Review: 'Paul Swan Is Dead and Gone,' but first, he's dévastaté

I suppose that makes “Paul Swan Is Dead and Gone,” which opened Wednesday, a “play.”

It’s certainly not a conventional drama, any more than the real Paul Swan was a conventional artist. Long before (and after) camp was diagnosed, he was the kind of man for whom quotation marks were too subtle. Exclamation points, interrobangs and innumerable French diacritics were all part of his patois.

And though the fearless actor Tony Torn doesn’t stint on the theatrics, his incarnation of Swan never quite comes to life. How could it? Written by Claire Kiechel and presented by the Civilians, “Paul Swan Is Dead and Gone” is more of a found object than a drama, an exhibit in a museum of unnatural history.

The museum is actually a performance space called Torn Page, on the second floor of a brownstone in Chelsea. (It’s wittily named for Torn’s parents, Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, who lived there.) The scenic designer Andromache Chalfant has done it up for the occasion as a gauzy salon, with a velvet-draped spinet, mossy paintings, heavy curtains and fairy lights. “Gymnopédies” is the winking mood music.

We are meant to take this as a simulacrum of Swan’s actual salon, in the Carnegie Hall studios, where on Sunday evenings from 1939 to 1969 — by which point Swan was 86 — he performed barely clothed dance recitals that also incorporated song and poetry, paintings and sculpture. Once called “the most beautiful man in the world,” he apparently thought he still was, at least in quotation marks. Where art was concerned, nudity was no obstacle.

That’s no doubt why Andy Warhol chose to feature Swan doing his strange shtick in the 1965 movie “Camp.” To watch him perform for Warhol’s camera — and for long stretches refuse to perform — is to have your capacity for sympathetic mortification sorely tested. The style Swan favored was almost out of date when he acquired it from the likes of Isadora Duncan in the 1920s; by the 1960s it was so bizarrely antique it caused audiences to “snigger.”

His reaction: “I was dévastaté!”

Or so Kiechel’s script has it. (She is Swan’s great-grandniece.) And though the monologues she has given him feel believable enough — some are derived from his work and letters — there is a weird superstructure around them, as if to assert the play’s avant-garde bona fides. In a work about fustiness, such distancing effects seem like holding one’s nose.

So a man called Bellamy — or is it his doppelgänger, Bollany? — accompanies Swan on the piano and serves as his awkward, temporizing major-domo. (Both are played by Robert M. Johanson.) Also on hand are two women (Helen Cespedes and Alexis Scott) who at first appear as the Paul Swan Dancers, then as Susan Sontag and novelist James Purdy, but are later revealed to be Swan’s daughters, Flora and Paula.

If at this point you are thinking it might be helpful to know more about Swan’s marriage, forget it. When the pinkish eminence in a jeweled miter finally emerges from his gilded sarcophagus, 15 minutes into the 75-minute performance, he has little to say about his actual life. You will have to guess for yourself whether Bellamy or Bollany or a man named Fred Bates — seen in a portrait — were really his lovers or are just convenient composites. (Bates was real.)

That might not matter in a play about a successful artist, whose art can be trusted to speak for itself. But what we are shown of Swan’s work does not come close to clearing that bar. In what he calls his “most famous dance,” “To a Hero Slain,” he looks merely wooden and ridiculous, his maroon smock flapping, his comical sword flailing. (The evocative if merciless costumes are by An-lin Dauber.)

Because the play abjures psychology in favor of gesture, much as Swan apparently did in his choreopoems, nothing tells us whether he is in on the joke. It thus becomes difficult to know how to respond when he makes a fool of himself or when he offers “beauté sécrets” — laxatives and olive oil baths — that can turn anyone into “an Adonis like me.” To laugh or not to laugh? Both seem cruel.

No wonder his Carnegie audiences sniggered.

But if Torn’s performance is meant to discomfit us in the same way Swan’s performances discomfited them, I’m not sure the equivalence is a justification. After all, Swan could do no better. Surely Torn, a stalwart of the experimental theater, could — if the director, Steve Cosson, wanted him to. I doubt he does; not improving things is a trademark of the Civilians, which often uses verbatim interviews as the basis for its plays.

Instead, "Paul Swan Is Dead and Gone” tries to have it both ways. It enjoys making fun of Swan; Sontag, watching him perform “To a Hero Slain,” says that camp is good only when it’s awful, and “I don’t know if this is awful enough.”

At the same time, it uses Swan to express the serious anxiety of being left behind, as an artist, as a human. That theme, at least, is touching: If we live long enough, we’re all camp.

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Production Notes:

‘Paul Swan Is Dead and Gone’

Tickets: Through May 19 at Torn Page, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, thecivilians.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

Credits: By Claire Kiechel; directed by Steve Cosson; choreography by Dan Safer; sets by Andromache Chalfant; costumes by An-lin Dauber; lighting by Lucrecia Briceno; sound by Avi Amon; props by Emily Raw; music by Avi Amon and Robert M. Johanson; production stage manager, Ryan Gohsman. Presented by The Civilians.

Cast: Helen Cespedes (Flora), Alexis Scott (Paula), Robert M. Johanson (Bellamy) and Tony Torn (Paul Swan).

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.