Broadway: A Consumer's Guide

...Harold Clurman Broadway: A Consumer's Guide New York theatre's prosperous mediocrity...

...Unfortunately, there is not much music in the air these days—without Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter—and in this respect all the season's exhibits have failed...

...A former jazz musician who lives in California, Shepard infuses his dialogue with the open air, loping tone, and beat of our land in all its length and breadth rather than that of the exclusively cosmopolitan centers usual in most stage spectacles...

...Working was a brave try by Stephen Schwartz and others to set Studs Terkel's interviews with humble wage-earners within a framework of song, dance, colorful costume, and a gaily stylized setting...

...The President most probably would have thought it had something to do with the Allman Brothers and Hunter S. Thompson, and so deserving of immediate action...

...The play suffers from being too oblique in plot and somewhat nebulous in its implications, but it still speaks to those attuned to the discombobulations of our youth...

...His humor—most of his plays are comedies—possesses a quizzical hobo resonance and a sometimes savage irony...

...It celebrates a disheveled romanticism in contrast to an inert conformism...

...Runaways, written, composed, and directed by the season's "genius," Elizabeth Swados, displays considerable zest in its cast of young players and a few bright lyrics (one of them named "Enterprise") but its theme—the runaways from sordid homes—is not truly dramatized...

...But his "problem" is quickly resolved with barely a tremor of inner conflict...

...A Life in the Theatre, another Mamet play successfully produced off-Broadway, has, in my estimation, been grossly overpraised by the press...

...The acting by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy is thoroughly engaging and Mike Nichols' direction skillful...

...Both The Water Engine and A Life in the Theatre were written before the author's far better play, American Buffalo, a prizewinner last season...

...be grateful...

...Nor was there anything shameful either...

...There were also revivals of plays by O'Neill, Shaw, rock the boat...

...Jail the feds...

...Notice the suggestion that the only way we can deal with totalitarian advances in Africa is to make friends with our enemies...

...but that they exist in these less publicized, minority domains is unquestionably a hopeful sign...

...Perhaps even more significantly, there are sixty-nine shows in the off-off-Broadway category...

...John Guare's Landscape of the Body (also at the Public Theatre) has its sharp moments but wobbles in its style and in its effort to offer consolation for the wounds of our erring humanity...

...This is done in the name of "free speech...

...Chapter Two is not the best of Neil Simon's comedy confections...

...The Gin Game,a box-office success, is a pleasant two-character piece of slight weight...

...The affectionate sentiment of the play, and a good many funny lines with gentle pricks of intelligent asperity, sum up to humane entertainment...

...There is no cause for complaint in regard to the play's eminence on the Broadway roster, but compare it to such former Pulitzer and Drama Critics' award-winners as A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Long Day's Journey Into Night...

...It reflects the restlessness, the uprootedness, and the lack of a steady direction among our people...

...Still, the Broadway scene does not tell the whole of our theatre's story...

...The New York Drama Critics Circle this year was unable to agree on a "best" American play...

...And, as Malcolm Muggeridge does not tire of pointing out, thanks to the pill and abortion, sex has been separated from responsibility...

...In the characteristic style of the demoralized Wimp, it is his own race that he has turned on...

...For while the text is witty and zestful, I fancy I might have enjoyed the occasion even if I had not understood a single word...

...The trouble with this piece is that it willy-nilly succeeds in producing pretty much the same effect as the objects of its satire: that of superficiality...

...the emphasis is chiefly on the jokes rather than on the poignancy of the situation...

...The result is no leadership at all...

...The Pulitzer Prize this year was given to The Gin Game, the work of a new playwright, D.L...

...This does not mean that these aims are frequently achieved—excellence on any high level is perennially rare...

...The constant oscillation of impulses between anarchy and stability gives his Curse a grotesque hilariousness which without malice tells us more than many a more considered "message" about our country today...

...But the health of the theatre should not be measured solely by economic factors...

...But the play as a whole transcends its socio-political allusion...

...The upshot of their palaver is that while we are alive we may still enjoy life's various pleasures, including the most minute, and when we are dead there is no longer any agony...

...Some critics suggested half-heartedly that Solzhenitsyn, the American guest, had spoken out of turn...

...who cannot afford the regular box-office tariff...

