Broadway Bottoms Out

...a character announces, "This is a sim-pleminded play about men who enjoy killing and those who don't...

...The telephone company calls to say it is about to suspend service because of nonpayment of bills...

...For what it's worth, I toss out some lines addressed to Alice at the end of the play: "I should not know you if we met again because you are so exactly like so many of the others...

...There is a shot...

...In The Gingerbread Lady he is having a major affair...

...Gregory's Alice is like little else that has been done in the American theater and is an imaginatively conceived and brilliantly executed theatrical adventure in a disconcertingly recognizable wonderland...

...Like the clown who wants to play Hamlet, Simon, unquestionably the most successful comedy writer of tfye decade, wants to write drama -—to be serious and to be taken seriously...

...And it is there, until the negative response to the play's Boston tryout, that Simon left her: drunk, deserted in a darkened room, about to invite the delivery boy into bed...

...But in the doctor he finds a new and different adversary, one of the "new heroes who refuse to fight and try to save the planet...

...This is a Mad Hatter who is very mad indeed, a comic-horror figure in an adult fairy tale, whose topsy-turvy anarchism has its carefully understated parallels to today...

...Well, no...

...I doubt that Story Theatre is quite the theatrical breakthrough some have termed it...

...He had a minor flirtation with it in last season's Last of the Red Hot Lovers...

...The stage is bare except for a four-man folk-rock group at one side and slide and light projections on the back wall...

...And that is part of the problem...

...A middle-aged homosexual actor friend of hers darts about, making preparations for her return...

...Harold Ryan, Hemingwayesque he-man, big-game hunter, and the youngest soldier in the Abraham Lincoln brigade, has been missing for eight years...

...Evy's seventeen-year-old daughter, the product of a marriage that ended in divorce, arrives to stay with her...

...But Evy (Maureen Stapleton) is nowhere to be seen when the curtain rises...

...I missed...

...A Puerto Rican delivery boy arrives with some groceries and declines when he is told to charge them...

...Actually, not much, including that, is beyond this particular flounder, as we realize a few moments later when the wife, in immaculate white papal robes, reacts to her husband's desire for a bit of sex: "Now, we're the Pope...

...Simon mechanically goes about setting up that fall...

...He is even more a delight when it comes to the wife's final demand, that she become Pope: "Pope...

...the resonances are most contemporary, highly physical, and imaginative improvisations in the manner of Grotowski and the Open Theater...

...His wife, who once delighted in his virility and bedmanship, has refined her tastes...

...She has shed forty-two pounds and is determined that this time it will be different...

...Their young son is of an age where his hero worship occasionally shows signs of wear around the edges...

...Various people have found various contemporary motifs in it, from a drug trip to a parable on Jerry Rubin's trial experience...

...There are the heads of a rhinoceros and an elephant, of deer, leopards, zebra, and a water buffalo, all killed on Harold's periodic hunting trips...

...So the New York opening was postponed and the play extensively rewritten...

...He does it all so easily—or seems to—and it is so easy not to take the final step, the one that would take him and the audience inside Evy, that would reveal what she is and why she is...

...But eight years have passed, and some things are different...

...It is quite sufficient to turn something with all the potential for excessive cuteness and whimsy into two thoroughly refreshing hours...

...The wisecracks that cloak the anguish, the automatic ripostes that seek to hide the fear, in this case not only preclude dimension, they permit Simon the easy out...

...It probably has more appeal to the theater party ladies...

...The actors are not, however, merely "illustrating" the stories, but infusing them with their own personalities and imagination...

...About a minute into Kurt Von-negut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June, CATHARINE HUGHES is a free lance writer and critic based in New York...

...Now, the daughter returns, and Evy will give it another try...

...The initial New York exposure has been a complete triumph and there is talk of a permanent New York workshop to train actors in Story Theatre techniques...

...There is a poster on the wall announcing a long ago concert she gave in Carnegie Hall...

...It is no longer enough to rely on fists or rifle—"an iron penis three-feet ;long...

...There is another one-liner, self-protection for the character, of course, but self-protection in another way for Neil Simon...

...The plot and the lines, with rare exceptions, are Carroll's...

...Vonnegut's one-liners have valid roots in the characters and culture they reflect, and his individualistic, sometimes anarchic perspective on the world is entertainingly unstereotyped...

...Gregory and his actors are faithful both to Lewis Carroll and to the moment...

...As her daughter tries desperately to help her mother reclaim her life—to succeed in that "one more chance at this human being business" —the other three ensure that she will not...

...An actor's back becomes the table from which she takes the golden key...

...They rely upon each other for completion, for comfort, for the lie that wards off the truth...

...The homosexual actor goes off to yet another desperate audition, still attempting—but less and less successfully—to convince himself he will become a star...

...Whenever he seems on the brink of telling more, admitting more, Simon pulls back...

...Otherwise, Sills' eight actors are on their own with only their—and his—imagination to rely on...

