Tapping the Raw Emulsions
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By ALbert Bermel Tapping the Raw Emulsions The opening of plays like Generation, which has started to bring trade to the Morosco Theater, and Minor Miracle, which closed shop at the...
...Better yet, his casting is nearly impeccable...
...Rather, they work for the effect of careless chatter as they push their stories to a point of false synthesis, a moment that cultivates a lump in the spectator's throat...
...It is the following day and Mabel is trying to lure Charles back into the bedroom...
...In Generation the lump begins to swell-and my own gorge rises again at the memory of it-when Henry Fonda and his stage son-inlaw, who have been at odds during the two preceding acts, break down while they are folding a sheet...
...The Trigon...
...A character abruptly ceases to be intolerant or otherwise disagreeable, or he accepts a member of the younger set as a person who is entitled to lead his own life...
...The question is: Can Bolton smuggle a qualified doctor into the apartment for the sake of his daughter's and his potential grandchild's safety...
...The fat is in suspension, not in the fire...
...Mabel, a nervous, healthy girl, looking for love but as virtuous as Sade's Justine, will continue to appear every day so that there will be a woman in their life...
...Cantor is an established producer and press agent who has not directed before in New York...
...James Broom Lynne's The Trigon is set in London and its protagonist embodies the combined menace and mystery that we have come to associate with Pinter's theater...
...nothing, anyway, that time didn't cure...
...ON STAGE By ALbert Bermel Tapping the Raw Emulsions The opening of plays like Generation, which has started to bring trade to the Morosco Theater, and Minor Miracle, which closed shop at the Henry Miller's after four performances, reminds us that even if there is as yet no theatrical success formula, there is something very like a formula for getting an American play past a Broadway producer, and the theater parties, and into business...
...That was a prime requisite if it was to be produced at all...
...A) Yes, the younger folks are a bag of nuts, with their behavior that's meant to shock you and all, and their naive morality...
...and each of these visual bits is good for a few laugh lines and a few repeats, thanks to the persistence of the author and the director, Gene Saks...
...One remark by the priest, apropos of his hours spent in the confessional, struck me as funny ("1 haven't heard a new sin in years"), so did the report of a lady named Mrs...
...He tells her that she is monotonous and adds insults to silence until she leaves...
...Mabel, who visits them every day, is described as being "a very nice girl and always the same...
...It shows the young photographer wearing a necklace...
...She recalls how much she enjoyed herself there the day before...
...It is a tribute to' him that the scenes of terror-in-repose are the ones that are most memorable...
...the doctor listening through a wall with his stethoscope...
...As the play drops its anti-establishment cracks from the mouth of the young photographer who will not "sell out," and its anti-bohemian wisdom by way of Henry Fonda and his obstetrician friend, a medical Beralde, so to speak (though Moliere would have considered this a contradiction in terms), it seems to be hitting out in all directions...
...as they come together to collect corners they exchange concessive thank-yous...
...He is weeping...
...they merely lull the spectator into a mood of vague righteousness, and finally coax from him a Panglossian cheer...
...These plays bypass real feeling...
...A sentimental piece of writing touches on emotions instead of invoking them...
...Ees for dat I want dis baby It may go back, for all I know or care to check, a great deal farther...
...But it is easy to find minor flaws in the fabric of any play...
...the daughter-wife (forgettably played by Holly Turner) tossing salads and things...
...Cope with it...
...He has not obtruded himself on the script yet he has made it work, without any slambang nonsense or regimental drill...
...With this gesture of unhappiness at his cruelty Charles is meant to grow from a threat into a saintly destroyer whose overturning of the lives of the trigon was a painful but necessary act of demolition...
...Basil will continue to dream of war and the brutal delights of being an officer with a gun and a free hand over his men...
...He goes to considerable trouble to snip the stems of a bunch of daffodils and arrange them in a vase...
...So (C) these kids'll be just like you, decent and settled in a few years...
...Broadway playwrights, and some off-Broadway ones, are not so drab-minded as to soak their dialogue in straight, old-time sententiousness...