...As it is, there's always the chance he will appoint Bella Abzug to look into the matter...

...His most recent book is Ibsen...

...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell HEW's Silver Anniversary In front of the White House, on July 4, 1978, a dirt-encrusted, insensate mob of about 3,000 "yippies" filled Lafayette Square...

...Let us no longer be taken in by the euphemisms of "majority rule...

...It is all too "showy": Everybody in it seems well-fed and self-satisfied, and only for the excessively sentimental does it convey pathos...

...Our newsstands are awash in prominently displayed pornography...

...though now outwardly bedraggled, it is still romantic at heart, playful in spirit in such a way that none of the official strictures is capable of quelling the land's essential vigor, the soulful integrity of its citizenry...

...A year later Variety blazoned its front page with "Legit Season Hits Historic High...

...The League of New York Theatres and Producers recently boasted that, while in 1975 fifty-seven million dollars were spent in theatre admissions, in the 1977-1978 season ticket sales were twelve percent ahead of 1976-1977...

...Among other meritorious plays produced at the Public Theatre were A Prayer for My Daughter by Thomas Babe, and David Mamet's one-act The Water Engine...

...In The 5th of July, at the reputable off-Broadway Circle Repertory Theatre, Lanford Wilson displays his talent for registering the addlepated but nonetheless significant temper of a whacky generation...

...It is in this regard that I feel justified in speaking of the past season as generally mediocre...

...Not to join.in is to be suspected of being "unliberated," possibly a Republican...

...Interesting, then, to observe the reaction to it...

...There is the off-Broadway theatre...

...I have reserved comment on this show because it is not what we commonly expect of a musical: It has no "book" or story...

...It is the consolation of the poor that they are freer in inner disposition than the hidebound wealthy in the West...

...It is only proper, in passing, to mention Ronald Ribman's Cold Storage, a play admired by a number of critics...

...Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as is by now well known, preached a sermon at Harvard roughly on the foregoing text...

...The writing is agreeably deft...

...In other words, with the freshest touch and abundant good humor, Orkenny shows through a delightful ambivalence how one may write a play of quizzical implication which will nevertheless escape strict governmental censorship...

...play...

...We are at the same time made aware of a permanent aspiration among those who dwell in outlying districts of our westerly states to soul-satisfying resolution of these dilemmas...

...Da", The Gin Game, Ira Levin's Deathtrap, and Neil Simon's Chapter Two were all nominated for the Tony award...

...The first of these was very well acted but is not a sufficiently integrated mixture of brutal police-station realism and quasi-lyric statements (inappropriate to the circumstances) about the sorry state of our citizenry...

...That has happened in this country in a way, and it has made for great internal change...

...It begins "seriously": A man whose beloved wife has died finds it painfully difficult to readjust to his life as a widower...

...One of the few causes on behalf of which the Wasp-turned-Wimp is ready to turn out, drink a glass of wine, and cough up a donation is the legal defense of one or other of the more egregious pornographers or porn-film stars...

...Most of its first act is devoted to the humors of a gin game in which two elderly people in a welfare nursing home engage to fill the emptiness of their existence...

...The peculiar consequence is that the nation-at-large is possessed of a collective good sense greater than that of its nominal leaders...

...But this takes little account of the inflationary rise in the cost of tickets and the operation of productions...

...On the old man's death, his son, a resident of London, returns to the native (Irish) sod, thinks back to his boyhood and to the genial stupidity and backwardness of the environment—especially in respect to his Da whom he once believed he hated and whom despite all he could not help loving...

...Thus we arrive at the root meaning of the word demoralized...

...Curse of the Starving Class is typical of Shepard's almost too prolific output...

...Or rather its story is in the unified exuberance of the five black performers who, though distinct as individuals, share in it as though they were limbs of a single organism...

...Fortunately, , the present occupant of the White House, in retreat at Camp David, was not in a position to gaze out over the assembled throng...

...Their joyousness is a signal to all of us that even in these days of spiritual torpor we may all be glad to be in the world, glad of our day-to-day experience...

...At home, he practices the bitter politics of class resentment...

...So, except for this, no great surprises in script, acting, direction, or mode of production were registered in the 1977-1978 New York theatre...

...The Wasp-turned-Wimp has been de-moralized...

