Decades of shoe-leather reporting taught the New York journalist Joseph Mitchell that, as sure as the key to a good movie lies in the casting, the secret to a great story depends on the subject at its center.
But great characters dont fall from the sky; you have to know where to find them. Joe Mitchell knew where to find them. The most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, wrote Mitchell in the late-1930s, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender. And theres enough evidence in this reporters glorious 60-year career to suggest that he spent more time in taverns than he did on farms or in bordellos, and that, in the end, he probably valued the street-level wisdom of the local barkeep most of all.
The same sentimental approach to your average drink slinger is at work in Louis Mustillos popular one-man show, Bartenders, which receives its first local staging tonight at the Iola Community Theatre. Bartenders weaves its story, an anthology of sorts, around the whiskey-soaked monolgues of six New York barmen Bobby, Patty, Benny, Jimmy, Eddie, and Richard.
The ICT production, however, under the excellent direction of Bryan Johnson, has converted Mustillos solo piece into a superb ensemble, starring a six-pack of local actors, men and women both, and not a weak drink in the bunch.
The first bartender we meet is Bobby, played with convincing verve by the smoky-voiced Savannah Hannum. Its 9 a.m. at a drink hole somewhere in Midtown. Bobby, a veteran tender, is dispensing hard-won wisdom to a wet-behind-the-ears kid-trainee.
Never pour a full shot. Foreigners dont tip. Give the odd free drink to your locals. Make your own whiskey sour mix. If any customer goes three rounds without tipping, he becomes invisible you dont take his order. Anyone who is not from Hawaii and orders a Pina Colada is not a real drinker.
Next is Richard, the heartsick bartender torn to pieces by recollections of a lost love, who attempts throughout his monologue to douse the memories of his old flame by guzzling brutal quantities of clear vodka. A desperate, disenchanted sort of character, who seems to have stumbled straight out of The Iceman Cometh, Richard is played with a real, never mawkish pathos by ICT newcomer Paul Vernon, who manages to rotate between anger and sorrow without ever letting his connection with the audience go slack.
Bartender number three: Patty. Patty, invoked with tremendous energy by Dave Glauner, erupts onto the stage, a loud, brash, wisecracking, white-ethnic bro of the sort still in evidence in small pockets of this country in south Boston, parts of Chicagos south side, Staten Island, Queens but a specimen certainly in demographic retreat.
Glauner is an excellent mimic with a pliable face and superior comic timing, who embraces the stark poetry of the four-letter word as eagerly as Patty embraces his chosen profession. Im a bartender, philosophizes Patty, and Im [expletive] proud of it.
This is probably as good a place as any to issue a warning. Here it is: If you wouldnt take your kids into a bar, then you probably shouldnt take them to see Bartenders. There are more f-bombs in this hour-long show than youll find in an entire season of The Wire. But thats as it should be: I mean, youre in a bar. And while theyve banned smoking from every beer joint in Kansas, youre still allowed to cuss. In fact, in a town like Iola, where nearly all of the performance arts are rigorously family friendly, its refreshing to find a venue where youre not asked to take your entertainment at the kids table.
Or as Patty puts it at one point: Its a bar. If you dont like it, stay home in your cocoon.
The fourth tender is Benny, whose plight no money, no skills, no safety net is the tailspin story of a great many of Americas working poor, who live paycheck to paycheck, with only a thin, quivering layer of luck to protect them from the gutter. If I lose this job, says Benny, Im done. Sarah Lundine gives a touching, tough performance as Benny.
The next-to-last bartender is Jimmy. Jimmys story gives the lie to the image of the barfly as a romantic figure the drunken poet or wet-brained philosopher. Jimmy, a once successful bar owner who threw it all over for a life of booze and drugs and who will soon die of AIDS in a flophouse on 12th Street, gives a final, moving testament to his life behind the bar.
Jimmys story is a reminder that, whatever cheer you find in your mojito, the stuff is still a legal poison, and its the bartenders bleak duty so long as a customers cash keeps spending to continue feeding the pickled livers of the bottoms-up crowd, who seek their escape in strong liquor. As F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of our greatest drunk poets, put it: First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Carri Sailor gives a dynamic, heartfelt performance as Jimmy, and floods the character with life despite his terminal prognosis.
