Despite a stellar career on stage and screen, countless Tony and Oscar nominations and awards, and being rated “America’s finest actress” by Tennessee Williams, no-one has ever written a book or made a documentary about Geraldine Page, until now. Her daughter Angelica has completed the first draft of a book and uses it as the basis of a stage presentation of sorts.

“World premiere” is mentioned at the after-show function but Turning Page is clearly still in development with quite a long way to go to become a play. Instead of an Off-Broadway or out-of-town tryout, Circa theatre has the privilege of hosting this out-of-country tryout.

It has to be said that Geraldine Page – whose true passion was live theatre: “I didn’t want to be a Hollywood actress who every so often does a Broadway play; I wanted to be a Broadway actress who every so often does a movie” – is not a household name to many New Zealanders. Not that that should matter: the central characters of most new plays are unknown to us until the work reveals them, and any biography should refresh and transcend any prior knowledge. Film clips are screening as we take our seats so the fact of her fame is established and we get a glimpse of her undeniable talent.

Comparison with Angelica Page’s other solo show, Edge, playing on alternate nights, is unfair, given that has been in her repertoire for about a dozen years. More importantly, Edge – in which she inhabits the role of Sylvia Plath pre and post-mortem – has been crafted by a playwright who understands thematic coherence, so Angelica’s beautifully honed performance offers a rich, multi-layered experience.  

The premise that Angelica is at last fulfilling the promise her mother, Geraldine, extracted from her on her deathbed to tell her story (as Hamlet does from Horatio) is a starting point but not a dramatic driver as such. Geraldine had run out of time to complete her autobiography and asked her daughter to complete the task but to wait seven years to get some perspective. It has in fact taken 27 years with the final push coming via a spirit medium who channels Geraldine and whose recorded voice more-or-less bookends the performance.

The first draft manuscript is hefted onto a lectern and Angelica refers to it often, sometimes reading passages in a matter-of-fact way before launching into role-play, as much of herself as her mother. When she is not recalling her subjective experience of her mother, she becomes Geraldine by donning a wig or other headwear and dark glasses: a simple, clear and useful device. 

There is a sense Angelica is still searching for a binding theme or quest or problem to solve that will bring dramatic coherence and cohesion to the story and performance; that will bring about that chemical change that transforms the component parts into something more than their sum. This is what writers do at the conception and early gestation phase, and the challenge playwrights face is very different than it is for book writers.   

For a master-class in the bio-play genre we need look no further than Flowers From My Mother’s Garden, written by Stuart McKenzie for his wife Miranda Harcourt and her mother, Dame Kate. (Read my review to see what I mean.)  

In Turning Page Angelica says she had failed to protect her mother in life so needs to do that now but that simply does not register as a compelling truth, subjective or otherwise, let alone a driving quest. Mention of a mystery concerning Geraldine’s two marriages before the one that produced her daughter, and two sons, has momentary promise but provides no through-line quest or thematic core.

We are, however, left with the mystery of why Angelica never actually names her father, Rip Torn, despite his having a bit-part as an “openly practising bigamist” who gave his goose license to emulate the gander – and bigamist does not mean philanderer, by the way. (His Wiki page tells us he delighted in their doorbell being labelled Torn/Page; that could have been a good gag to share.)

There is potential in her mother’s being drawn to acting because of a yearning to be other people and play in the realm of make believe, and yet unvarnished truth was her strong suit as an actress. How did that contrast with her role in actual life? Is there a metaphysical-cum-existential enquiry into the nature of truth to be explored here, through the specific example of Geraldine’s life and work? Perhaps.

An amusing clip from the trailer for the John Wayne film Hondo, which gave Geraldine her first screen role, could spark off a comparative exploration into the roles she played and the person she was.  

Angelica’s nuanced performance as Sylvia in Edge includes acknowledging the presence of her audience and including us in her wry perspective on what she’s revealing but there is no real contact with us here; nothing conspiratorial, confessional or secretively naughty. Also I often caught strong glimpses of Geraldine in her Sylvia, especially in the more embittered second act (because my strongest memory of Geraldine is in Woody Allen’s Interiors) but no such flashes of recognition occur in Turning Page.

There is lots of name-dropping and bits of gossip but Geraldine’s “I smell schadenfreude” is not well integrated, as it is not clear who is gaining pleasure from whose misfortune exactly. There are plenty of interesting, insightful and entertaining moments but they don’t earn their keep because they are not stitched in to something bigger.

As it stands (so to speak), Turning Page adds up to much less than the sum of its scattered and dangling parts. Given her mother’s desire to be in every Pirandello play – indeed all the plays ever written – I can only conclude Geraldine and Angelica Page are two characters in search of a playwright.

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