A deserted highway. The rocky California coast. A body with an arrow through its heart. A blonde named Anonymous flips through stills perched on an easel in Toni Schlesinger’s loopy noir solo show The Long, Slow Death of Lila Remy. Lila Remy’s slipper from the Pink Angel. A goodbye note from Mr. X. A champagne glass from the cocktail party where a mysterious identity is revealed. One by one, Anonymous removes objects from boxes as her story loops through the life, loves, and fortunes of a nameless pretty face in 1950s Los Angeles.
Schlesinger, who writes the “Shelter” and “Money” columns for the Village Voice, wrote, designed, and performs the piece, which plays at HERE’s Basil Twist-basement space weekend nights through August 6. She spoke with TheaterMania just after the first weekend of the show, her first full-length piece and “an entirely new experience in every possible way.”
TheaterMania: I was really intrigued by the film noir elements of The Long, Slow Death of Lila Remy. I also noticed that you have another piece entitled James Bond’s Old Girl Friends. Do you have a big interest in film?
Toni Schlesinger: Enormous. A major percentage of the people I know and talk to are filmmakers or critics. And I just sort of came of age watching films. I moved to New York in ’93 [from Chicago], and for some reason I really started watching film noir intensely–of course I live a block-and-half from Film Forum–I almost started collecting the tapes.
Photo: Robin Holland
I think that visually it’s just so interesting. It’s not so much that I love noir specifically, but I like things that are mysterious and eerie, and that have that edge. And I also like things that have urban imagery. This piece is when I got kind of pre-occupied with California, which is like ’70s noir, like The Long Goodbye. I took a trip to Los Angeles two summers ago, and I think that’s how this piece started. I got really into that sense of California. I was driving around a lot, and I came upon some old postcards, which is where I got a lot of the visuals on the easel. I’ve done some other noir pieces, shorter ones, like She Buys Her Perfume in Encinada–that’s a woman in a hotel room waiting for her boyfriend to show up–and then another one where I kept getting shot onstage, which is like a 12-minute piece. I get shot, and I get back up again and I start talking, and I get shot–
TM: What piece was that?
Schlesinger: That was called Blast of Luigi. I did that at Watermark Theater’s Word Fire Festival a few years ago. And then there was another one, Post-Conscious Film Noir, and again I get shot–I think only once, though. It’s not as though I’ll only do film noir, but I also didn’t want to parody it. Though it’s tricky to do those characters on stage, because the beauty of those film characters is that usually they’re not–especially the women–particularly active people, unless they’re evil. So, I was always kind of wrestling with that. And also, the thing about them that is intriguing is that they don’t really talk a lot in the film, and that’s the opposite of–the one thing that I kind of do do is dialogue. So, in some ways, it ends up rather comic.
TM: Who’s your favorite femme fatale?
Schlesinger: Hm. This might take a while. With a lot of them, what I admire about them is their confidence. I have the opposite personality in real life. I drop things. They never drop things–they’re very cool. They don’t worry. They don’t really reflect–they’re basically about action–and they only really care about the money. It’s kind of absolutely everything I wonder what it would be like to be, but I’m not. I really care more about whether I got the man I was in love with rather than the money. So, I think there’s that fascination. I guess most people agree that Double Indemnity is the best. Barbara Stanwick is just wonderful in that sort of reddish house that she’s in–or they say it’s red, even though the film’s black and white. So I think she sort of epitomizes that. Also Elizabeth Scott, I think, was sort of fascinating, in a way.
