Lucifer's Toy

By T.E.Kalem

PIAF by Pam Gems

Affinity is the most potent magic the theater has to offer. When Jason Robards plays Eugene O'Neill or Julie Harris portrays Emily Dickinson, the evening is transfiguring -- both radiantly illuminating and deeply moving. That is what is happening on the stage of Broadway's Plymouth Theater, where Jane Lapotaire plays Edith Piaf as if she is being flayed alive and only the lacerated nerve ends glow in the dark like neon.

Lapotaire renders Piaf, the diminutive poet-songstress of the pre-dawn city blues, with matchless psychological fidelity. She gives us Piaf, whom the French called the Sparrow, as an eagle in courage. She makes us know Piaf soul-seared, the Paris gutter urchin, the cagey whore whom the world came to hold in the embrace of fame but who could not keep her own life from seeping through her splayed fingers, at 47 in 1963 spent by alcohol, morphine, sex and cancer.

Some people are bathed in a perverse glory, as if they were Lucifer's play things instead of God's creatures. Piaf was one of these, and Lapotaire never lets us forget it. The play unfolds through sketchy vignettes, some of which are disconcerting, such as the ones that have Marcel Cerdan, the French middleweight champion and Piaf's love of loves, being played by a black, and a Marlene Dietrich who is downright frumpy. A medal of merit should be struck for Zoe Wanamaker; as the prostitute pal of Piaf's who later achieves smug respectability, she is a perfect foil for Lapotaire, and their scenes together are wickedly droll.

--T.E. Kalem

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