Tennessee Williams and Others

...As a delectable final touch, the two magdalenes, who have been at odds, are reconciled on Christmas Day when one invites the other into her room to share her California Tokay, and the spirit of the Virgin Mary comes in, while outside a gang of carollers chirps, "A miracle, a miracle...

...Now she lives in a wrecked shack of a boarding house situated on the southernmost key of "these Disunited Misstates...

...The Fraulein is a displaced person and Williams, who composes what might be called a drama of solitude taking sad stock of itself, has hinted more than once that he feels displaced, in both senses of the word...

...Indian Joe, for whom the Fraulein brings home the fish, is the audience...

...The landlady is the professional Broadway fraternity and sorority...

...Her previous snatching of fish from the seal represents the author's sudden and early success...

...This play gets its sparse laughs by using the word "shit" and having men squint down the top of the first whore's dress...

...Alan Schneider coping with Williams and Harold Clurman with Inge (Where's Daddy?, Billy Rose Theater), this has been a sad season for some of New York's most gifted directors...

...this nonpresence allows him to comment on other people and anticipate their remarks, much as Elvira does in Blithe Spirit...

...He must be Goodman's ideal Jonah as he transforms himself repeatedly from the self-deprecating pantspresser to the almost-tragic figure of the prophet...

...As the hero, Ray Milland gives no evidence whatever of being able to act on a stage...

...But not much worse...

...In the final scene when she stands half-scalped and, like Oedipus, with bloodied eye sockets, the horn of the trawler arriving at the dock signals that she must brave the Cocaloony's wrath again-for the last time...

...Which is what Williams probably thought most of the spectators would grunt...

...The Cocaloony Bird is the younger, competitive generation of playwrights, possibly such Absurdists as Kopit and Albee...

...A young fellow called Gar O'Donnell is about to forsake a provincial hole called Ballybeg for America...

...and the gossip columnist is, well, maybe a gossip columnist...

...Surely N. F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum, definitively blighted this sort of weed...

...The "southernmost" dockside is the theater, which strikes Williams as being too far-out today but to which he keeps returning with new plays for production (fresh fish to fry), despite their unfavorable reception...

...Philomela never had it worse...

...Later the play skids into welltrodden ruts of sentimentality and slogs along them to the final curtain...

...One might do worse than spend an evening at the Music Box observing the courtroom drama Hostile Witness...

...He must have some of the solo lines sung...

...With their choice of material narrower than ever, the system maltreats them even more than it does actors...

...The preceding one-act, The Mutilated, is a maudlin episode about two whores, one with a volcanic landscape of bosom, the other suffering from the surgical removal of one breast...

...Our own recent broad comedies (say Cactus Flower, Neil Simon's plays and The Gnadiges Fraulein) are hobbled by the American dramatist's inability to go the limit...

...The most cheerful recent occasion in the theater was the Com?©dieFran?§aise doing what it does best: Feydeau...

...He must have a model ship rocking on stage, cherubs waving a cloth for the ocean, blinding sets by Remy Charlip, and dazzling lighting by Roger Morgan...

...To help himself recall his past he plays a recording of the sugary slow movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto...

...Her situation (a favorite Williams word) is described in an atrociously written colloquy valiantly acted out by Zoe Caldwell as a gossip columnist with a blue-white face-Miss Caldwell may be the best straight comedienne on the American stage-and by Kate Reid as the landlady of the boarding house...

...The key is named after the Cocaloony Bird, an obscene, man-sized fowl that looks like O'Casey's Cock-aDoodle-Dandy with a monstrous kingfisher's bill but is as spiteful as Aristophanes' hoopoe...

...In one memorable scene an Argentinian general presents a cocotte with a large bouquet and her aging sister with a withered nosegay, remarking to the sister, "It's smaller than the other one, but more portable.' And the cocotte's butler coolly announces a male guest with not-quite-translatable formality: "Madame, c'est le p??re de l'enfant de Madame...

...The eponymous Fraulein has had a glittering European career intercepting fish thrown to a trained seal...

...Stop!'" The early scenes are juiced-up by some forceful acting from Mairin D. O'Sullivan as a maid who is Gar's substitute mother, and from Donai Donnelly as the wry Private Gar...

...here his assignment is to pronounce the downfall of a Nineveh that has affinities with New York...

...In the process he has flattened it...

...it also becomes a literal illustration, when the two Gars confer, of those pieces of fiction in which, "while he was saying, 'I will,' his mind cried out to him, 'No...

