"Everyone has their vices," says Tallulah Bankhead, as reincarnated in Matthew Lombardo's play Looped. "Mine just all come out to play at the same time."
The original misbehaving celebrity - if the Alabama-born theater and film actress were around today, she could provide enough fodder for a dozen Entertainment Tonight-type shows for years - Bankhead is ripe for renewed appreciation.
Lombardo has crafted an amusing, mostly involving vehicle for that resuscitation, and with Valerie Harper in the driver's seat, Looped gets a spirited spin in the Arena Stage production at the Lincoln Theatre.
The playwright was inspired by what sounds like the ultimate party recording - a 1965 audio tape of a not-exactly-sober Bankhead taking eight hours to dub (or "loop") a few lines for her final movie, Die, Die My Darling. Lombardo ups the comic potential by creating a scenario where Bankhead and a frustrated film editor struggle through the looping process for just one, overwrought, 20-word sentence.
Set in an Los Angeles recording studio, the play reveals a calculated side here and there, creaking most audibly as it conjures excuses for the antagonism between Bankhead and Danny Miller, the put-upon editor confronting his own inner demons and messy personal life while trying to cope with Tallulah's tantrums.
Some of this, especially the inevitable, it-all-comes-out (no pun intended) second act, feels manipulative and forced. But, before you know it, there's another zinger from what Danny calls Bankhead's "pocketful of punch lines" to make up for any not-quite-convincing lulls.
Like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, Bankhead had an indelible voice and speech cadence, ripe for imitating. And there was the Tallulah trademark - the catch-all "dahling" that she used for everyone because, as she explains here, "all my life I've been terrible at remembering people's names. I was at a party once and introduced a friend of mine as Martini. Her name was actually Olive."
That line can be found almost verbatim in a 1964 AP story on Bankhead. It's typical of the authentic ring that Lombardo's dialogue has in Looped. There's hardly a word that doesn't sound as if Bankhead said it or, at least, thought it. (One exception is a gratuitous slap at Joan Crawford, included for a cheap, Mommie, Dearest-prompted laugh - Bankhead died long before that now discredited assault on Crawford was created.)