...It goes back nine years earlier than that, to 1924, when in Sydney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted the old wine-grower Tony Patucci pardons his young wife for having a baby by his foreman and decides to keep the child as his own, because "W'at's good for me havin' dees fine house...
...After all, today's emulsification has a native ancestry that goes back more than 30 years to O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, as Nat Miller says "huskily" to his rebellious son in act four, "You're all right, Richard," and blows his nose, after which Richard "turns impulsively and kisses him...
...In Minor Miracle a bishop apologizes to a parish priest he has despised for umpteen years and calls him by his first name for the first time...
...Bolton spraying sheets with disinfectant...
...Lipton, who uses his hands and his features as economically as any classically-trained actor, manages to make such a force of himself that the lines addressed to him seem to acquire their full meaning only after he has received them...
...A new situation...
...and wearing boy scout shorts and green garters, the very model of the overgrown British schoolboy named Billy Bunter in Frank Richards' stories of 50 or 60 years ago...
...Bolton works in public relations, owns a big house in Chicago, has sent his daughter to the best schools, and feels awkwardly well off...
...Everything's under control...
...The play, then, in harmony with its players, provides a trim performance: no fat, no gum, therefore no emulsion...
...He turns his face to the audience and raises it...
...Charles replies, "It's another day...
...But (B) didn't you once have a pretty naive outlook yourself...
...The playwright, more concerned with manipulating his viewers than his characters, breaks the strain with a mild dose of release, an orgasm of the nerve ends...
...Arthur will continue to fuss over him, making his bed, straightening up after him, submitting to his bouts of rage and frustration...
...Finally, he sleeps with plump Mabel, and that drives the other two men into dudgeon and out of the flat...
...It pits Jim Bolton (in the rueful, loping figure of Henry Fonda with his absentminded eyes focused on some blue oblivion) against a shaggy youngster (Richard Jordan) who has married Bolton's daughter 8 3/4 months after impregnating her...
...He promises to set up a marvelously intricate hi-fi set...
...I am willing to swallow that ending whole for the sake of the rest of the drama, which climbs past one suspenseful encounter after another, is flecked with intelligent humor that proceeds out of the character apercus, and incorporates some unusual dramatic language grounded on interesting ideas...
...Yet, at the same time, it whispers interlinear reassurances to the comfortably-set-up, middle-aged couples who bulk out the auditorium...
...Whereas Minor Miracle is nearly all talk, and not very compelling talk...
...I also caught myself watching him time and again when he was not taking part in the conversation...
...Then he tries to persuade Arthur, who has the capacity for suffering of a masochist or maybe a martyr, to desert Basil...
...By contrast, the sacrifices made in Broadway's moments of emulsion are pitiful...
...He walks into the flat one morning by appointment and agrees to move in that day...
...The obstetric Beralde is taking charge of the parturition (a breech birth, too tough for our photographer to handle) and Fonda and the young fellow are thanking each other and the middle-aged couples have stopped laughing and started gulping...
...In much the same way, AI Morgan's Minor Miracle ignites a quarrel between a couple of members of the New York clergy, but its obsequious Catholic in-jokes that everybody can grin along with keep on implying that two men of God like Lee Tracy and Dennis King cannot be held apart indefinitely...
...First of all, he encourages the not-very-latent blood lust in Basil to emerge so that Basil will kill Arthur...
...and Arthur, fleshy, bespectacled, motherly...
...A far more desperate sacrifice is involved in the drama of renunciation, such as Corneille's Polyeucte, in which the hero gives up his life so that his wife may marry the man she had loved before he met her...
...And suddenly-splash...
...a wineglass that will not stand up without assistance...
...Touching," though, is an appropriate adjective to qualify a sensation that is an illegitimate offspring of compassion...
...But the point of Sheridan's scene is that Charles is making a sacrifice, forgoing a very generous sum by holding on to the picture and taking the risk of offending the man who can pull him out of debt...
...But what sort of emotions...
...This makes his adeptness all the more remarkable...
...Such moments are said to be moving or affecting or touching, although their admirers never get around to explaining in what direction they are moved, in what manner affected or how deeply touched...
...The description fits the relations between these three angles of the "trigon...
