.
From the very first moments on stage, John Douglas Thompson and Kyle Vincent Terry inhabit the roles of the elder and younger Griffith with the magnetism of the man’s personality and the irreconcilable contradictions of his lifestyle. Luis (Victor Almanzar) as the elder Griffith’s lover and caretaker is tender, gentle, and the only link Griffith has with the real world. The portrayal of Griffith''s mother, who emigrated to the United States years before Griffith and prostituted herself to make a living is two dimensional. She clearly has no idea how to nurture her son but is happy take his money as he rises to fame. The cruel aunt in St. Thomas she asked to care for him was cruel and devoid of any love. For nurturing and any kind of parental love (his father was long gone after he was born), Griffith began life with a mandatory eight count. Luis is the only constant source of love Griffith may have known his whole life.
How is it possible to make the life of an immigrant bisexual boxer a compelling piece of theater? Director Michael Grief, playwright Michael Cristofer, and music director Michael McElroy know exactly how they want the play to unfold - using imaginatively staged and illuminated vignettes that gradually fit together the people and the pieces of the puzzle that was Griffith's life.
The boxing scenes, strobe lights popping to show in freeze frame scenes of his knockout punches in his fights are starkly effective as are scenes of the champion patronizing gay bars. Even in 2018, the bar scenes contradict every notion we have of men in the prize fighting business, let alone world champions prize fighters.
The clever two-tier stage setting features a place for musicians to play the melodies of children’s songs as the boxer brings them into focus and a huge screen backdrop that shows crawls of headlines from Griffith's career and brief black and white video clips of Griffith during arc of his brilliant ring career from 1958 to 1977 (85 Wins [23 Knockouts], 24 Defeats [2 Knockouts, 2 Draws).
The man was either way ahead of his time or recklessly self-destructive. In his boxing career, he was willing to take punches to wait for an opening to knock out an opponent. In the ring of life, he absorbed the pain of being battered for who he was. Years after his death, this powerful, deeply realized portrayal of the most complex world champion boxer the world has ever known awards him a TKO over the misery he suffered in life.
Griffith's bisexuality may have been an open secret to the closely knit world of boxing but was never a story newspapers would run at the time. A meeting with Benny Paret's son when Griffith struggles for the words to ask for forgiveness at the closing moments of the play puts the entire audience into a sob mode. This is not a theatrical device. It happened.
The single bed on the set is a metaphor for the island on which Griffith finds himself stranded with only memories to keep him company.
“Miracles and Other Deceptions”: Sleightly Wonder-ful Show at the Omni Parker House
Omni Parker House, 60 School Street, Boston, MA, 02106
Fridays, 7 PM and 9PM
November 16, 2018
I’m rolling up my sleeves to show I have nothing to hide as I tell you this is one of the best evening’s entertainments in Boston right now.
“Miracles and Other Deceptions,” a 75-minute program of theatrical sleight of hand magic is all of that. Paul Gertner was smitten with the idea of magic when he was a kid. He’s so good at it, he presents all over the world. He’s fooled Penn and Teller. Three times. Fooling me was a lot easier and I loved every minute.
No grand stage illusions by levitating a woman, or having her climb into a small box, driving swords into the closed box, and then opening it up to discover only air inside. This is the best kind of magic. Small scale, a few props, and big surprises with playing cards, coins, and cups and balls.
The set up is perfect. A small room on the Omni Parker House mezzanine level, a large round table covered in black velvet seating 12 people, plus one for Paul Gertner. Risers accommodating a dozen others are set behind the table close enough to see the goings on. I was two seats away from Gertner; my pal Myke who invited me to join him for the show sat right next to him.
"The closer you look, the less you'll see!" Gertner says in the first few minutes. Giving into glee is much easier.
Telling you what happened would spoil the fun. I can tell you that with playing cards, coins and a few cups and balls he will bedazzle you with magic and patter that makes the show feel like a musical that hums along just fine without the music. Back stories, anecdotes about his father, children, Johnny Carson, and wife seamlessly connect with the sleight of hand he performs. It is utterly mesmerizing for the ears as well as the eyes.
“Does anyone have a $20 bill?” he asks. I quickly reach into my pocket. What happened next had something to do with a lemon and was stupefying.
I haven’t had so much fun since my mother, her mother, and all her sisters were playing Peekaboo with me when I was an infant. OK, that’s an assumption. A fact is I haven’t done as much oooo-ing and ahhhh-ing in a long time.
“The sense of wide-eyed wonder you had as a kid still lurks in your psyche,” he tells you upfront. No small part of his show is that he makes that re-appear too.
SIDEBAR
Pricing; VIP “At The Table” $60, 12 people; General Admission: $45 in second and third row and close to the magic, 12 people, seats not assigned. Definitely recommend VIP seating.
Seating: Arrive 30 minutes early, wait in the hallway on the mezzanine level till Gertner’s wife Kathy opens the door 15 minutes before showtime. The 12 seats around the VIP table are first come, first served, as are second and third row. Myke was the first ticket holder for the table who entered the room and got those fabulous seats right next to Paul Gertner.
A Happy Thanksgiving message that magically turns into a personal timeline/mini biography from Paul
“Miracles and Other Deceptions" program covers.
Myke, Paul Gertner, PT
The residual memories of the joy of seeing magic being performed a few feet from my chair at the table in synch with an evening of personal anecdotes that scaffold the illusions has kept me beaming days and days after witnessing it.
https://gertner.com/developing-new-magic-trick/
https://gertner.com/upside-down-thinking/
November 20, 2018 in Commentaries, Theater reviews | Permalink | Comments (2)
Tags: Paul Gertner, “Miracles and Other Deceptions"