Broadway: A Consumer's Guide

...For while the text is witty and zestful, I fancy I might have enjoyed the occasion even if I had not understood a single word...

...The play I voted for as a member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, in which I was joined by several other members, was Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class...

...In the 1950s he directed, among other plays, Bus Stop and A Touch of the Poet...

...Catsplay is acted with captivating zest by an English actress, Helen Bond, and its originality lies in its infusion of social nuance into the "goulash" of character comedy...

...But that is not convincing...

...The acting by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy is thoroughly engaging and Mike Nichols' direction skillful...

...Carter will find that the average man is more concerned by what he pays in taxes than by what his neighbor pays...

...In the 16 years since I came to America, I can confidently assert that no chief executive has filled me with as many misgivings as Jimmy Carter: not merely misgivings about himself, but about the country that elected him...

...Still, the Broadway scene does not tell the whole of our theatre's story...

...These two lonely people, whose children evince only a perfunctory devotion to their parents, share a common fate and thus have every reason to develop a close relation to one another...

...Deathtrap is a thriller which kids itself...

...Just as The Water Engine is clever without being genuinely efficacious in its attack on the media, so A Life in the Theatre is almost a collegiate and trifling picture of its subject...

...There are other progenitors...

...That has happened in this country in a way, and it has made for great internal change...

...The President most probably would have thought it had something to do with the Allman Brothers and Hunter S. Thompson, and so deserving of immediate action...

...Its shivers are immediately relieved by the author's assurance that there's nothing to frighten us: It's all a spoof: The streets of New York are nowadays sufficiently menacing to make fright-inducing shows not merely tame but farcical...

...President Wimp presides, and "presides" is the right word, for by no stretch of the imagination can Carter be said to govern...

...But this takes little account of the inflationary rise in the cost of tickets and the operation of productions...

...Much laughter...

...An exultant celebration of existence emerges from the interplay among the actors...

...The New York Drama Critics Circle this year was unable to agree on a "best" American play...

...This is done in the name of "free speech...

...Most of its first act is devoted to the humors of a gin game in which two elderly people in a welfare nursing home engage to fill the emptiness of their existence...

...There were also revivals of plays by O'Neill, Shaw, rock the boat...

...But the play as a whole transcends its socio-political allusion...

...The League of New York Theatres and Producers recently boasted that, while in 1975 fifty-seven million dollars were spent in theatre admissions, in the 1977-1978 season ticket sales were twelve percent ahead of 1976-1977...

...Unfortunately, the demoralized white male is not merely the child of Vietnam...

...Thus we arrive at the root meaning of the word demoralized...

...It is in this regard that I feel justified in speaking of the past season as generally mediocre...

...Jail the feds...

...Notice the suggestion that the only way we can deal with totalitarian advances in Africa is to make friends with our enemies...

...The American Spectator August/ September 1978 21 The season offered a few "fringe benefits" such as several and Moliere, but I found none of them especially distinguished...

...At the trendy Washington gatherings, pot is circulated, cocaine sniffed...

...The season's most stirring phenomenon is Ain't Misbehavin', based on thirty songs composed or recorded between 1929 and 1943 by Fats Waller...

...Fortunately, , the present occupant of the White House, in retreat at Camp David, was not in a position to gaze out over the assembled throng...

...It celebrates a disheveled romanticism in contrast to an inert conformism...

...Da", The Gin Game, Ira Levin's Deathtrap, and Neil Simon's Chapter Two were all nominated for the Tony award...

...Most elites that lose wars lose their heads in the process...

...In The 5th of July, at the reputable off-Broadway Circle Repertory Theatre, Lanford Wilson displays his talent for registering the addlepated but nonetheless significant temper of a whacky generation...

...But the play folded after a short time, unable, no doubt, to muster a wide appeal at Broadway prices...

...Our sense In brief, it was the kind of season to be expected at a moment of of indignation these days is chiefly aroused by evils in far-away jittery affluence when it would be inopportune or ill-natured to localities...

...Curse of the Starving Class is typical of Shepard's almost too prolific output...

...plays about the horrors of South African apartheid...

...who cannot afford the regular box-office tariff...

...And, as Malcolm Muggeridge does not tire of pointing out, thanks to the pill and abortion, sex has been separated from responsibility...

