Klonsky and Schwartz

There are reasons why Romulus Linney’s Klonsky and Schwartz sounds as if it’s written in verse. (Please keep reading even if the thought of a verse play causes your eyes to glaze over.). First, the intermissionless piece, which focuses on the friendship between writers Delmore Schwartz and Milton Klonsky with an analyst’s concentration, includes a segment of Schwartz’s searing poem “Prothalamion.” That’s the one where the poet wrote: “I will forget the speech my mother made / In a restaurant, trapping my father there / At dinner with his whore. / Her spoken rage / Struck down a child of seven years / With shame for all three.” In fact, Schwartz didn’t forget the speech, or at least that it was made; and therein lies one of many keys needed to unlock the tormented life he led until 1966, when the 52-year-old writer died of a heart attack in the lobby of the shabby Times Square Hotel.

But, primarily, this play sounds like poetry because Linney intuited that a depiction of the friendship between these two troubled, argumentative men would inevitably take on the form of a poem. He also knows that if you live your life as a work of art, which poets often do, it mysteriously becomes one. That’s the beauty — the terrible beauty, to borrow a phrase from another poet, W. B. Yeats — of this piece about friends who are almost always in conflict, circling warily much of the time, simultaneously attracted by and fearful of their need for each other.

The story is told in a flashback from the day when Schwartz (William Wise) succumbed, shortly before Klonsky (Chris Ceraso) could bring him the news that the National Endowment for the Arts had awarded him $11,000 in appreciation of his life’s work. (That sum meant something back then.) Reminiscing, Klonsky recalls his 25-year association with Schwartz, hitting — in vignettes that feel like stanzas — on numerous incidents from Schwartz’s life and from his own complicated bond with the man. Among them are views of at least one visit that Schwartz made to Bellevue’s psychiatric ward. Paranoid and often given to mumbling while shuffling through Manhattan, he was convinced that his wife had been seduced by Nelson Rockefeller. He also believed that a dybbuk was the cause of his frequent rages. (Schwartz’s Jewish heritage haunted him; to underscore this point, sound designer Graham Johnson pipes in klezmer music and strains of the traditional song “Rumania Rumania.”)

At times, the buddies boldy attack each other: “You’re a walking penis, loosely connected to a brain,” Schwartz blares at the blonde-chasing, gambling Klonsky. When Schwartz lists his writing credits, Klonsky fires back, “All added up, in past tense! What you do now is talk! You can’t stop and you write the way you talk. You won’t revise anything.” Yet, at other times, Klonsky and Schwartz indulge in the sort of vaudeville-like routines that are common to longtime friends. What Linney has uncovered are two men who may or may not be on different intellectual planes but who find something in each other that is necessary for them to go on. Specifically, Schwartz needs Klonsky’s adulterated love to keep him grounded as much as possible, while Klonsky needs Schwartz as a standard by which to guide his own career. This is both a blessing and a curse, since he admires the standard but is convinced that he can’t live up to it. (Isn’t that often why friends fall out?)

Wearing the expressions of men who are pained because they know too much about life, Ceraso and Wise bring a melancholy human dignity to Linney’s pitched fight. Some credit for their achievement must also go to director Jamie Richards, who keeps the actors roaming about, often pulling props from the two bookshelves that set and lighting designer Maruti Evans has smartly placed on either side of the stage. Schwartz’s best-known short story is titled “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Attending Klonsky and Schwartz, one may well feel that in imaginative plays begins understanding.