On Stage

...Its abstract plastic frame, crowded with a lot of very full-size furniture, swallows exactly what it should emphasize-laura's tiny glass menagerie...

...On Stage DRAMAS IN TWO WORLDS BY LEO SAUVAGE Three one-acters written between 1975-78 by the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel have had their initial New York production at Joseph Papp's Public Theater under the title of A Private View...

...When Vanekis told that breaking with fellow dissident playwright Pavel Kohout (throughout, Havel refers to the various offstage characters by their real names) would make life easier for him, he takes his coat and prepares to leave...

...Although Michael would have access to luxuries unknown to his ordinary comrades, it is difficult to believe a high-ranking Communist would openly lead such an "Americanized" life...

...Admirably acted by Stephen Keep, Vanek is a quiet, steady, sturdy symbol of human resistance...

...The actress, who 36 years ago created the part of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, is perfect...

...But it is not devoid of meaning...

...There is an incredibly ludicrous scene where Concetta Tomei, as Vera, exhibits her breasts to Vanek while Michael, portrayed by Nicholas Hormann, vaunts their beauty...

...Amanda Plummer and John Heard's beautiful enactment render it unforgettable both to the Wingfields and to admirers of Tennessee Williams...

...Since she is deprived of the spouse she could tyrannize while considering herself his helpless victim, all her energy is directed toward the children, and she cannot imagine that they might feel suffocated...

...More important, because it lacks the leitmotif of guilt and embarrassment that carries the other plays, Private View introduces an element of incoherence into what is supposed to be an interrelated trilogy...

...Having suffered from making life impossible for her husband because she loved him, she will make it still more difficult for the son and daughter she loves...

...Placed between the two small masterpieces, Private View comes close to spoiling the whole evening...

...The current production at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, directed by John Dexter, is far from the best I have seen, but it is rescued by uniformly first-rate acting...

...Interview is a farce--thick, coarse, uninhibited, enthusiastically staged by Lee Grant in her directorial debut, and pushed to the limit by Barton Heyman's lavishly unrefined head maltster...

...Tom dreams of being what he later becomes, a seaman in the Merchant Marine...

...The plays, which seem to be excellently translated by Vera Blackwell, premiered separately in London...

...Though vulgar and well aware that he has to be very careful to retain his cushy spot, he is neither brainwashed nor mean...

...Thus the play's emotional content is belittled by the projection of fake "matter of fact" scene titles, and the sense of magic is stifled by having Tom, as narrator, cue the changes with a snap of his fingers like a second-class carnival artist...

...Ming Cho Lee's exceptionally ill-conceived setting doesn't help matters either...

...Deep, or not so deep, inside, some of the submissive majority cannot help admiring, indeed envying, the dissident, however they try to wriggle out of the discomposure this causes them...

...These pseudo-Brechtian devices are misplaced and it is within the director's province to cut them...

...Interview begins when the "head maltster"--as the program identifies him--summons Vanek to his office...

...Michael and Vera conspire to seduce Vanek into relinquishing his principles out of friendship--or, as becomes increasingly evident, out of desires that reach beyond the bounds of normal friendship...

...weare told at the beginning by Amanda's son Tom, the autobiographically-based hero...

...Certainly, it upsets Havel's demonstration...

...An easy desk job, it seems, could be arranged in exchange for these innocent flights of imagination...

...Looking like a George Grosz drawing of a fat bureaucrat, the chief is a former blue-collar worker who has managed to climb to a position that allows him to drink beer, fall asleep at his desk, snore, and dream of spending a night in the arms of a beautiful actress whom, he learns with rapture, Vanek knows...

...So besides harassing Tom, played by Bruce Davison, because he wants a life of his own, Amanda constantly upbraids him for his failure to find Laura a "gentleman caller...

...His father has left home after 15 years of marriage for reasons we soon understand...

...He has suddenly called Vanek, whom official intellectuals of course prefer to avoid, because a young songwriter lately placed under arrest happens to be the boyfriend of Stanek's daughter...

...From time to time he also steps out from the unfolding drama to make clear that what we are seeing is the past as he remembers it, and as he has always unsuccessfully tried to escape it...

...Unfortunately, there is also the second play, the title piece...

...Vanek, although previously ignorant of his ex-friend's personal connection to the case, has come to Stanek's comfortable villa with a briefcase containing precisely such a petition...

...Amanda's relationship with Tom will unavoidably go the way of her marriage...

...Wingfield-a narrow-minded and mundane woman who exuberantly acts the Grande Dame, a devoted yet unwittingly selfish mother--without getting on the nerves of today's more emancipated public is not easy...

