Folie à deux in the Hamptons

Her only apparent problem in life is Big Edie (played by Christine Ebersole, who plays Little Edie in Act 2). There is an exceptionally skillful construction of the Beales' unhealthy mother/daughter dynamic, which essentially turns Act 1 into "Drama of the Gifted Child -- the Musical." The screeching between the Edies is real and familiar enough to be truly unpleasant, and it is chilling how Big Edie ever so gently crushes her daughter under her own flowery, narcissistic self-regard and competitiveness.

All the while, there is music, most of which is wonderful, and ripe for an original cast recording that will be gleefully worshiped by young drama majors for years to come.

There are a couple of glaring clunkers, like the Cole Porter-ish number "Better Fall Out of Love," which feels as if the songwriters are pandering to the uptight tastes of the super-square "Lion King" crowd. But the vast majority of the show's music is as wild, haunting, overgrown as the neck-high grass in the Beales' backyard, and lovely -- crammed full of wit, pathos and delicious harmonies.

Unfortunately, Act 1 goes on a bit too long. It's hard to care about the Beales when they're beautiful and young because we're too impatient to see them when they're old and bonkers. Little Little Edie is charming and gorgeous, but two-dimensional -- somewhat shrill in fights with her mother, but otherwise not the least bit eccentric or batty, which is a pity: I craved more foreshadowing of the bridge to nowhere her brain eventually crossed. After a catastrophic event in Act 1, wherein the Beale women are abandoned by all the men in their lives, we are aware that Little Edie went "back to the Barbizon" in New York, to her small modeling career and, one presumes, a promiscuous, slummy, Greenwich Village-lifestyle unbecoming of a debutante. But this isn't shown, and we miss seeing this crucially developmental part of Edie's life.

While it makes dramatic sense to contrast the Beales' plush, earlier lives with the wreckage of their later years, it's hard not to feel a little disappointed that the creators don't let us see any of their long slide down. Since the characters resemble themselves very little from Act 1 to Act 2, we have no clear idea how things dismantled to effect these hair-raising transformations: This results in a distinct cognitive divorce between the two acts.

However, the play really starts to cook with gas in Act 2, when Ebersole, desperately outfitted in girdles, mangled cardigans, white heels and a skirt held upside-down with safety pins, walks out of the mansion, squints into the light and sings "Revolutionary Costume for Today." Here, finally, is the Little Edie Beale we know and love.

And it is a revelation.

Ebersole, particularly as Little Edie, turns in one of those thrilling, superlative performances that inspire weeping, chest-beating, genuflecting and clothes-rending praise. The actress appears to have spent a lot of time dangerously exploring the razor edge of her own sanity in order to more sharply portray the molten life of an insane character. Watching her, I recalled a line from Anne Sexton: "Darling, the composer has stepped into fire." Ebersole becomes a human volcano -- Klaus Kinski in a turban made of ski pants. Her Little Edie is a goose-bump-raising, heartbreaking, unforgettable, calamitous experience.

However, despite moments of true greatness, Act 2 never quite congeals. It suffers from a flimsy narrative arc, which revolves around Little Edie's almost leaving to go back to New York but never quite making it, out of a combination of loyalty to her helpless mother, her own frailty and a sense of her own time having come and gone. The act is filled with big ideas: songs designed to illustrate the fantasies and delusions of the Beales -- including one particularly incongruous Norman Vincent Peale gospel number -- but despite gorgeous music and the best of daffy intentions, these flights of fancy tend to distract, and hobble the story line from gaining emotional momentum.

Then again, these very distractions account for some of the musical's most vivid, loopy and beautifully realized moments. The song "Jerry Likes My Corn," in which Big Edie sits in bed and rhapsodizes while cooking on a hot plate, is one of the weirdest, sweetest, funniest things I've ever seen onstage, and perfectly captures the cockeyed charm and humanity of the "Grey Gardens" documentary.

"Grey Gardens," for all its flaws, did manage to steal my heart -- but I have one serious gripe.

By taking the Maysles brothers and their film out of the story -- they simply aren't there onstage -- the musical's collaborators deprive Big and Little Edie of their own true, real-life redemption. They were lunatics, but they were also trained songbirds -- above all, they dreamed of being entertainers in an appreciative world. Big Edie constantly waxes nostalgic over the old records she'd recorded back in the golden days; Little Edie is both envious and breathlessly proud of her mother's accomplishment. The Edies loved and craved attention, and (redemption works in mysterious ways) the Maysles finally gave it to them.

A big part of what made the documentary so lovable is that Little Edie, for all of her insanity, was finally getting her close-up from Mr. De Mille. It was, in a fucked-up way, deeply life affirming.

"Grey Gardens" became a legitimate mania. It was a big favorite at art house cinemas. Little Edie's outsider-art approach to fashion inspired spreads in Vogue. After the film came out, Edie caught the wave, went back to New York and sang at a nightclub for a short spell, before finally relocating to Miami Beach and passing away in 2002.

What made the film watchable was a feeling that the ladies' folie à deux protected them, in a significant way, from ever being crushed by a killing awareness of their hopeless conditions. The Maysles didn't just turn an all-seeing eye on the self-destruction of someone with no inner reserves -- they didn't set out to "break" Danny Bonaduce. Big Edie was as solid as an oak tree, even if she was a crazy old woman who ate cat food. Little Edie may have been a thoroughly unconventional personality, but she always felt like a star, and a star she was, finally. Those revolutionary outfits she threw together, one must remember, were for the camera. By removing the camera from the stage, you also remove the God from Edie's world -- and this turns our Grey Gardens a little too black.

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