Selling the Actors Short

...Much the same is true of the choreography Donald McKayle uses his dancers to illustrate dramatic points rather than to make dance statements (It should be said that very few choreographers seem able to move, into showbiz and avoid this danger ) The movements he has devised, in his second capacity as director, for the acting scenes and songs are sometimes impoverished One number has the mother (Virginia Capers) sitting in a chair and singing to a potted plant, during another, her son (Joe Morton) stands constrictedly with his hands in his pockets These two troupers in the central roles know how to hit a big note or a brash line with authority, so do Ernestine Jackson as the son's wite, Ralph Carter as the grandson, and Robert Jackson as an African visitor But Raisin seems least tawdry, exploitative and counterfeit when Deborah Allen is in evidence as the young sister She has effortless command over all the arts of the musical Wait and see what happens when she finds one...

...On Stage SELLING THE ACTORS SHORT BY ALBERT BERMEL As in his novel Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levin sets up an isolated woman as a target in Veronica's Room (Music Box), and then lets wicked people torment her A program note entreats us, "for the enjoyment of future audiences," not to give away the ending Nevertheless, in the interest of upper-level critical discourse and on the understanding that readers of The New Leader who get through the next few paragraphs will not immediately fly all over town buttonholing passersby with the big news ("Listen, you want to hear the plot thing at the end of Veronica's Room''"), I will talk about the concluding twists of Levin's play, its most notable feature There is this girl, Susan (Regina Baff), an innocent little sophomore from Bloomfield, New Jersey A dingy, elderly couple with on-again, off-again Irish brogues (Eileen Heckart and Arthur Kennedy) induce her, for humanitarian reasons that are not worth investigating, to impersonate a dead girl called Veronica by dressing up in 1935 clothes, hairstyle, and manners The old couple then reappear, transformed into Veronica's upper-crust Bostoman parents and rejuvenated by a quarter of a century or so When Susan gets bewildered, indignant and finally frightened, they treat her as a mad Veronica who is pretending to take refuge in the future from some ugly activities in her past Veronica, it seems, has been confined to her room for seducing her 12-year-old brother and doing horrible things to her sister with a heavy shovel To make this segment of the play work, the actors and director (Ellis Rabb) must create a convincing 1935, persuading us, first, that Veronica is a fiction dreamed up by the older pair, and then, that Susan is a fiction, an uncanny prognosis of a 1973 character invented by an insane Veronica in 1935 The ambiguity would deepen if we had a dictionary of names and a flashlight in our theater seat, and could discover that Veronica means "true image " As it turns out, neither Susan nor Veronica is a fiction Much as the supernatural in Rosemary's Baby boiled down to witchcraft, so the wrenching of time in Veronica s Room is a matter of psychopathology The Eileen Heckart character is--hold your breath, please, for the revelation--not an old Irish maid and not Veronica's mother but Veronica herself She has picked a victim to play her young self of 38 years before in order that she may, in the guise of her mother, sit in judgment on her own criminal behavior The play does not say this in so many words But the Heckart character is going through her elaborately prepared act with her partner (the once-seduced brother) in a vain attempt to confess and be punished at one remove And as the curtain--the good old-fashioned curtain--comes down, Ms Heckart is alone, beating at the locked double door of Veronica's room and crying out to her mother and father to forgive her, promising them that she will be a good girl from now on All of this is dramatic material of great potential, and Levin's conclusion represents the point at which Pirandello, say, would have begun a play The preliminary business is so much hokum, the author's contrivances to prop up his play's suspense My response to the drama was More, more' I wanted to see Eileen Heckart bringing her formidable resources to bear on the part of the aged Veronica reliving her youth The production had already teased us with one of her transformations In the early scenes as the elderly woman, she appears in a frumpish dress of nondescript color with thick wrinkled stockings, her face sagging, body an overloaded cylinder, and her hair in gray, lifeless coils When she reenters as Veronica's mother, she is a violently attractive blonde, wearing a sleek royal-blue dressing gown of velvet, her features, now cunningly treated with cosmetics, have a haughty cast Part of the change is undoubtedly clue to Nancy Potts" witty costumes, yet it is the actress who works the inner, truly necessary miracle She and Kennedy have wrought two of the most subtle fiends seen on Broadway in many seasons, and in a much less rewarding part, Ms Baff keeps pace with them pretty well Ellis Rabb has not directed better since his early years with the APA He governs the action with a rhythmic but unobtrusive alternation of outbursts, silences and reflective, disquieting speeches The designer, Douglas W Schmidt, although not offered the challenge he found and met in this summer's Macbeth at Stratford (NL, September 3, 1973), makes a solid contribution with a threatening room which stands oblique to the spectator's line of vision--putting the setting on a skew--and which has oppressively high walls, doors, windows, and bookcases to belittle the characters Still, if anything, it is the staging and acting, not the plot, that get this show on legs and keep it running Once again we bump into the same baffling question Why don't Broadway producers give our best actors drama they can do something with...

...Here is Eileen Heckart, with a credits column in Playbill a mile long She has collected just about every award going --regrettably for serving the pedestrian likes of Paul Zindel, Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Robert Anderson, John Patrick, and Tad Mosel She has played in The Little Foxes, but at Ohio State University, and in Mother Courage, but at UCLA And in the confines of Veronica's Room, when she and Kennedy start to whip up a nice frenzy, the play cuts them dead The performers in Raisin (46th Street Theater) are not star names yet they, equally, are squandering talent, plus that mystery ingredient, presence, on formula writing Raisin emerges, rebaked, from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) The original was no dramatic landmark It lifted many stock observations about the "little people" in ethnic-cum-regional America (I Remember Mama, The Rainmaker, Picnic, you name it) out of the mid-Manhattan grab bag, and featured the standard characters the mother who has no book learning but is a fount of common-sense and uncommon strength, the ambitious, frustrated son who wants to open his own business and clean up because "money is power", the sassy, teenaged sister, and the lovable grandchild, promise of a new future Nonetheless, A Raisin in the Sun had little of the glossy finish that comes from 12 rewrites by assorted hands, six changes of director and sundry other buffings administered during a 10,000-mile preopening circuit or three months of surgical previews Its rhetoric sounded harsh and therefore sincere It was a black play on Broadway and blacks were never--especially not in the late '50s --just another minority In addition, the playwright had tackled a timely social issue The Younger family wants to move into a white Chicago suburb and the residents want to pay them off to go elsewhere The late Ms Hansberry's onetime husband and present "literary executor," Robert Nemiroff, has been assiduous on somebody's behalf He shuffled together from her life and posthumous writings a show called To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, adapted her play Les Blancs, produced and recently revived The Sign in Sidney Brustem's Window Now he has recruited several collaborators to help him plane off the irregularities and rough edges of A Raisin in the Sun--in other words, its integrity--and pump it up with song, dance, a revival meeting, street scenes, a dream sequence, ladies in flowered hats, slaps or hugs to end each confrontation, and several specific gravities of schmaltz, Raisin expands as the evening goes on into a full-blown grape One critic (it must have been Walter Kerr) admired the fluidity of the staging Instead of separating scenes, Robert U Taylor has provided a grid of catwalks and cages against the back and side walls, not unlike the look of Ain't S'posed to Die a Natural Death, and left an open space in the middle The Youngers five in a portion of that space, which they define for themselves by turning an imaginary door handle (dozens of times), cooking invisible foods in nonexistent utensils, and sweeping unbuilt corners with an absent broom Mime pays off if it makes a comment on everyday gestures, if it merely reproduces them, it amounts to busy work for the actors (what the hell--give them a lousy door) and eye-distractions for the rest of us...