...Basil talks earnestly of getting into bed with a girl called Mabel while Arthur insists that what Mabel needs is understanding and love...
...No, Morgan and his director, Howard Erskine, simply failed to observe another Broadway convention: that a hit must be charged up with business, sometimes called "shticks," to have it looking like a movie...
...This is not a matter of stealing or upstaging but of asserting a stage personality with peculiar strength, a faculty without which Charles cannot dominate and eventually isolate the other characters...
...This intention is not quite realized...
...The moment of most pressing sentimentality in a Broadway play -the reconciliation or the declaration of forgiveness-is a phenomenon akin to the state of emulsion in which a fatty substance is held in suspension in water by the presence of gum...
...and there was nothing the matter with you...
...His son-in-law is an arty photographer who builds his own furniture and is so independent that he has made up his mind to deliver the forthcoming child himself...
...The triumph of sentimentality is that it makes him think he is experiencing feelings...
...It is a relief to turn from the geared, if not epileptic, antics of Broadway to the cleverly burnished modern morality at Stage 73...
...on the other hand, has a marked relevance to our lives, though it does not layout problems (that maddening because grossly overtaxed word) in a practical way and pump emulsified solutions into its audience...
...Emulsification...
...they almost defy one to apply them...
...Arthur Cantor who produced the play has assigned himself the job of staging it...
...He pays the rent for the coming quarter so that Arthur and Basil become his tenants, not the landlady's...
...the photographer taking flash pictures of his father-in-law so as to catch him in an embarrassing posture...
...The radio will continue not to work, the pictures to hang in their same spots...
...Not the primary ones-fear, awe, grief, hatred, love-but substitutions for them-chills, distaste, anxiety, dislike, togetherness-for there are no wolves or young lions in Broadway's bestiary: In the end the lamb dwells with the lamb and one calf lies down with another...
...Don't worry," it says, "the moment of emulsion is on the way...
...And the barometer (an unnecessarily obtuse symbol, this) will continue to register "Change" while nothing changes...
...Geidt, inventive but always in character, lays antimacassars on the back of a sofa with housewifely preciseness...
...Then he begins to work on them...
...And if the moment of emulsion brings with it any sense of recognition, it is a recognition not of life but of other sentimental works...
...This species of play is nearly extinct, although the theme of dying for a principle has been tapped anew in The Deputy and in Miller's Incident at Vichy and The Crucible...
...But Lynne has found his own stage vitality and ambiguities which make Pinter seem, at most, a distant relative, consanguinous in time rather than aim...
...Superficially, the moment of emulsion resembles a scene like the one in The School for Scandal in which Charles Surface refuses to sell the portrait of his uncle to the uncle, who is in disguise, and the old man exclaims in an ecstatic aside, "I forgive him everything...
...it does not square with Charles' earlier behavior...
...Thus, Generation keeps one's eyes as well as ears active...
...Perlmutter who said of a print of Christ that had tears coming out of both eyes, "What do you expect from a picture that cost you a dollar and a quarter...
...Pinter's plays are deliberate abstractions...
...Jeremy Geidt in the feminine but not pansyish role of Arthur offsets the still, ascetic presence of Michael Lipton as Charles...
...William Goodhart's Generation is a useful example...
...The introductory music switches from The British Grenadiers to The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy as the curtain rises to reveal Basil, a mustached military type, obviously uneasy in mufti...
...Antoine once wrote that directing is a subtle kind of diplomacy, and Cantor mediates well between his author and actors...
...At this point we see Charles alone in the flat...
...Instead of a lump in the throat it puts a thorn into the heart...
...Sentimentality has seeped into all the American arts and vitiated them to the extent of its penetration, but it has done most damage to the theater...
...W'at's good for me havin' all dis money w'at I got...
...wait and see...
...If Morgan's play has failed while Goodhart's is succeeding, it is not for lack of emulsification...
...then standing back with his hands behind his head, mouth critical, eyes squinted, he mutters, "If only I had a piece of fern Without an effective Charles there would be no play...
...Nothing changes, that is, until the arrival of a newcomer, Charles, who gives away almost nothing of his past or his designs...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
