Misleading Advertising

NATALIA GINZBURG's The Advertisement is a play about what can happen to people who answer Real Paper classifieds. A young student in Rome named Elena responds to an ad offering free room and board in return for companionship. As a result, she is forced to listen to the long neurotic monologues of her host, Teresa; falls in love with Teresa's estranged husband, Lorenzo; and finally gets shot to death.

The first half of the play is practically a single speech an hour long. Teresa, very well played by Amy Moss, pours out the story of her life, sloppily, like soup overflowing a saucer--her nightmares, unhappy childhood, financial problems, and unrequited love for her husband. "Is all this boring you?" she asks Elena (Anne Singer)--a risky suggestion for an author to make to an audience when presenting this kind of familiar material. But Ginzburg carries it off, and instead of sounding like your roommate's version of hell at Harvard, the first act is hypnotic and convincing.

Like a radio drama heard in a dark room, the sound of Teresa's voice seems the most important thing in the world for a few moments. Loving, whining, and remembering everything, she is dramatically true and completely sympathetic. She absorbs life around her, pours it into the warped mold of her own experience, and then utters it forth again, transformed, without self-pity or egotism.

As it turns out, Teresa is so convincing about the virtues of her husband that the moment Lorenzo (Henry Lie) shows up, Elena falls in love with him. Rich, pretentious, and dated, he drags Teresa down to his own level of platitudes and the play begins to sound inane. ("She's as boring as a bottle of olive oil." "I didn't know olive oil was boring.") Things begin to happen fast, but the play goes off balance once the static, dreamy atmosphere of the first act is left behind. The rest of the play ignores the social and sexual issues raised by the plot--marriage between the rich Lorenzo and the poor Teresa--and it just doesn't have the magic to make up for it. Ginzburg's people, in the end, are all psychology and no character.

Ginzburg is a good writer whose novels and short stories are modern Italian classics. The Advertisement won a major prize in France and was well-received in London. The first American production at the Ex does it justice. But director Philip Haas couldn't entirely rescue the play--Ginzburg made the last acts so short that she didn't have enough to work with, and fell back on ending the play with a repeat of the first lines. The massive, intricately crafted and performed tour de force of the first act promises much more than the rest of the play delivers.