...For all its portentousness and occasional lack of focus, Wanda June (first produced Off Broadway, then transferred to Broadway) is often a funny play...

...It is not that they will her downfall, rather that in their mutual weakness and dependence, they lay out their own travails—a lost role, an impending divorce—and those travails lead Evy, who has already been sneaking a sherry or a beer on the side, into a complete fall off the wagon...

...You can't believe in impossible things," says Alice, but Gregory's seven actors do some almost impossible things in physically realizing the fears and fantasies of Carroll's Alice...

...The walls of his apartment resemble a natural history museum, a taxidermist's paradise...

...The major musicals— Two by Two, The Rothschilds, and Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen—have been derivative and without distinction...

...Wounded in his pride and with his manhood under challenge, he goes off to his son's bedroom with the .22-rifle he had given the boy...

...The Brothers Grimm provide most of the material for the ten stories that make up this edition...

...But audiences, critics, and presumably Simon, were unhappy...

...This is something that's beyond the flounder...

...and Evy drinks...

...the liner of her lone album is conspicuously present in the record rack...

...A forty-year-old friend, her face in her cosmetics case, comes on the scene, stridently trying to convince everyone that beauty and "femininity" are all, cataloguing her conquests and almost frighteningly insecure...

...Sills has been experimenting with the "story theatre" idea for several years and in various parts of the country...

...His wife is entertaining the pleas of two suitors, one a $43,000-a-year vacuum cleaner salesman, the other a doctor whose hallmark is the peace symbol...

...about against the rear-projected sea, acquiescing in the ever greater demands of the fisherman's wife—for a larger house, a castle, a kingdom—he is a delight...

...That is about the last thing one could say for Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady...

...Whatever else, Harold Ryan is out of style...

...There is also Alice in Wonderland, in an extraordinary new experimental production that has recently emerged from months of underground celebrity...

...One night, when she is about to marry the doctor^ Harold returns, accompanied by Colonel Loose-leaf Harper, who supposedly dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki...

...The tiny Extension Theater, usually the home of an Off-Off Broadway company, has been turned into a rabbit hole, with a tentlike canopy at its center, a table that substitutes for a house, an inverted lampshade to replace the Queen of Hearts' crown...

...Evy is lonely...

...Evy, without more personally revealing features, is a cliche, a woman with a past that made her what she is, but a past seldom more than hinted at...

...Evolution," the doctor tells him, "has made you a clown...

...Harold is the self-defined "antique hero...

...Evy has spent ten weeks in a hospital trying to shake her long-time alcoholism...

...Sills' approach employs some dialogue from the stories themselves— such as "The Bremen Town Musicians" or "The Golden Goose"—and some third-person narrative, some improvisation, and a great deal of mime...

...The end...

...Paul Sills' Story Theatre has been the sole exception, and it is something quite special...

...With his return to America he reverts to type, proclaiming his credo: "Never mind your bodies and your spirits, take care of your things...

...When, in "The Fisherman and His Wife," a flounder named Peter Bonerz announces he's no common flounder, there is no reason not to believe him, and as he dashes (or is it swims...

...Unfortunately, the very ambivalence toward his material that permits Simon to alter his original intention infects the whole play...

...But before she can get there, the audience—which has entered Gregory's version of the rabbit hole through an undersize door—watches the other actors swing and fling her about in simulation of Alice's fantasy journey down the well to Wonderland...

...Harold Ryan is "one of the great heroes of all time," boastful of his courage, his adventures, his sexual prowess...

...A guitar-playing former lover, who deserted Evy in favor of an eighteen-year-old girl, reappears, pleads to be taken back, and is sent away...

...Evy Meara is forty-three, a former cabaret singer and a nymphomaniac, with a fading apartment on Manhattan's West Side...

...Evy and her three companions are among the walking wounded...

...The dramas have been zero, apart from a welcome influx from London which has brought Broadway virtually its only moments of meaning or luster...

...But taken at face value, working with material of its own choosing, it provides a thoroughly delightful and engaging evening, one possessing just the touch of wonder the modern theater so frequently lacks...

...The Mad Tea Party scene is sinister, macabre, with an element of menace and mystery that goes beyond Carroll...

...Grimm's fairy tales aren't the only surprising thing to turn up in the theater this season...

...Dealing with more complex plots and psychological implications probably would raise difficulties...

...Perhaps clowns should not play Hamlet after all...

...four actors bend to form the mushroom on which the great caterpillar sits smoking —his arm a substitute for Lewis Carroll's hookah—and dispensing his orders and his advice...

...The author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle isn't about to do anything "simpleminded...

...He talks of "a strange blue soup" that he and Looseleaf ate in Africa, and how it rendered them peaceful and euphoric, the antithesis of their former temperaments...

...Clearly, Evy has seen better days...

...Andre Gregory's Alice visits a world that is a blend of humor and terror...

...Evy is frustrated...

...That it won't be is fore-dained: a three-act play requires her decline and fall...