I begin to feel sorry for Jerry Hall: the plays she appears in are getting steadily worse. Having started as the "chantoose" in Inge's Bus Stop, she next appeared as Mrs Robinson in Terry Johnson's bland Graduate and has now dwindled into a manipulative movie-star in this awful little play by Bud Shrake and Michael Rudman.
Since both are fellow-Texans, I can only assume she is acting out of misplaced loyalty to the lone-star state.
At least the evening perks up a bit when Ms Hall comes on. In the first half she makes only fleeting appearances in what is largely a sedentary duologue between two washed-up movie-producers on a Los Angeles park bench.
One of them, Courtney, is an ex-Ivy League liberal; the other, Scott, is an ageing hippy lately returned from a Tibetan monastery. It transpires, very slowly, that they shared screen credits, an Oscar and the love of Ms Hall's Sugar Moran. And it is she who has contrived their re-union.
The chief difficulty lies in guessing what on earth the authors are up to. Are they simply trying to devise a new theatrical cure for insomnia? Or are they trying to force Albee's The Zoo Story and Beckett's Waiting For Godot into a shotgun marriage?
My deduction is that they are struggling to tell us that most men - even former showbiz hotshots - are simply little boys lost, easily manipulated by strong, seductive women.
But any lingering feminist credentials are undermined by a string of sexist jokes: not least the revelation by a passing hitman that he charges more to despatch women on the grounds that they are always late.
To be honest, the only thing that makes this meandering tosh remotely bearable is the enlivening presence of Jerry Hall.
She may not be Eleanora Duse, but at least she has that mysterious quality called "presence."
The part she plays, of a former Polish tennis player turned Hollywood actress, is faintly ludicrous; and the revelation that the character is awaiting death is largely an excuse for some dismal euthanasia-jokes to the effect that she hopes, when the time is ripe, her ex-lover will "stick it in her". But Ms Hall rises above her material and comports herself with a glamorous dignity.
Stephen Greif also lends her hippy lover a certain rugged, ponytailed grandeur and Harry Ditson does all he can as his old partner who has graduated from Yale and the state penitentiary which, he says, was "like Hollywood without the riff-raff". Even that line - the best in the show - comes from Robert Mitchum.
And one emerges from this weird, paint-drying exercise contemplating alternative forms of employment and wishing Jerry Hall in the future a more judicious choice of theatrical roles.
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