Starstruck

NEW YORK—On Saturday night the art world gathered to watch itself watching a performance at the Guggenheim Museum. There were several indications that some such “meta,” as they say, thing was afoot as the audience filed in for the performance of Francesco Vezzoli’s restaging of Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are). There was the half-hour-long wait outside, complete with Performa director RoseLee Goldberg swanning by and assuring some folks in line not to worry if they were directed to a second-class standing position high up in the spiral ramp—“that’s where Cate Blanchett will be!”; the color-coded tickets indicating seating, or, in most cases, standing, assignments (for various levels of the ramp, or for the rotunda floor, where the fancier folk occupied chairs); the binoculars handed to those filing up the spiral, presumably for use to zoom in on the aforementioned fanciness below; the mirrored front and back covers of the program notes—you saw your own mug when you opened it, and when you’d finished it.

In the center of the rotunda was a circular stage just large enough to accommodate a ring of eight chairs and corresponding musical stands, each containing a script. It looked as though we were waiting for an orchestral octet to arrive. Instead, there were Natalie Portman (wearing a Sacco and Vanzetti mustache), Peter Sarsgaard, Ellen Burstyn, and several other familiar faces of screen and stage. But of course the audience knew this; their names had been widely advertised. At last auteur Vezzoli’s voice announced the play’s opening: “Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to the Guggenheim Museum for the first act of…” And then, sitting thus, they read the play. No sets, scant costuming. But wait—

Pirandello’s play is about nosy neighbors encountering an epistemological impasse. Signor Ponza, his wife, and his mother-in-law are newly arrived in a provincial Italian town and cause a stir with their peculiar living arrangement and lack of neighborly etiquette. Their erratic behavior becomes an obsession for the Ponzas’ prying neighbors, but Ponza and his mother-in-law, in their attempts to explain themselves, instead offer differing accounts of the family’s misfortune, which leaves the others to speculate on which of the two has told the truth and which one is insane. In the end Signora Ponza, the wife and daughter whose mysterious identity is at the heart of the conflict, finally appears, only to tell the imploring neighbors that she is both who her husband says she is and who her mother says. For Signora Ponza, this is no contradiction—she is, she boldly declares, whoever you want her to be.

The play is a comedy with serious intent, a send-up of small-town nosiness that points to the impossibility of discovering the objective truth about other people. But the audience at the Guggenheim could hardly know this. By the time the combined tediousness of the reading (which was not only barely acted but, given the poor acoustics in the Guggenheim, almost impossible to follow) and the voyeuristic peeking through the binocs had hit a fever pitch—Was Salman Rushdie sleeping? Did Jerry Saltz look bored? If I move to the other side will I get a better look at David Byrne? Why did Klaus Biesenbach leave his seat? Isn’t that him right behind me? Weird!—finally, toward the end of the third and final act, amid sounds of thunderous bass and bursts of strobe light hitting the upper reaches of the parapet walls, there was Cate Blanchett, playing Signora Ponza, sauntering down the spiral ramp from the very top, decked out in funereal Galliano-for-Dior-designed garb. Walking backward ahead of her was a fellow with a large spotlight, and two others—fake paparazzi—snapping pics. (A scenario strangely recapitulated in reality the next day when paparazzi photographs taken earlier, showing Blanchett leaving her hotel for Vezzoli’s performance, appeared on a web site.) She arrived in the center of the circular stage, amid the other celebs, to utter the play’s climactic lines: “I am whoever you want me to be.”