...We must look to the quality of productions of all types...

...The Wasp-turned-Wimp has been de-moralized...

...Would we be asked next to forego porn, pot, and the pill...

...A great whimpering was heard across the land...

...Runaways, written, composed, and directed by the season's "genius," Elizabeth Swados, displays considerable zest in its cast of young players and a few bright lyrics (one of them named "Enterprise") but its theme—the runaways from sordid homes—is not truly dramatized...

...Hostility in varying degrees was heard from the New York Times, the Washington Post, James Reston, Arthur Schlesinger, and, most strikingly, Rosalynn Carter...

...The woman, who is a beginner at the game, keeps beating the practiced and expert man...

...Mamet's play is an extended radio sketch satirizing the commercial exploitation of human and social tragedy by our media...

...It begins "seriously": A man whose beloved wife has died finds it painfully difficult to readjust to his life as a widower...

...Considered abstractly the show is pure theatre...

...As it is, there's always the chance he will appoint Bella Abzug to look into the matter...

...Flashy settings and some good comic performances provide a modicum of attractiveness to On the Twentieth Century, an adaptation of the Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur play and film of yesteryear...

...It has since been moved to a larger theatre for commercial production...

...Or rather its story is in the unified exuberance of the five black performers who, though distinct as individuals, share in it as though they were limbs of a single organism...

...The writing is agreeably deft...

...Orkenny nevertheless suggests that Hungary still remains sentimentally regretful of the past...

...A charming Hungarian comedy named Catsplay by Istvan Orkenny was presented at the off-off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club, one of the better outlets for adventurous writing...

...These impressions were not inferred from plays of a political character but from an undertone in the stage fare and in audience reactions...

...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell HEW's Silver Anniversary In front of the White House, on July 4, 1978, a dirt-encrusted, insensate mob of about 3,000 "yippies" filled Lafayette Square...

...It is the consolation of the poor that they are freer in inner disposition than the hidebound wealthy in the West...

...They smoked marijuana openly, taunted police, trampled geraniums, or lolled inertly on the grass in a state of stuporous indifference while a scrofulous, hirsute, semi-naked, fully-crazed speaker harangued them with paranoid invective, assassination gibberish, and slogans: "Free the heads...

...His most recent book is Ibsen...

...In 1974, Variety carried the headline, "Theatre Is Now A National Invalid...

...This is not previously unheard of—England in its prewar appeasement phase had many of the same characteristics—but it is surely unusual in the life of nations...

...The artistic stamp in such a condition is mediocrity...

...It is in essence a conversation about death between two patients presumably suffering from a fatal disease...

...With every passing day, he presents us with an ever more unattractive picture...

...It is all too "showy": Everybody in it seems well-fed and self-satisfied, and only for the excessively sentimental does it convey pathos...

...We are at the same time made aware of a permanent aspiration among those who dwell in outlying districts of our westerly states to soul-satisfying resolution of these dilemmas...

...While our audiences enjoy the play on its own happy terms without recognizing its quasi-"subversive" dimension, an East European audience is relieved to see a truthful presentation of the discomfort and hardship of its everyday life, and is assuaged by its overt plot (which tells how a rich and crippled lady from Munich decides to join her sister in the jolly disorder of her Budapest quarters...

...The Pulitzer Prize this year was given to The Gin Game, the work of a new playwright, D.L...

...It reflects the restlessness, the uprootedness, and the lack of a steady direction among our people...

...For that, at least, we may Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...

...Let us no longer be taken in by the euphemisms of "majority rule...

...It is another example of amiable Irish self-criticism within which we may discern an element of self-compliment...

...It is not only from personal inclination that I tend to regard these off- and off-off-Broadway theatres with special favor...

...The play suffers from being too oblique in plot and somewhat nebulous in its implications, but it still speaks to those attuned to the discombobulations of our youth...

...But, alas, their trivial competitiveness—particularly acute on the man's part—divides them and may deprive them forever of the consolation of enduring friendship...

...A year later Variety blazoned its front page with "Legit Season Hits Historic High...

...Their joyousness is a signal to all of us that even in these days of spiritual torpor we may all be glad to be in the world, glad of our day-to-day experience...

...Shepard is an uneven writer, his dramatic structure is often improvisationally erratic, but his vision is that of a poet...

