On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (15 page)

And
Company
, also a straight play, lacked Robert. Having trouble with his script, Furth turned to Sondheim, who showed it to Prince, who heard a musical in it. Somebody then came up with the idea of making the third parties a single individual—a thirty-something bachelor who is taken on a voyage of discovery in the world of heterosexual bonding. But Sondheim and Furth retained Furth’s original structure of serial sketches rather than invent a linear narrative—though that wouldn’t have been difficult. You start with Robert in his place of work, making plans to see one of the couples, and they reveal something that clicks on the plot-starter tab, leading to more scenes with more couples. Add in a designated sweetheart, making Robert half of a First Couple in the manner of the King and Mrs. Anna, or perhaps Candide and Cunegonde…

But why not originate a format?
Company
has no First Couple, no official Robert romance beyond, it appears, a one-night stand with a stewardess. Of his two other girl friends, one does little more than break up with him, and the other simply meets him on a park bench and then accompanies him on one of his couples visits.
Company
’s ending isn’t wedding bells: instead, it’s Robert’s reaching the maturity of wanting to—as they used to call it—Settle Down.

This is a surprisingly gooey conclusion to the most innovative of shows; all it needs is a Neil Simon father thundering that Robert is a “bum” because he isn’t married. There are no fathers in
Company
; there aren’t even any children, though there are references to them. And Robert has no place of work. We don’t even know how he makes his living. Furth’s libretto strips away all the earmarks that particularize a story, because there isn’t a story.
Company
disintegrated the musical’s habitual framework that tells us who everybody is: a student prince in Heidelberg amid glee-singing classmates, the waitress he loves, and the class system that separates them. A crippled beggar, his woman, her brutal ex, a crafty dope peddler, and the rest of the ghetto of prayer and jubilation in
Porgy and Bess
. A matchmaker and the “well-known half-a-millionaire” she’s after, along with a Second and even Third Couple, in
Hello, Dolly!
.

Not in
Company
. We don’t know who anyone is, and no sets slip in and out to tell us where we are. All we saw (in the original production) was a high-rise apartment building, complete with elevator, that functioned as a kind of ant farm of high-end Manhattan life. Most interesting, Furth’s dialogue is more playful than informative, pointed yet mysterious. It doesn’t explain anything—for instance, how does Robert know these people? Where did they meet? Is he on gala terms with all of them equally, or is there one husband, one wife, that he simply puts up with?

He does seem particularly drawn to Amy, the bride who, in “Getting Married Today,” gives way to genuinely frantic jitters at the thought of being legally involved with the man she has been living with in—we imagine—bliss. It’s a key scene, because Robert impulsively proposes to Amy himself—and that appears to soothe her anxiety. “You have to want to marry
some
body,” she tells him, “not some
body
.” And she hurries off to meet her other half at the church, and the first act ends almost immediately thereafter, pointing up this lesson in love: the marriage thing is scary, contagious, pervasive. Couples saying, “I do” are ubiquitous, and not only because of social pressures or economic benefits.

But why did Robert propose to Amy and not the unattached women he knows? What’s the history of Robert and Amy? Furth gives no clues, and that’s no accident, because
Company
cuts to the chase in every scene. This explains why the show’s every revival plays like a new piece: it has no baggage.

Then there’s Furth’s oddly skewed dialogue, redolent of Manhattan smarties reveling in their bons mots. Some might call it mannered, but it’s the opposite: purified. Robert’s friends are always blurting out what most people think but don’t say. This is in contrast with Robert, who’s an open-sesame of feelgood clichés. It’s as if he keeps trying to grab hold of the show, to twist it into a more typical musical, one that doesn’t confront you with your demons. Then, in the work’s most telling scene, the last of the “couples” sketches, it is Robert who suddenly does the blurting out, sitting in a night spot with the worldly Joanne. He is finally completing his voyage from carefree child to grownup, with a sense of responsibility and, by marriage contract to come, officially giving and being given to in turn. It sounds nice. And he’s scared.

Before we quote him, let’s consider whether or not Furth was influenced by the Broadway airings, in the 1960s, of Harold Pinter’s plays, for, like Furth in
Company
, Pinter leaves out the explanatory details that reassure an audience but defy realism of character. Many playwrights, even today, puppet their players into delivering contrived expository lines, little synopses of what they’re up to. It’s akin to one character’s telling another, in scene one, “Oh, I’m so resentful of my job at the pickle factory that pays for my younger brother’s education but is certain to provision guilt and antagonism in the style of Arthur Miller directed by Elia Kazan, with Tonys for all of us.”

But some of the interaction in
Company
does bear a Pinteresque feeling, as characters talk
around
the apparent subject rather than within it. In Pinter’s
The Homecoming
(1965), a Canadian university professor visits his London family with his wife, who, at the play’s end, stays to become the family’s prostitute while her husband departs for home. No,
really
? In fact, she
is
a prostitute. He has just hired her off the street to
impersonate
his wife in order to express his contempt for his seedy relatives, coaching her in a couple of facts—they have three kids and they’ve just been in Venice—to give her credibility.

Of course, Pinter never states this in so many words because the professor and his “wife” wouldn’t state it, either. But a careful reading of their first scene, when the two are alone in the family house, makes it unmistakable that they don’t know each other:

RUTH
:
Can I sit down?

TEDDY
:
Of course.

RUTH
:
I’m tired.

    
(Pause)

TEDDY
:
Then sit down.

