Bon Appétit! My Dinner with André: Harbor Stage Again Delivers Magic

The setting is French bistro: dark red wallpaper, ornate mirrors, not-too-bright sconces, and an intimate table for two. It could feel claustrophobic, using just this one small part of the stage; but it doesn’t—the ideas exchanged in the Harbor Stage Company’s American première of My Dinner with André soar beyond stage and theatre and lodge themselves, sometimes humorously, sometimes contemplatively, in the audience’s minds.

First embodied as a film in 1981, directed by Louis Malle and featuring Wallace Shawn and André Gregory playing fictionalized versions of themselves, My Dinner with André is now adapted for the stage—for the first time in America—by the Harbor Stage Company, with Jonathan Fielding as Wally and Robert Kropf as André.

The title says it all: two middle-aged men, both involved in the theatre, meet for the first time in several years and agree to have dinner together. André has spent the intervening time far from New York, and he initially dominates the conversation with story after story of world travel, each one more fantastic than the last, while Wally seems to take a backseat, even ordering the same entrée (a dish appearing in French on the menu, which André rather patronizingly translates for him), reacting with politeness and just the right touch of incredulity to the stories. “What happened next?”

And André’s travel does sound like a singularly frenetic search for new and wondrous experiences. Starting with his interactions with a Polish director who’d disengaged from theatre and began seeking our performances in real life, André launched himself into collecting life: in Tibet, in Scotland, in Poland, in the Sahara desert. “They understood what it was about,” he says of one group he met, switching into irony, “which of course begs the question, what was it about?”

André never seems to find the answer. He disdains priests who only “talk about Communism and birth control,” finding himself in Scotland “living in a William Blake world,” hurrying off to America to be ritually buried alive, inviting a monk to come live with him and his family (who get very short shrift in his narrative), communing with nature in a seemingly endless series of forests.

Listening to André expound at such length about himself, his feelings, his reactions, his thoughts would generally make one care less and less about him, but Kropf makes him so engaging, so funny, so eager that one is swept along with his takes; the words summon images that seem to dance in the air around the table. He slumps casually in his seat, his stories spilling out as he darts from communicating with insects to assuring UFOs he can provide them a safe place to land while his body language conveys that this is all completely normal and everyday.

Eventually, though, André is forced to engage with Wally, who finally hears enough he can’t agree with that he shifts the energy of the interaction onto himself, replacing his earlier comments (“wow”) with, “do you really want to hear what I think?” Mystical escapism may be all well and good, but science is the key to understanding life. All this, he argues, isn’t real; and—surprise, surprise—real life can actually be fun. He talks about his wife Debbie in ways that indicate he genuinely likes her. He expounds on the joys of even a day-old cup of coffee. He looks forward to his downtime when he can read the biography he’s making his way through.

Fielding’s Wally is bracingly, refreshingly normal. He’s hesitant and touchingly naïve at the start—when his quail is served by the waiter (Robin Bloodworth), he exclaims in surprise at how small it is—but seems to gather strength as time goes on and André’s words wash over him. And when he eventually talks about the exquisite comfort of an electric blanket, and André disdainfully retorts that he couldn’t touch such a thing, Wally comes back strong: “I would never,” he says robustly, “give up my electric blanket.” For all of André’s fabulous experiences and communing with nature, one senses in that simple declaration that Wally is a man content with his life, ultimately more secure within himself.

It’s daring of course to be the first one to do anything; adapting a movie—that already has cult status—for the stage is super-daring, with the inevitable comparisons it invites; but Harbor Stage owns this story. Kropf captures the essence of a kind of artist who stays on the highwire not because he’s afraid of falling but because it’s the only place he can find meaning; Fielding is the artist who wants his work to fit into the overall picture of  a life where process is more important than success. And both Kropf and Fielding absolutely shine.

As is sometimes the case, Harbor Stage has chosen not to name a director for this play; it is “adapted by The Company,” and that collaborative process shows (and is, fittingly, the way the movie itself was created). There is a special magic these people create that lures audiences in and keeps them rapt, and that magic is alive and well throughout My Dinner with André.

review by Jeannette de Beauvoir

photos by Joe Kenehan

My Dinner with André

Harbor Stage Company

July 11-August 3

Thurs-Sat. 7:00pm, Sun. 5:00pm