...The play would appear to be a scramble of non sequiturs, made only partially palatable by Alan Schneider's farcical direction, which the text cannot support...

...As Jonah, Sorrell Booke is a small, fierce man whose voice can hold an auditorium still with a whisper or out-thunder the metal sheet rattled by an odd-looking seraph...

...He is played by two actors who stand for the Public Gar and the Private Gar...

...Kornfeld has taken Goodman's mosaic of folksy jokes and untidy poetry and stretched it all across the stage of the American Place Theater...

...Drexler's speeches into non-rhyming songs and so turned her comedy into a musical...

...The action is also interrupted periodically by Indian Joe, a seven-eighths-naked warrior with golden hair and peach-colored makeup all over...

...At the end of each rush of memory he lowers his head into his hands and repeats names to himself brokenly: "Madge, Madge" or "Oh, Kathy, Kate...

...The play itself is uncraftsmanlike (a girl is laboriously introduced as a brilliant counsel, and never used), creamed off from junky latenight movies, and unraveled by stale Old Bailey trial procedure and dialogue that travels not even in circles but in ellipses...

...If Slapstick Tragedy arrives wondering if it has been brought into the right world, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which was bred in Ireland, enters the Helen Hayes Theater with a bundle of gold spoons protruding from its mouth: It is one of Broadway's own, authentic, boxoffice babies...

...In revenge the Cocaloony pecks out her eyes and assaults her in other, unspecified ways...

...Compounded of a realism in which almost every line rings untrue, it is, like some of Williams' work, a drama of memory, that is, yearning...

...Or the reviewers...

...The Fraulein hurries down to the dockside every day to earn her keep and kitchen privileges by catching the leftover fish in midair before the Cocaloony can swoop on them...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Tennessee Williams and Others The second part of Tennessee Williams' double bill, Slapstick Tragedy (which closed after a one-week run), is entitled The Gnadiges Fraulein, without umlauts, and seems to be a disguised confession...

...In the early 1940s, when Mrs...

...The Fraulein is Tennessee Williams...

...He came out of an Alex Kemeny play downtown and will certainly go a lot further...

...Between fish-snaring trips she sings pop love songs and ballads...

...Un fil ?  la patte-like Le dindon which the company gave here during its last visit-is too zany a flow of complications to permit a summary that would make sense or decent nonsense, but it lends itself to a treatment in which every performer, from the principals to the bit-players, becomes a premier farceur...

...At one point the Fraulein holds out a frypan to Indian Joe, who grunts, "No fish in skillet...

...Robert Frink, playing the King of Nineveh, is an original...

...he doesn't know when to leave a bad idea alone...

...The reason, I would guess, is that he does not trust his author or his actors...

...The latter is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the cast...

...Kornfeld, like so many directors who want to make the plays they direct into spectacles, must supplement the few songs in the original script with production numbers...

...A show that should have been over in 75 interesting minutes totters on for an additional hour and mislays its main charm: its casual contrasting of one line and mood on top of another...

...By Goodman, Jonah is bodied forth as a Jewish tailor who does a little doom-trumpeting on the side whenever a summons comes from the Angel of the Lord...

...A couple of years ago Rosalyn Drexler's play Home Movies was staged at the Judson Poet's Theater by Lawrence Kornfeld, who turned some of Mrs...

...The Fraulein introducing a song: "All Alone, by Irving Vienna-erBerlin...

...He looks endlessly tall and sways about with the consummate awkwardness of a born clown...

...He last appeared on Broadway in a chunk of cheap real estate called The White House and brought dignity even to that...

...I am no adept at these things but I guessed the culprit, and since that was the only reason for listening to the last quarter of the play I studied Melville Cooper as a judge who must have been a lot shrewder than his lines, and Geoffrey Lumsden, a faultless British actor who is worth watching when he merely shoots his cuffs or turns his head...

...Booke has been squandered time and again...

...The French, however, take their farce seriously...

...The very shape and matter of this play confirm him: In Absurd comedy he is out of his depth...

...The Fraulein says nothing about herself...

...Perhaps my own construction of the story is fanciful but hardly more so than a literal interpretation of the stage events, so here goes...

...Drexler was a little girl, Paul Goodman wrote a brief, amusing anachronization of the Book of Jonah, which Kornfeld has now converted into a sluggish pageant...

...This baffles me, because his casting is nearly exemplary...