Jane Jacobs: Super villain: Faster than a traffic-calmed road! Stronger than the developer's lobby! A new play dares to dream of ...
National Post
Monday, May 30, 2005
Page: AL1 / FRONT
Section: Arts & Life
Byline: J. Kelly Nestruck

May has been a busy month for Canadians on the New York stage. Torontonian Daniel MacIvor's The Soldier Dreams received its New York premiere, while Montrealer Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs was revived at an East Village theatre. CBC broadcaster and playwright J.J. McColl's menopausal musical We're Still Hot added mob-daughter-turned-reality-TV star Victoria Gotti to its off-Broadway cast, and Stratford native Colm Feore stole scenes opposite Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar on Broadway.

But the sight of urban guru Jane Jacobs off-Broadway at the 45 Bleecker Theater was much less expected. Especially since she appears onstage as an evil, time-travelling super villain.

A highly fictionalized version of long-time Toronto resident Jacobs is the antagonist in Boozy: The Life, Death and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses, a critically acclaimed play described as "Brecht by way of Monty Python" that just wrapped over the weekend.

Written and directed by Alex Timbers, Boozy takes a warped look at the life of Robert Moses, the master builder who shaped New York City unchallenged from the 1930s until opinion turned against him after the demolition of Penn Station and his attempt to build an expressway through SoHo and Greenwich Village in the '60s. As chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the American-born Jacobs was one of Moses' most vocal critics and was instrumental in bringing him down.

Today, most remember Moses as he was portrayed in Robert Caro's 1973 book The Power Broker: an untouchable elitist who ignored the concerns of ordinary citizens and was responsible for some of the most ill-advised urban-planning disasters of the 20th century, a man whose favourite aphorism was "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"

But, in Boozy -- which purports to be a play created by the descendants of Swiss architect Le Corbusier -- Moses gets a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation. "We re-envisioned him as a Messianic action hero who can create public housing at the flick of a wrist," explains Timbers, a Yale graduate who was recently called "one to watch" by The New York Times. "And then we took Jane Jacobs, who is really this beneficent, wonderful community activist ... whose ideas about planning are really what are today the ideal of conscientious planning, and we turned her into a time-travelling, globe-trotting super villain."

With a scene where Le Corbusier hawks his Unite d'Habitation apartment complexes on the Home Shopping Network and another with rabbits dressed up as Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Goebbels, Boozy is the funniest and most absurd play ever written about urban planning -- though it's probably the first play ever written about urban planning.

"The theatre is ill-suited for urban planning's illumination," admits Timbers, whose hipster theatre company Les Freres Corbusier's last off-Broadway hit was A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. "It's difficult to talk about academic issues in a direct manner without it having a talking-heads didacticism ... So we decided to take a provocative approach -- as our company always does."

Boozy's circus-mirror Jacobs, who is followed around by a gang of angry rolling-pin-wielding housewives, is a black turtleneck and pencil skirt-clad lunatic whose desire to bring down Moses has nothing to do with a desire to save her neighbourhood. According to the play, she was once a lover of Le Corbusier, whose ideas and theories inspired Moses.

In Boozy, Jacobs time-travels to the future to destroy the career of Moses, after she and Le Corbusier have a falling-out over croissants. "We present her as Corbusier's jilted lover, who's going to take down Corbusier by taking down his legacy of planning," explains Timbers.

"To create a show about Moses and Jacobs and just show the same old imagery of Moses as this tyrannical, racist, classist villain and Jacobs as this wonderful, hippie-dippy activist, it's just not the most interesting and energetic way to learn about something."

Before being cast as Jacobs, actress Nina Hellman knew nothing about the author of Dark Age Ahead, who famously resides among the lefty literati in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. "When I first read the script, I thought, 'oh my God this is amazing,' " recalls Hellman. "It was so funny and irreverent and sort of a crash course in history -- albeit a lot of it is made up."

In order to prepare, Hellman read Jacobs's 1961 urban-planning classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Caro's The Power Broker and studied the hour of Ken Burns' documentary on New York that chronicles the real-life court battles between Moses and Jacobs over the Lower Manhattan Expressway. But she didn't try to imitate Jacobs. "The interpretation in this show is completely opposite," says Hellman. "In our show, she's like a film-noir femme fatale."

Though Boozy takes place over 30-odd years, Jacobs does not age, thanks to her unexplained ability to effortlessly move through time. "It's not like she has a time capsule or anything," notes Hellman.

Not all Jacobs fans have been impressed by Boozy -- and some have confronted its creator after the show. "We have had some architects say, 'You know, we thought you were a little hard on Jane Jacobs,' " Timbers notes. "But I imagine if she saw it -- she's a very smart woman, probably has a good sense of humour -- that she would probably find it pretty amusing."