    
(She does not move.)

This hardly sounds like two people who have been living with each other for years. On the contrary, it sounds like two strangers, she so uncertain about this odd gig that she has no idea what she is allowed to do. And would the wife of an academic with career and standing—a doctor of philosophy, no less—want to prostitute herself for anyone, much less her husband’s degenerate bloodline?

There’s just enough of this in
Company
to make us wonder, comparably, how well Robert really knows these wonderful friends of his. Let’s go back to his scene with Joanne—and, remember, she’s the really edgy member of the “company.” With a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she fixes Robert with a look as sharp as the butterfly collector’s needle, and Robert goes into a tensely rambling monologue, which ends:

ROBERT
:
Whew! It’s very drunk out tonight. What are you looking at, Joanne? It’s my charisma, huh? Well, stop looking at my charisma!

JOANNE
:
(still staring; no change in position or voice) When are we gonna make it?

Or consider
Company
’s opening scene, when Robert comes into his apartment to be met by a surprise party. He starts verbally overcompensating while his friends answer “lifelessly,” intoning in ghostly chorus:

ROBERT
:
Thank you for including me in your thoughts, your lives, your families. Yes, thank you for remembering. Thank you.

THE COUPLES
:
You don’t look it.

A double meaning: he states his age and they respond with the indicated cliché. But he
hasn’t
stated his age. He has expressed gratitude for their being in his life
and they say he isn’t really grateful at all
. So what kind of relationships are these, anyway? Is this Furth’s revelation that the intimacy available in urban American civilization is fragile and elusive, even unattainable? We think
Company
says that marriage is difficult, but it says also that friendship is difficult as well.

As a seasoned actor,
^*
Furth knew instinctively how written dialogue would play. Limiting this discussion to American writers of the twentieth century, let us observe that the playwrights who outlast their era, such as Clifford Odets or Tennessee Williams, create dialogue that plays. S. N. Behrman wrote dialogue that doesn’t, which is why he is seldom revived, despite his great success in the 1930s and 1940s. Just to confuse the issue, Eugene O’Neill’s early expressionist works (like
The Hairy Ape
and
The Great God Brown
) play well, but the grander yet still expressionist
Strange Interlude
does not. Later,
The Iceman Cometh
plays well even with some awkwardly self-conscious writing, but the following
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
plays magnificently from start to finish.

And so does
Company
, partly because the score does not blend into the book any more than the book “blends” into the lives it presents to us. The entire show is skewed, brilliant, lopsided in the way Furth and Sondheim approach the material. For instance, how does Robert know Larry and Joanne? They’re an older couple, Larry a successful businessman (I guess), affable and easygoing and Joanne the typical Elaine Stritch role: a mean-girl sophisticate. And of course Stritch was the original New York Joanne—but that puzzles us all the more. Elaine Stritch and Robert are an extremely unlikely mix. Robert might have met Larry in some professional connection, but would they have become buddies? And, given that Robert doesn’t appear to enjoy being analyzed, wouldn’t he have been put off very early on by Joanne, who is as invasive as a colonoscopy? She rips into him in that aforementioned nightclub scene with “Jesus, you are lifted right out of a Krafft-Ebing case history” and then hits him with that “When are we going to make it?” line, throwing Robert and
Company
itself off its pins.

But is Joanne really coming on to Robert? She gives him a potential passion slot—two o’clock at her place, when Larry is at the gym—but we’re not sure exactly what is happening in that transaction, except that it leads directly to the climax of the show, when Robert “makes it” to his moment of self-discovery and more or less walks out of the forest of apartments and “extra man” socializing and becomes, at last, himself, setting aside the toys of youth to reach the most old-fashioned possibility in musical comedy, the solo in which someone we like pours out his heart to us. Being alive, losing my mind, what’s the use of wond’rin’?. Messages that essentialize with such illumination that entertainment becomes enlightenment.

Robert has a few of these numbers—“Someone Is Waiting” and (added to the 1995 Roundabout revival and now a part of the show) “Marry Me a Little.” They stand apart from the other songs, which tend to jut into rather than materialize out of the action. In
Contradictions
, Hal Prince specifically cites as the inspiration for this odd use of the music the English director Joan Littlewood’s staging of Brendan Behan’s
The Hostage
(1958), an indescribable farrago set in a Dublin boardinghouse. Seen in New York in 1960 in the Littlewood production,
The Hostage
, says Prince, “maneuvered currents of realism and fantasy compatibly in one play,” which makes it sound a bit like
Company
. (Even if Behan’s raucous farce-melodrama includes very disparate character elements, from flaming queens and prostitutes to outright crazies, and, further, deals with Irish Republican Army terrorism, while
Company
’s milieu is that of the serenely middle class.)
The Hostage
’s musical numbers, Prince continues, “erupted from rather than grew out of moments. They had the abrasive effect of attacking when you least expected, creating such life.”

We’ve already remarked on this aspect of
Company
regarding “The Little Things You Do Together,” and it is one of
Company
’s salient features. Some might think of this as Brechtian, despite Sondheim’s distaste for Brecht’s style. In fact, the songs in Brecht’s plays are usually performance pieces—specialty numbers, like those in Kander and Ebb’s
Chicago
. But that’s not how
Company
uses its songs. The
Company
score is, for the most part, naturalistically integrated with the
Company
continuity. The trick is that you never know just who is going to sing about what till he or she has already started the number—creating, as Prince said of
The Hostage
, “such life.”