‘Bunny Bunny’: The real Gilda Radner (2nd review)

Some celebrities are woven into the fabric of our lives, especially when they are taken away before they’ve had a chance to reach their full potential. Gilda Radner was that kind of persona for me.

As a young woman fresh out of college and living in New York City in the ’70s who was neither blonde nor buxom, I looked for role models who were bright and brunette and a bit outrageous in ways I could never be. In the characters she played on “Saturday Night Live,” Radner was smart and funny and sassy and consequently made me feel better about being me. Even today I find myself saying, in a poor approximation of her nasally voice, her famous Roseanne Roseannadanna line: “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

In Bunny Bunny, Alan Zweibel has written a love poem about his unconsummated (according to the script) love for Radner. “Bunny Bunny,” he tells us, are the words she said at night as a child to help protect her from the dark, and she still said it as an adult, on the first day of each month, to protect her from the darkness of her life.

In the play, Zweibel protects us from that darkness as well. Act I is filled with Radner’s successes, their meeting, her rise to fame at “Saturday Night Live,” his marriage and her first marriage. The first act ends as she leaves the show, and I heard several people in the audience ask, “Now what?” because for us, her fame seemed to end there. We really didn’t know what happened next.

A gag for every problem

The second act reveals Radner’s insecurities, her divorce and marriage to Gene Wilder, her bulimia and eventually her cancer and chemotherapy, all handled with gentle one-liners. After all, Zweibel is a comedy writer and Radner was a comedienne, so it’s not surprising that they instinctively soften life’s tragedies with humor.

Bunny Bunny is written with the quick cuts and short scenes of a TV sitcom. Every problem is presented, then covered over with a joke. Of her diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she says, “I’ve become a member of a club I’d rather not belong to.”

The intimacy of the Walnut’s Independence Studio almost puts the audience in the play. Leah Walton as Gilda and Matt Pfeiffer as Zweibel allow the audience to be part of a loving, if neurotic, relationship that develops very slowly. They seem to enjoy each other, and at times it feels as if we could be joining them at some coffee shop when they sit down to talk. Matt Tallman, as his own cast of characters— a fish seller turned peanut vendor, a distraught friend, a cameraman— creates a world around them even as he makes us laugh.

Gilda’s old apartment

Interestingly, while the play celebrates Radner, the characters she famously created on “Saturday Night Live” are absent, so a theatergoer who’s unfamiliar with Radner’s work might wonder what the fuss was about. The night I saw the show, a couple from Detroit told me that people had considered changing the name of Gilda’s Club in their area to something else because no one knew who she was any more.

I, on the other hand, brought to the play my own experience of the times Radner and I both lived through. We all have our celebrity stories— the encounter on the street, a sighting in a restaurant, an awkward moment in an elevator. My Gilda story is about an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at that time a distant country for those of us who lived in Manhattan.

One day I looked at an apartment in a house that I was told had once been owned by Gilda. It had a ballroom and a spiral staircase, and the bathroom had a claw-foot tub and dark mahogany paneling.

I didn’t take the apartment. I don’t even know if the story was true. Perhaps my memory is as romanticized as Zweibel’s portrait of Gilda, and that’s why I still remember it.

My childhood mantra

Like Gilda, I learned to recite an incantation as child. Mine was “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit,” said three times with three turns at the end of the bed as I got up on the first day of the month. I never knew if I was supposed to turn clockwise or counterclockwise, so each month I knew that I hadn’t done it well enough to keep me safe.

Radner’s life apparently was like that. “Bunny Bunny” couldn’t protect her from unhappiness and illness. Zweibel knew that too, so he created a play as his incantation to keep the world safe for the woman he loved but could never have.

Bunnies, rabbits, tribute plays— wouldn’t it be a nice thing if that’s all it took to protect us from life’s darkness?♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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