...The peculiar consequence is that the nation-at-large is possessed of a collective good sense greater than that of its nominal leaders...

...I must not fail to mention the musicals for it is in this sphere thatAmerica generically excels...

...The first of these was very well acted but is not a sufficiently integrated mixture of brutal police-station realism and quasi-lyric statements (inappropriate to the circumstances) about the sorry state of our citizenry...

...Harold Clurman Broadway: A Consumer's Guide New York theatre's prosperous mediocrity...

...Unfortunately, there is not much music in the air these days—without Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter—and in this respect all the season's exhibits have failed...

...But the health of the theatre should not be measured solely by economic factors...

...The trouble with this piece is that it willy-nilly succeeds in producing pretty much the same effect as the objects of its satire: that of superficiality...

...A former jazz musician who lives in California, Shepard infuses his dialogue with the open air, loping tone, and beat of our land in all its length and breadth rather than that of the exclusively cosmopolitan centers usual in most stage spectacles...

...The result is no leadership at all...

...Thus Dracula is one of the season's biggest hits because it cannot scare a cat—or any adult...

...A Life in the Theatre, another Mamet play successfully produced off-Broadway, has, in my estimation, been grossly overpraised by the press...

...Not to join.in is to be suspected of being "unliberated," possibly a Republican...

...Had Solzhenitsyn only condemned America for its 22 The American Spectator August/September 1978...

...The feeling is not talked about, explained, or preached: It is embodied...

...Chapter Two is not the best of Neil Simon's comedy confections...

...The assembled rabble constituted the worst possible advertisement for their cause—the legalization of marijuana...

...Working was a brave try by Stephen Schwartz and others to set Studs Terkel's interviews with humble wage-earners within a framework of song, dance, colorful costume, and a gaily stylized setting...

...Why then be so terrorized by the prospect of death...

...The second act gets to the core of the From 1931 to 1941 Harold Clurman was director of the Group Theatre...

...Da" is an endearing play—most beguilingly acted by Bernard Hughes—about a son's memory of his dunderhead of a father...

...Many of the plays similarly honored in previous seasons were English...

...John Guare's Landscape of the Body (also at the Public Theatre) has its sharp moments but wobbles in its style and in its effort to offer consolation for the wounds of our erring humanity...

...The play awarded an almost unanimous accolade was Hugh Leonard's "Da", a sprig of Irish growth...

...Having thought about this for a while, I have concluded that America is now fittingly presided over by that characteristic specimen of the 1970s, the demoralized white male protestant—"Wimp," for short...

...Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as is by now well known, preached a sermon at Harvard roughly on the foregoing text...

...His meaning is socially penetrating without propagandistic alloy...

...Abroad, Carter's most noteworthy act to date has been to take the side of the Rhodesian terrorists...

...On a later visit to that city I perceived the imminence of a reaction leading to its present, much harsher government...

...Interesting, then, to observe the reaction to it...

...There is no cause for complaint in regard to the play's eminence on the Broadway roster, but compare it to such former Pulitzer and Drama Critics' award-winners as A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Long Day's Journey Into Night...

...His humor—most of his plays are comedies—possesses a quizzical hobo resonance and a sometimes savage irony...

...Orkenny has succeeded in making a "fun show" into both an honest picture and a "defense" of Hungary's present condition...

...There is the off-Broadway theatre...

...Regardless of my indifference—not to use a stronger word—to the play's proposition, I need only add that talk alone, even humorous talk, is not drama...

...This today chiefly refers to Joseph Papp's so-called New York Shakespeare 20 The American Spectator August/September 1978 Festival which is housed in the various playing areas within the Public Theatre on Lafayette Street...

...Our newsstands are awash in prominently displayed pornography...

...At one time, for instance, I gathered from what I saw on the stage in Prague just before the Dubcek regime was installed that Czechoslovakia was due to undergo a liberalizing change to "the socialism with a human face...

...They are generally superior in artistic intent and in their ambition to exceed the limitations of the TV texture so often characteristic of Broadway entertainment...

...The affectionate sentiment of the play, and a good many funny lines with gentle pricks of intelligent asperity, sum up to humane entertainment...

...So, except for this, no great surprises in script, acting, direction, or mode of production were registered in the 1977-1978 New York theatre...

