Word: malkovich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That is exactly what Don DeLillo envisions in his vivid 1988 novel, Libra, which has been adapted and staged by John Malkovich for Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe. Oswald is variously buffeted by communists who hate Kennedy, CIA renegades bent on a better Bay of Pigs invasion and Mafia overlords whose motives are as shadowy as their methods. As history, the explanations are no more satisfying than any others. As literature, the portrait of Oswald's strange world -- especially his bizarre mother -- is richer, spookier and eerily funnier than anything else on the subject...
This dark humor translates to the stage much more effectively than the political narrative, which Malkovich renders murkier, overstressing the mysterious deaths of minor figures a dozen or more years after they could have spilled the beans. He relies heavily on video footage, words projected onto screens, rows of chairs suggesting a government hearing, booming sounds and other techniques reminiscent of the Wooster Group. At the center are four beguiling caricatures, three of men whose alleged homosexuality is linked to misdeeds...
...sneer, animal cunning and dimwit suckerdom by Alexis Arquette, a film actor (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Threesome) and sometime drag performer under the sobriquet Eva Destruction. In the most jarring scene, he is half-seduced, half-raped by David Ferrie, a fey father figure and apparent conspirator. Ferrie, whom Malkovich has said he would have liked to play if he were not directing, is a tour de force for Laurie Metcalf in a far cry from her Emmy-winning role as the title character's sister on TV's Roseanne...
...world, she may have a case. Rick Snyder's Jack Ruby is a guileless goof, jitterbugging with nervous / vacuity, forever asking the strippers at his nightclub if he is effeminate. A Mob intermediary tells him he will be a hero if he kills Oswald. He is, instead, another dupe. Malkovich rightly considers this an unfinished work. It is full of intriguing moments, but it is more confusing than revelatory...
Supporting Actor: John Malkovich...