...In the 16 years since I came to America, I can confidently assert that no chief executive has filled me with as many misgivings as Jimmy Carter: not merely misgivings about himself, but about the country that elected him...

...Considered abstractly the show is pure theatre...

...But, alas, their trivial competitiveness—particularly acute on the man's part—divides them and may deprive them forever of the consolation of enduring friendship...

...Da" was the eventual winner...

...Many of the plays similarly honored in previous seasons were English...

...This today chiefly refers to Joseph Papp's so-called New York Shakespeare 20 The American Spectator August/September 1978 Festival which is housed in the various playing areas within the Public Theatre on Lafayette Street...

...It has since been moved to a larger theatre for commercial production...

...The second act gets to the core of the From 1931 to 1941 Harold Clurman was director of the Group Theatre...

...Since the country forcibly became Communist under the vigilant eye of the Soviet Union, a too stringent expression of dissatisfaction would not be tolerated...

...The feeling is not talked about, explained, or preached: It is embodied...

...In the 1950s he directed, among other plays, Bus Stop and A Touch of the Poet...

...Senator Moynihan put his finger on a part of the problem in his discussion with Henry Kissinger (published in the American Enterprise Institute's useful bimonthly journal, Public Opinion...

...An exultant celebration of existence emerges from the interplay among the actors...

...plays about the horrors of South African apartheid...

...Predictably, however, this latest assault will backfire...

...We must look to the quality of productions of all types...

...Its shivers are immediately relieved by the author's assurance that there's nothing to frighten us: It's all a spoof: The streets of New York are nowadays sufficiently menacing to make fright-inducing shows not merely tame but farcical...

...Hostility in varying degrees was heard from the New York Times, the Washington Post, James Reston, Arthur Schlesinger, and, most strikingly, Rosalynn Carter...

...They smoked marijuana openly, taunted police, trampled geraniums, or lolled inertly on the grass in a state of stuporous indifference while a scrofulous, hirsute, semi-naked, fully-crazed speaker harangued them with paranoid invective, assassination gibberish, and slogans: "Free the heads...

...The play I voted for as a member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, in which I was joined by several other members, was Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class...

...Why then be so terrorized by the prospect of death...

...Coburn...

...The American Spectator August/ September 1978 21 The season offered a few "fringe benefits" such as several and Moliere, but I found none of them especially distinguished...

...Most elites that lose wars lose their heads in the process...

...It is another example of amiable Irish self-criticism within which we may discern an element of self-compliment...

...This is not previously unheard of—England in its prewar appeasement phase had many of the same characteristics—but it is surely unusual in the life of nations...

...Just as The Water Engine is clever without being genuinely efficacious in its attack on the media, so A Life in the Theatre is almost a collegiate and trifling picture of its subject...

...To judge by the New York theatre season of 1977-1978, I would say that our country is now on a level of "calm" which does not signify peacefulness so much as uncertainty, a degree of apprehension, and a yearning for benevolence...

...Its charm is persuasive...

...At one time, for instance, I gathered from what I saw on the stage in Prague just before the Dubcek regime was installed that Czechoslovakia was due to undergo a liberalizing change to "the socialism with a human face...

...He lashed out mercilessly at the "three thousand millionaires" who, he claims, will benefit from the Steiger Amendment to reduce capital gains taxes, perhaps forgetting that he is himself a millionaire...

...Catsplay is acted with captivating zest by an English actress, Helen Bond, and its originality lies in its infusion of social nuance into the "goulash" of character comedy...

...The reports on the New York theatre season just ended glow with statistics of prosperity...

...Their excuse today is that 'I was only giving orders.' " Moynihan said he thought that this "failure of nerve" was with us "more so now than a few years ago when I originally sensed it...

...Abroad, Carter's most noteworthy act to date has been to take the side of the Rhodesian terrorists...

...Thus Dracula is one of the season's biggest hits because it cannot scare a cat—or any adult...

...But the play folded after a short time, unable, no doubt, to muster a wide appeal at Broadway prices...

...A great whimpering was heard across the land...

...The play awarded an almost unanimous accolade was Hugh Leonard's "Da", a sprig of Irish growth...

...It is in essence a conversation about death between two patients presumably suffering from a fatal disease...

...Much laughter...

...For that, at least, we may Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...

