Hustler on the Streets, Missing Both a Limb and a Capacity to Feel

Two decades before Joe Buck peddled his flesh in Times Square — as the dim, hunky hero of the 1965 James Leo Herlihy novel (and 1969 movie) “Midnight Cowboy” — Ollie Olsen was feeling the pangs of alienation that come from being a male hustler of great beauty and small intellect. Conceived by Tennessee Williams , who specialized in angels in exile, Ollie first appeared in a 1944 short story. But he is only now making his New York debut, on the stage of the Acorn Theater on West 42nd Street.

The play that charts the course of Ollie’s life on the game is, like the story that inspired it, called “One Arm.” It is undoubtedly a labor of love and deep empathy on the part of its creator, Moisés Kaufman , who adapted and directed the production that opened on Thursday night, based on both the original story and drafts for a screenplay Williams wrote in 1967.

But while Ollie finds redemption before the final curtain, his tale never achieves the same apotheosis. His reincarnation here should inspire tender feelings among hard-core Williams fans (I’m among them); others — especially those with a resistance to sentimental clichés about streetwalkers — are more likely to roll their eyes over “One Arm,” a production of the New Group and the Tectonic Theater Project .

Embodied with endearing sincerity and merciful restraint by Claybourne Elder, Ollie (as he often tells tricks) was once the lightweight boxing champion of the Pacific Fleet, in which he served as a sailor while still in his teens. Yeah, he coulda been a contender. But an automobile accident ended his dreams of athletic glory. Ollie lost his right arm in that crash, though he acquired a whole lot of symbolic weight in compensation.

You see, when Ollie lost a limb, he lost his capacity to feel as well. On the other hand, he inspires deep feelings — and not only lust — among many of those who meet him. Once he takes to the streets as a hustler, his asymmetry becomes an extra lure for the johns (and occasional Jane) who seek his services. This man of exceptional, mutilated beauty resembles “a piece of antique sculpture,” as one admirer tells him. And his lost arm seems to echo a feeling of incompleteness within the clients — especially gay men — who court and use him.

Only a few of Williams’s prose pieces come close to matching the transcendent force of his best plays. The limits imposed by dramatic structure and spoken dialogue reined in his natural tendency for poetic bombast and symbolism. Despite the grittiness of its subject, “One Arm,” as a story, is essentially a lyrical allegory in which the third-person narrative is as dominant as that in a Grimm’s fairy tale.

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Summary:

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a television commercial director, is in the midst of a personality crisis. His wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) has left him and he seeks the help of his friend John (Bruce Dern), a self-styled guru who's an advocate of LSD. Paul asks John to be the guide on his first "trip". John takes Paul to a "freak-out" at his friend Max's (Dennis Hopper) pad. Splitting the scene, they score some acid from Max and return to John's split-level pad with an indoor pool. Paul experiences visions of sex, death, strobe lights, flowers, dancing girls, witches, hooded riders, a torture chamber, and a dwarf. He panics but John tells him to "go with it, man." Would you trust John?

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