Why is Bella Abzug — with her trademark big-brimmed hat — stepping fully dressed from the shower?
That at any rate is how we meet her in “Bella Bella,” Harvey Fierstein’s cobbled-together PowerPoint of a play about the firebrand New York congresswoman of the 1970s.
If it’s a peculiar pose for Abzug, it makes perfect sense for Fierstein playing her; a star needs a big entrance, and there’s nowhere else for the director Kimberly Senior to give him one on John Lee Beatty’s blue bathroom set.
Those who have seen Fierstein onstage won’t be surprised; they know he’s not going to lose a battle for dominance with any author, including himself. He’s a big, tasty ham and will do whatever is necessary to make sure you get an ample helping of his warmth and flavor regardless of the role.
That’s usually a net plus. But in a biographical vehicle like “Bella Bella,” which opened on Tuesday at New York City Center Stage I, it unfortunately means someone else is not getting served. In this case, big surprise, it’s the woman. Her name may appear twice on the Manhattan Theater Club marquee but neither the anecdotal play nor the droll performance provides the depth of a reasonably thorough obituary.
Not that Fierstein stints on admirable facts about Abzug, whose career as a lawyer, feminist, antiwar protester, gay rights champion, congressional representative and environmental activist was full of marvelous firsts. On the night in September 1976 when the play is set, she is hoping to achieve, at 56, her biggest first yet: becoming “the first ever female senatorial candidate from the great state of New York.”
What meager tension exists during the play’s 90 minutes comes from the contrast between Abzug’s blustery confidence (she has been running for office, she says, since third grade) and her professional instinct about a five-way primary in which she is the most liberal candidate. Pacing from toilet to tub in her campaign suite at the Summit Hotel on the Upper East Side, while her supporters await the results on the other side of the bathroom door, she says repeatedly, but with diminishing confidence, “I have never entered a race I didn’t win — eventually.”
Though Fierstein has taken much of the text from his subject’s speeches and writings — inserting hokey segues like “Speaking of buttons” and “Oh what fun we had with that wacky Joe McCarthy!” — the selection is clearly skewed to emphasize humor and grit. (Abzug’s daughter Liz, the founder and executive director of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, serves as a consultant to the production.) Perhaps more to the point, the selection is skewed toward Fierstein’s familiar skills as a performer, allowing him to create the kind of character an audience has no choice but to love.
That’s a mistake: With no personality defects to exploit and only imaginary antagonists (all puny) to shake a fist at, this Abzug unbound gives Fierstein no resistance. His performance at times gets cloying and pushy, like an overeager canvasser buttonholing you for votes. Several times I wanted to tell him (and Senior, who doesn’t seem to be in control): Take it down a notch! I’m not the electorate!
At the same time, in his choice of material, Fierstein so over-represents Abzug’s famous zingers and one-liners (“This woman’s place is in the House: the House of Representatives”) that you’d think she was a Catskills tummler. Though her bit about Elizabeth Taylor as a rabbi is great, too often what the script calls a “cute story” — plumped with Yiddish and capped with an epigram — turns out sadly to be just that.
Or less than that. It’s hard to imagine that Abzug ever said, while making a 2 a.m. meal of Twizzlers and Cel-Ray soda, “I’ve had worse things in my mouth.”
You can easily imagine Arnold Beckoff (from “Torch Song Trilogy”) or Edna Turnblad (from “Hairspray”) saying it, though. And ghosts of Fierstein’s memorable performances do sometimes put Abzug in a similar light. Not that he plays her in drag; other than the hat, which he quickly removes, he wears neutral clothing — black slacks and shirt — with only black toenail polish to acknowledge the gender twist.
But if his Abzug is not an imitation, it can’t help being an embodiment, leaving you to wonder what that fierce advocate for expanding women’s roles would make of a man taking hers. (Patti LuPone, Bette Midler, Kathy Bates and Kathy Najimy were apparently approached before Fierstein decided to do it himself.) To say it’s no different from casting a woman in a part traditionally assigned to a man — a practice now, thankfully, becoming unremarkable — is to assume a symmetry of opportunity that doesn’t really exist.
Still, you can tell that Fierstein adores his subject; if only that were enough to fuel a play! But the affectionate spoken-résumé monologue genre hasn’t proved very successful for women, turning formidable characters like Ann Richards (“Ann”), Molly Ivins (“Red Hot Patriot”) and Ruth Westheimer (“Becoming Dr. Ruth”) into little more than salty self-promoters. (Men often fare even worse.) The setups are laughable, the conflicts interior, the relief uncomic, the conclusion foregone. It’s part of the contract of these plays that our hero winds up just where she started — except now with a shinier halo.
That needn’t have been the case with Abzug. One of the fascinating things about her is that after saying “I have never entered a race I didn’t win — eventually,” she lost. (In the play, she blames The New York Times, but there were other factors at work in her second-place finish to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.) And though she kept running for office, she never won an election again.
What did this disappointment do to her? Who was she anyway, under the hats? “Bella Bella” doesn’t get close to answering those questions.
But it does make you rethink the idea of loss. Many of the positions that made Abzug a radical in the 1970s seem moderate now; she introduced, with Ed Koch, the first national gay rights bill. Fierstein’s treasurable career, and this performance, are evidence that in some ways “Battling Bella” did win, eventually.
Bella Bella
Tickets Through Nov. 24 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, bellabellaplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Bella Bella
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Jesse Green is the co-chief theater critic. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was the theater critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor. He is the author of a novel, “O Beautiful,” and a memoir, “The Velveteen Father.” @JesseKGreen • Facebook
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