Arden's "Something Intangible' (2nd review)

Driving home from the opening night of Something Intangible, I turned on my radio and, by coincidence, heard the opening of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony— just the work that the characters were discussing on stage a few minutes earlier.

You may recall that the Pastoral was a controversial part of Walt Disney's 1940 film, Fantasia, as some music critics denounced Disney and conductor Leopold Stokowski for editing sections of the music. In Bruce Graham's new play, the cartoon artist turned studio owner is named Tony Wiston, and the conductor is called Gustav von Meyerhoff— but Meyerhoff is having an affair with Greta Garbo just as Stokowski actually did, and the movie includes the animation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, not his Sixth.

These cute near misses are an annoying aspect of Graham's otherwise generally entertaining play. They constitute unnecessary name-dropping in a work of fiction that was announced as being "loosely based" on the relationship between Walt Disney and his brother Roy. Something Intangible isn't a documentary, so there's no need for details to be accurate, and making the dialogue refer so closely to reality becomes distracting. It causes audience members to assume that everything they hear is factual. Among the audience I heard comments like, "Did Walt actually force his employees to pop Benzedrine pills?" and "Did Walt really hate homosexuals?"

Why couldn't the playwright simply have taken the contrast between the artistic and extroverted Walt and his buttoned-down and buttoned-up brother Roy and spun his script from that?

Reciprocal resentments

The notion that one brother is a high-strung prima donna and the other an unassuming caretaker of business offers great potential, and Something Intangible dramatizes their differences quite effectively. Their reciprocal resentments are interesting, whether or not they're factually accurate. Graham possesses enough imagination to start with these archetypes and invent everything that they do and say.

There is one area where a parallel with the Disneys yields interesting drama. That is in Walt's (excuse me— Tony's) frustrations with the movie moguls and critics who refused to take his work seriously because he was a cartoonist. Graham expands this vein to suggest that Tony became anti-Semitic because Jews ran almost all the other studios. (Perhaps that's partly true, but a more specific cause might be the resentment that Walt felt against his employees, led by a Jew, who agitated for union representation.)

Was Walt Disney actually hostile to gays and foreigners? I don't know, and for this play's purposes it really doesn't matter: The notion plays well onstage. But Graham jumps the shark when he has his Tony react by revealing a model of a magic city he will build that will be populated by real, old-fashioned Americans, with bandstands where you can hear the music Tony remembers from his old home town. This is an unnecessary appropriation of Disneyland, the first Disney theme park, which didn't open until 1955.

Between now and this play's next production, Graham might consider adding more details from his own imagination and subtracting some of his script's paint-by-the-numbers Disney stories.

Directed with restraint

Terrence J. Nolen directed this world premiere with skill and with an unusual amount of restraint. There were no staging gimmicks; he focused attention on the cast members.

Ian Merrill Peakes scores a personal triumph as a Tony who is mercurial, perhaps paranoid, probably bipolar. The nervous intensity of Peakes's characterization is mesmerizing. Scott Greer was cast against type as the phlegmatic brother, Dale. His considerable acting talents seem almost to be wasted in such a repressed role.

Walter Charles is excellent in the dual roles of the conductor and a financial backer of the studio, while Sally Mercer struggles with the thankless role of a psychotherapist who functions as a sounding board.

Incidentally, I disagree with Robert Zaller's opinion that the story about the making of Fantasia "wouldn't carry an evening." That very subject carried a one-hour documentary that won awards on public radio a few years back, and it included dramatic stories about the film that weren't even explored, such as German submarines sinking the ship that carried Fantasia's revolutionary recording and projection equipment that introduced nine-channel sound. Fantasia was a landmark motion picture with back-stories every bit as fascinating as those surrounding its more famous contemporaries like Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind. ïµ





To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.