We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time
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Cititour.com Review
During much of David Cale’s riveting theatrical memoir, “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time,” now making its New York premiere at the Public Theatre under Robert Falls’ precise direction, one can’t help but be surprised at how cheerfully (or sometimes just dispassionately) Cale relates this tale of his extremely unhappy and dysfunctional childhood in working-class England. But ultimately what you’ll most marvel at after 90 minutes is that Cale is still standing – both physically and metaphorically – having survived something beyond horrific: the murder of his mother by his own father.
While Cale starts his story rather innocently, focusing on his deep, single-minded love of birds, he soon reveals the darker undercurrents of his young life. His parents, Ron and Barbara Egelton, married young and not altogether willingly; moreover, both gave up their personal ambitions in order to be supported financially by Ron’s gangsterish father Jimmy as employees of the hat factory he owned in dreary Luton. Still, could anyone – never mind a child -- predict how badly this union would end?
A thoroughly selfish man who belittled and bullied all around him (including his own wife), it turns out Jimmy may have literally driven Ron to drink – in astounding excess – and which led him to perhaps snap one day and kill Barbara as soon as David left for school. Mind you, Cale never directly places the blame for the crime on his grandfather, but he makes his disdain for the older man crystal clear time and again. Meanwhile, he’s a bit more sympathetic to his father (although in the last 35 years of his life, Cale only saw him three times) – who thanks to Jimmy’s lawyers got off with a shockingly short sentence.
Rather unsurprisingly, though, he paints a far more generous picture of his mother, a woman who gave up her artistic ambitions for an unfulfilled life of domesticity and factory work -- while also admitting she was prone to screaming fits and smashing plates. Cale vocally impersonates all these characters and more (including his younger brother Simon), and while you’re always sure who is talking; he’s not the greatest mimic.
He’s not the greatest singer, either; nevertheless, numerous songs (co-written with Matthew Dean Marsh, who leads an excellent six-piece onstage orchestra) punctuate the monologue, in what feels like a distinct attempt to periodically lighten the potentially pitch-black mood of the show. Most of these tunes accomplish little, saying in minutes what could be summed up in seconds of prose, but I will admit I found “Canada Geese” rather haunting and I adored (and completely related to) the pop-flavored “All the Smart Girls (Listened to Joni Mitchell).”
That song, which reflects Cale’s friendship with a group of high school classmates, also becomes a clever commentary on the other, almost equally important facet of Cale’s confessional: his coming to terms with being gay. “Everything stayed unexpressed. Except in my bedroom. ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ became every boy I knew. From that point, like Dylan I was ‘Tangled Up in Blue,” says one poignant lyric.
Cale doesn’t ever seem all that bothered that he’s attracted to men, but he’s smart enough to know that being a homosexual in 1970s England is a fraught proposition. In the chilling song, “Poufter,” sung as a teenaged David visits his father in prison the first time, he reminds himself: “Stay hidden. Don’t come out. There’s danger to be yourself here.”
That Cale chose to escape England, and come to America, is hardly shocking. Yet, given that one can never fully escape one’s past, one can also argue whether Cale’s story truly has a happy ending.
By Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
https://publictheater.org/
Cast
David Cale
Open/Close Dates
Opening 6/27/2019
Closing 7/14/2019
Theatre Info
Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10003
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