...With Vera crying hysterically on the sofa, however, and Michael swearing at his guest for turning his back on their longstanding bond of affection, Vanek comes back, not to drink beer with a head maltster this time, but to join in what is obviously going to be a triangular sex party...

...After all, he is a writer by profession...

...It's a great scene, superbly played by Richard Jordan as Stanek and flawlessly directed by Grant...

...Vanek's political status doesn't seem to disturb him, except for one problem: They want him to write a weekly report on his worker, and he doesn't know what to say...

...And Vanek, who has until now carefully kept his distance, is ready to join the man in his revels...

...Rather unexpectedly, Have concentrates--with bitter, yet only slightly sarcastic understanding--not on people like himself but on those who have more or less reluctantly adapted to the totalitarian system...

...her Amanda ranks as a major event in the history of Broadway...

...While most of Tennessee Williams' plays will probably be remembered only as symptoms of the problems and obsessions that pursued the author until his death earlier this year, The Glass Menagerie, his first work to attract wide attention, is deservedly staged again and again all over the world...

...Not unnaturally, her mother would like to see her snap out of it, and rightly believes a husband could do the job...

...her caller, it turns out, has someone else to return to...

...I recommend, therefore, walking out after Interview, without going too far away to be back in time for Protest...

...Thanks to Michael's position in the upper-class bureaucracy, they have recently traveled to the U.S., bringing back every American gadget, record and piece of furniture they could lay their hands on...

...Finally, Tom brings home a friend, who briefly draws Laura away from the collection of little glass animals she spends her days playing with...

...In the eyes of Vanek/ Havel, then, the dull-witted bureaucrat is not an enemy, only a sad example of Czechoslovakia's "new society...

...Stanek, a novelist and television scenarist, and a former good friend of Vanek, has given up all independent writing in favor of his well-rer warded hack work...

...Still, Tandy goes her colleagues one better...

...The play is bad, and made worse by Grant's misdirection and Tomei's physical miscasting...

...Have l, a permanent victim of the Prague regime even if he is out of jail for the moment, intends to demonstrate that the authorities have not entirely succeeded in extinguishing the emotional and moral life of their servants...

...By asking Stanek whether he wants to sign it himself, he launches an exquisitely peculiar dialogue wherein the accommodationist, pen in hand, details all his good reasons for refusing...

...In Private View, by contrast, Michael and Vera, the husband and wife whose apartment Vanek is visiting for the evening, have no conscience...

...The weakness of Dexter's direction may result essentially from his rigid obedience to the writer's rather self-deprecating instructions...

...Portraying the abandoned Mrs...

...The play is memory...

...Maybe, Stanek tells Vanek, a protest signed by well-known dissidents would help the young man...

...Surely Michael would understand that he was putting an end to his career...

...When Vanek tries to slip out of the office without having relieved his superior's headache, the "interviewer" arouses himself from a moment of drunken stupor and, forgetting the previous conversation entirely, invites the disgraced intellectual in to start all over again...

...After long, embarrassed, circuitous small talk punctuated by the opening of beer bottles and interrupted by frequent trips to the toilet, he suggests that perhaps Vanek would be willing to concoct the entries to his own dossier...

...Indeed, Jessica Tandy's performance as Amanda Wingfield, "The Mother," should simply not be missed...

...Eventually, he thinks of a solution...

...The first and last of the trio, Interview and Protest, are short tales of extraordinary dramatic power, exemplary in the sense Cervantes gave to the word...

...They are soulless, perhaps brainless, certainly tasteless profiteers...

...What the conformists are still able to feel, and how they cope with it, is revealed when they are faced with a dissident playwright named Ferdinand Vanek, who is obviously Vaclav Have himself...

...Naturally, they cannot be seen in the author's own "socialist" country...

...The scene between the girl and the dinner guest is written in a tender, delicate, poetic vein seldom found in the author's later work...

...Laura, lame in one leg, is pathologically shy, becoming ill when a stranger so much as looks at her...

...Like the head maltster who represents the industrial bureaucracy, the opportunist from the intellectual bureaucracy is not hopelessly corrupt--for he is as little at ease with himself as with Vanek...

...Amanda is a former Southern belle (even if looking at Tandy, who says she is 74, we may be inclined to forget about the "former") with all the unconscious and contrived mannerisms proper to that particular American version of 19th-century European manners...

...One of the jobs Vanek/Havel had to take in order to survive through the 1970s was that of a laborer handling barrels in a brewery...

...and her daughter Laura, whom she does not want to keep, will stay with her...

...No less grotesque is the concluding sequence...

...In Protest, Vanek's presence unravels a quite different member of the unhappy group who once thought they could reap the benefits of satisfying the regime without becoming dissatisfied with themselves...

...In the end, though, she is left with the menagerie again...