DIVA IN DISTRESS.(Souvenir)(Theater Review)

It is difficult to prove--or disprove--the brilliance of those stage performers whose rise to fame occurred during the now distant pre-DVD age. While historians, by scouring reviews and photographs, can approximate what made a given performance memorable, a diva of the theatre, that most ephemeral of art forms, relies, for the most part, on fans to keep her mystique alive. It is unlikely that there are many theatregoers around who remember just what it was that made the late Jeanne Eagels such a powerful Sadie in the 1922 Somerset Maugham adaptation "Rain," but there she is, still being talked about, analyzed, and debated--as are her successors Kim Stanley, Diana Sands, and Elizabeth Hartman. For if myth has a home in any branch of our contemporary culture, it's in the theatre. Unlike the stars of the screen, the more elusive a theatre goddess is the more she is loved by her audience; distance is built into this particular form of worship.

In recent years, the writer Wayne Koestenbaum and Gary Lee Boas, whose photographs and reminiscences make up the original and extraordinary 2000 book "Starstruck," have both examined the unique, perplexing, and fascinating character of the theatre fan. But James McCourt's 1971 baroque novel "Mawrdew Czgowchwz" remains the most insightful text we have on diva worship; it should be required reading for anyone going to see Stephen Temperley's troubling new play "Souvenir" (at the Lyceum). In this two-person show--a kind of "Master Class," starring two people who never quite made it--Temperley alludes to what McCourt makes explicit: the transference that occurs between a female star and her largely gay audience when both are in the process of inventing themselves in public.

Set, as such pieces should be, in memory, "Souvenir" opens in a supper club in Manhattan. The year is 1964. Cosme McMoon (Donald Corren) is playing the piano. Cosme is a gay former songwriter whose own work never had the lilt or the sophistication of the standards he is singing now. In a pleasant baritone, he croons "One for My Baby," a song that carries us to another time and place; and, sure enough, as he tickles the ivories and tells the audience about his life and his professional failures, the supper club around him is transformed into a suite at the Ritz-Carlton inhabited by a wealthy middle-aged society woman, Florence Foster Jenkins (Judy Kaye). (The excellent stage design is by R. Michael Miller.) We have travelled back thirty more years, and Cosme is a young man, hungry for a job. He's been recommended as an accompanist to Florence, who aspires to be an opera singer. The problem is she can't sing--a fact that's lost on Florence herself. She reveres "Mr. Mozart" and "Mr. Gounod," and she longs to serve them with her warbly, out-of-tune soprano. Cosme quickly realizes, though, that Florence is possessed of a kind of genius, or, more precisely, of a force that he can't resist--or duck. Nor can he quite fathom why Florence can't hear herself. "What was going on in her head?" he asks. "Was I in the presence of mere delusion or a kind of . . . ...