...These impressions were not inferred from plays of a political character but from an undertone in the stage fare and in audience reactions...

...Regardless of my indifference—not to use a stronger word—to the play's proposition, I need only add that talk alone, even humorous talk, is not drama...

...While our audiences enjoy the play on its own happy terms without recognizing its quasi-"subversive" dimension, an East European audience is relieved to see a truthful presentation of the discomfort and hardship of its everyday life, and is assuaged by its overt plot (which tells how a rich and crippled lady from Munich decides to join her sister in the jolly disorder of her Budapest quarters...

...Deathtrap is a thriller which kids itself...

...Da" is an endearing play—most beguilingly acted by Bernard Hughes—about a son's memory of his dunderhead of a father...

...The latter pronouncement hardly tallies with the fact that during the 1927-1928 season two hundred and six productions were mounted and that there then were some sixty theatres in the Broadway area whereas now little more than half that number remain...

...These non-profit institutions are in the main supported by National or State Endowments for the Arts, by foundations, and by the Theatre Development Fund, which supplies tickets to most of the better productions at reduced prices to selected members of the public (teachers, hospital personnel, students, etc...

...Flashy settings and some good comic performances provide a modicum of attractiveness to On the Twentieth Century, an adaptation of the Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur play and film of yesteryear...

...Having thought about this for a while, I have concluded that America is now fittingly presided over by that characteristic specimen of the 1970s, the demoralized white male protestant—"Wimp," for short...

...This he has done in what he no doubt perceives to be the nobler cause of race war...

...The artistic stamp in such a condition is mediocrity...

...I must not fail to mention the musicals for it is in this sphere thatAmerica generically excels...

...His meaning is socially penetrating without propagandistic alloy...

...These two lonely people, whose children evince only a perfunctory devotion to their parents, share a common fate and thus have every reason to develop a close relation to one another...

...But one cannot conclude that the play breaks any new ground or manifests any special originality of perception or writing...

...With every passing day, he presents us with an ever more unattractive picture...

...Unfortunately, the demoralized white male is not merely the child of Vietnam...

...Orkenny nevertheless suggests that Hungary still remains sentimentally regretful of the past...

...The assembled rabble constituted the worst possible advertisement for their cause—the legalization of marijuana...

...The theatre in every epoch is a social barometer...

...Had Solzhenitsyn only condemned America for its 22 The American Spectator August/September 1978...

...Our sense In brief, it was the kind of season to be expected at a moment of of indignation these days is chiefly aroused by evils in far-away jittery affluence when it would be inopportune or ill-natured to localities...

...I have this joke—which Henry may or may not appreciate—about thepeople who started the war and ran it and are still working here in Washington...

...Orkenny has succeeded in making a "fun show" into both an honest picture and a "defense" of Hungary's present condition...

...But that is not convincing...

...In 1974, Variety carried the headline, "Theatre Is Now A National Invalid...

...Shepard is an uneven writer, his dramatic structure is often improvisationally erratic, but his vision is that of a poet...

...President Wimp presides, and "presides" is the right word, for by no stretch of the imagination can Carter be said to govern...

...They are generally superior in artistic intent and in their ambition to exceed the limitations of the TV texture so often characteristic of Broadway entertainment...

...It is not only from personal inclination that I tend to regard these off- and off-off-Broadway theatres with special favor...

...Would we be asked next to forego porn, pot, and the pill...

...There are other progenitors...

...At the trendy Washington gatherings, pot is circulated, cocaine sniffed...

...his plots are "myths" rooted in contemporary American experience...

...The woman, who is a beginner at the game, keeps beating the practiced and expert man...

...A charming Hungarian comedy named Catsplay by Istvan Orkenny was presented at the off-off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club, one of the better outlets for adventurous writing...

...The season's most stirring phenomenon is Ain't Misbehavin', based on thirty songs composed or recorded between 1929 and 1943 by Fats Waller...

...y. t has long been my contention—though it may have been an illusion—that I could sense the state of a nation, here and elsewhere, by what was being produced in its theatre...

...On a later visit to that city I perceived the imminence of a reaction leading to its present, much harsher government...

...Carter will find that the average man is more concerned by what he pays in taxes than by what his neighbor pays...

...Mamet's play is an extended radio sketch satirizing the commercial exploitation of human and social tragedy by our media...