The Unicorn deftly summons Sue Mengers’ funny, gossipy spirit
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Sue Mengers wasn’t larger than life, but the Hollywood superagent lived large. A major player in the industry from the 1960s to the ’80s, she suited herself for a man’s game, one in which the rules of the time didn’t include female competitors.
In the Unicorn Theatre’s one-woman show I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, we get a glimpse of that powerful, very real woman (who died in 2011) in Donna Thomason’s captivating portrayal. Learning from her father — who died, Mengers says, of “thwarted dreams” — she reached out for the parallel universe of her desire, that of film, where “everybody was making themselves up.”
Facing the audience throughout the funny and biting 80-minute play, wearing Mengers’ characteristic caftan and blond hair, Thomason doesn’t budge from the sofa on which she’s seated. In the capable hands of director Sidonie Garrett, this veteran actress holds us rapt with Mengers’ stories, told with a sharp tongue as she drinks and smokes cigarettes and pot incessantly. It’s as though we’re guests at one of her famous Hollywood dinners.
Except we’re not, and she lets us know it. “My own mother wouldn’t have gotten in,” she says, “if she was standing outside in the rain.”
There’s the A list, and there’s the B list, and Mengers’ table was reserved for the former: Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, Julie Harris, Michael Caine, Brian De Palma. There was also, most important to her, perhaps, Barbra Streisand, whom Mengers met when the singer’s first name still had the third “a.” Mengers awaits an important phone call from Streisand as she talks with us before one of her parties.
We learn that, as an immigrant from Nazi Germany living in Utica, New York, Mengers lost herself, as a child, in the movies at her “local fleapit movie house.” She fell in love with movies there, and used them to teach herself English. “That’s why I still talk like a gum-cracking Warner Bros. second lead,” she says. She may have transformed herself from a shy, overweight outsider to an influential starmaker, but Thomason’s commanding yet sensitive performance lets us keep sight of that young alien working to fit in.
Playwright John Logan (who wrote the Tony Award–winning Red and the films The Aviator and Hugo, among others) plausibly re-creates the famous, charismatic personality, and his artful script braids facts with delicious details. The stories appear real: Mengers’ trip to Virginia to visit Sissy Spacek at the actress’s muddy farm, her discovery of an unknown Streisand in a crummy gay bar with a 40-watt spotlight. Who isn’t seduced by a little gossip, after all, “the lube by which this town slips it in,” Mengers says.
We’re taken in by this persona as Thomason dances from one tale to the next — all ultimately about the business, the deals. We don’t take our gaze off her, except, perhaps, to warm our eyes on the pastel-colored and richly decorated environs of Mengers’ Beverly Hills home (set design by Gary Mosby and properties design by Shawnna Journagan), a house formerly owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor, she tells us, that had to be “de-sequined.”
The film business is changing as this play takes place. It’s 1981, a time when Hollywood is driven less by artists who love the movies and more by CEOs preoccupied with corporate finance. “What’s an Ewok?” she asks us. Mengers, too, is at the cusp of a career shift, a decline she equates to that of other A-listers who eventually fade away, but a fall of her own making, one having something to do with that phone call from Streisand.
A porous fourth wall separates this brutally honest and barrier-breaking big shot from her audience during the play, and I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sad when she prepared to take her leave. But she had guests arriving soon, a party to savor while it lasted.