...At home, he practices the bitter politics of class resentment...

...Predictably, however, this latest assault will backfire...

...though now outwardly bedraggled, it is still romantic at heart, playful in spirit in such a way that none of the official strictures is capable of quelling the land's essential vigor, the soulful integrity of its citizenry...

...The Gin Game,a box-office success, is a pleasant two-character piece of slight weight...

...This does not mean that these aims are frequently achieved—excellence on any high level is perennially rare...

...Perhaps even more significantly, there are sixty-nine shows in the off-off-Broadway category...

...I have reserved comment on this show because it is not what we commonly expect of a musical: It has no "book" or story...

...The theatre in every epoch is a social barometer...

...The constant oscillation of impulses between anarchy and stability gives his Curse a grotesque hilariousness which without malice tells us more than many a more considered "message" about our country today...

...Coburn...

...On the old man's death, his son, a resident of London, returns to the native (Irish) sod, thinks back to his boyhood and to the genial stupidity and backwardness of the environment—especially in respect to his Da whom he once believed he hated and whom despite all he could not help loving...

...The upshot of their palaver is that while we are alive we may still enjoy life's various pleasures, including the most minute, and when we are dead there is no longer any agony...

...But his "problem" is quickly resolved with barely a tremor of inner conflict...

...In other words, with the freshest touch and abundant good humor, Orkenny shows through a delightful ambivalence how one may write a play of quizzical implication which will nevertheless escape strict governmental censorship...

...To judge by the New York theatre season of 1977-1978, I would say that our country is now on a level of "calm" which does not signify peacefulness so much as uncertainty, a degree of apprehension, and a yearning for benevolence...

...This he has done in what he no doubt perceives to be the nobler cause of race war...

...These non-profit institutions are in the main supported by National or State Endowments for the Arts, by foundations, and by the Theatre Development Fund, which supplies tickets to most of the better productions at reduced prices to selected members of the public (teachers, hospital personnel, students, etc...

...be grateful...

...Among other meritorious plays produced at the Public Theatre were A Prayer for My Daughter by Thomas Babe, and David Mamet's one-act The Water Engine...

...Their excuse today is that 'I was only giving orders.' " Moynihan said he thought that this "failure of nerve" was with us "more so now than a few years ago when I originally sensed it...

...Nor was there anything shameful either...

...Its charm is persuasive...

...But one cannot conclude that the play breaks any new ground or manifests any special originality of perception or writing...

...In the characteristic style of the demoralized Wimp, it is his own race that he has turned on...

...Da" was the eventual winner...

...his plots are "myths" rooted in contemporary American experience...

...One of the few causes on behalf of which the Wasp-turned-Wimp is ready to turn out, drink a glass of wine, and cough up a donation is the legal defense of one or other of the more egregious pornographers or porn-film stars...

...Both The Water Engine and A Life in the Theatre were written before the author's far better play, American Buffalo, a prizewinner last season...

...He lashed out mercilessly at the "three thousand millionaires" who, he claims, will benefit from the Steiger Amendment to reduce capital gains taxes, perhaps forgetting that he is himself a millionaire...

...but that they exist in these less publicized, minority domains is unquestionably a hopeful sign...

...Since the country forcibly became Communist under the vigilant eye of the Soviet Union, a too stringent expression of dissatisfaction would not be tolerated...

...y. t has long been my contention—though it may have been an illusion—that I could sense the state of a nation, here and elsewhere, by what was being produced in its theatre...

...The reports on the New York theatre season just ended glow with statistics of prosperity...

...Senator Moynihan put his finger on a part of the problem in his discussion with Henry Kissinger (published in the American Enterprise Institute's useful bimonthly journal, Public Opinion...

...Some critics suggested half-heartedly that Solzhenitsyn, the American guest, had spoken out of turn...

...It is only proper, in passing, to mention Ronald Ribman's Cold Storage, a play admired by a number of critics...

...play...

...I have this joke—which Henry may or may not appreciate—about thepeople who started the war and ran it and are still working here in Washington...

...the emphasis is chiefly on the jokes rather than on the poignancy of the situation...

...The latter pronouncement hardly tallies with the fact that during the 1927-1928 season two hundred and six productions were mounted and that there then were some sixty theatres in the Broadway area whereas now little more than half that number remain...