'Aunt Dan and Lemon': morality dissected

NEW YORK, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- The revival of Wallace Shawn's "Aunt Dan and Lemon," a play about the fascist mind set, is resonant of the preemptive war controversy that engages so much public attention today and is getting plenty of audience attention as a result.

The New Group production of the 1985 Off-Broadway play opened at the Clurman Theater Dec. 18 for a limited run through Jan 31 but has had to be extended through March 27 to meet the box office demand for tickets. It's one of those controversial plays on which some people walk out and others shout out occasionally in protest, and it also offers some of the most realistic sex scenes being enacted on the stage this season.

Whether its chief attraction is intellectual or sexual, "Aunt Dan and Lemon" doesn't leave its audience apathetic. It's the kind of entertainment that means good after-theater business for nearby bars. A good strong drink seems just the right antidote to all the unpleasantness one has seen and heard on stage.

It's the only play in memory that dares to suggest that the Nazis were just answering the human race's animal instinct to kill and had reason to do so to preserve the Aryan way of life. It also suggests that goodfellow Henry Kissinger was right in pursuing the Vietnam War. You can kill cockroaches and still be a good person, it argues.

Although you know the playwright is just setting you up with such specious arguments, it's a nasty business to have to listen to all the right wing palaver from Aunt Dan (short for Danielle), an American-born Oxford college don, and her impressionable pupil, Lemon, the chronically ill, agoraphobic daughter of London friends.

Lemon's corruption by the older woman, who is also bisexual, is the crux of this ominous drama. Aunt Dan believes that real compassion doesn't exist in the world and Lemon believes her, even though this constitutes a denial of all the global humanitarian activity that has marked the post-World War II world as the most benevolent era in history.

As the play opens, Lemon is seated in her luridly red London flat recalling in a monologue her English childhood during the Vietnam War and her relationship with Aunt Dan. As she talks, characters from her own past and from Aunt Dan's begin to appear on the stage to play out various scenes Lemon remembers at first or second hand or from her own fantasies.

Aunt Dan appears, then Lemon's unhappily married, quarreling parents and an assortment of lowlife characters from London's swinging '60s including a pimp, a prostitute, and a Latino stud who is drugged, then strangled by a thieving pick-up date who ties him to a bed in the course of sexual bondage. Lemon is on stage at all times, watching the lurid goings-on with the fascination of a young girl with very little life experience of her own.

Actress Lili Taylor, most recently seen on television as Lisa in "Six Feet Under," is unsettlingly childlike as Lemon, never more chilling in her naivete than when mouthing Aunt Dan's callous political theories that allow her to find "something refreshing" about the Nazis. This is a truly mesmerizing performance almost matched by Kristen Johnson as Aunt Dan, a big blonde in a too tight minidress and high heeled boots.

Johnson, who won two Emmy Awards for performance in TV's "3rd Rock from the

Sun," manages to be both feminine and butch and both casual and insinuating. It's a complex role but Johnson takes it in her stride with all the aplomb of a person who knows she is right about everything and can reduce any intellectual idea to a platitude.

Others in the excellent cast are Melissa Errico, stuck in thankless role of Lemon's passive mother, Bill Sage as Lemon's time bomb of a father, Brooke Moriber as the murderous Mindy, Carlos Leon as her victim, and Isaach De Bankole as the black pimp.

If Scott Elliott's direction seems somewhat awkward it may be because he has been given a very small stage on which to manipulate a cast of 12 actors.

Derek McClane's single livingroom-bedroom set is suitably tacky and garish and garishly lit by Jason Lyons, and Eric Becker has created costumes that are just right for the decadent period when London's Carnaby Street was a major influence in the world of with-it fashion.