THE STAGE

...Wilson's The Hot L Baltimore, which won a Critics Circle award for 1972-73, was the first of the plays to move into an extended run, which it is still enjoying at the downtown Circle in the Stluare...

...what they share, so far as I am concerned, is a return to old-fashioned realism and a healthy respect for stereotype and--I'm sorry--sentiment...

...The most obvious example was Mari Gorman as tough, boyish Jackie and, ironically, her performance was singled out for high praise, an indication, I guess, that you have to punch some critics to get their attention...

...Yet, Marshall W. Mason, Wilson's friend and director, defended him in a Sunday Times interview (May 12, 1974) as an "honest Saroyan" after attacking the older playwright for being "gushy, sentimental...

...Throughout its history, Commonweal has achieved an influence far beyond its modest circulation, and limited resources--an influence on those of us in religious communications and on many thoughtful.Americans...

...It glows---like the unassumingly innocent Daisy herself...

...roseate...

...This is what Daisy Miller would suggest anyway...

...Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, the third of the Circle transfers, is directed not by Mason, but by Kenneth Frankel...

...Perhaps for that reason, the production is consistently and annoyingly artificial...

...Mason is the artistic director of the Circle Repertory Theatre Company, presently the most vigorous of the 0ff-off-Broadway organizations...

...Other performers--notably Elizabeth Sturges as Angel--are saddled with physical business that conveys not character but the insistence that work has been done on this show...

...It's a vague talent not to be confused with movie direction...

...The Catholic Press Association expresses its congratulations, best wishes, respect and gratitude to CommonweaFs staff, past and present...

...She talks ve.ry fast, apparently so that the emphasis will be distributed absolutely evenly over everything she says and nothing will take on special significance...

...The playwright doles out biographical details as though he had learned from Ibsen that you can keep an action in the present going by feeding it with facts from the past...

...Except for Leonard Melfi, Lanford Wilson has always struck me as the schmalziest of the up--from-off-offBroadway playwrights...

...Despite his admiration for Hawks, Ford, Welles, Lang, et al., Bogdanovich's own talents seem more eompat~ le with another Hollywood tradition, that of the tasteful adaptation and the "quality" dramatic film--the tradition of Cukor and Victor Fleming rather than Hawks or Ford...

...James was careful not to let anything so direct and certain as a look get into his novel, where moral innuendo is the only action and everything else, from kissing to dying, happens in the wings with hardly a mention...

...Then at the end, it turns out that everyone has somehow been changed--some of them strengthened--by his treatment of them, and the whole thing begins to suggest a parody of The Passing of the Third Floor Back...

...Medoff's diner, for all the attention to realistic detail (wiping the counter, pouring coffee), never becomes as real as Wilson's hotel lobby...

...The film is (how shall one say it...

...As with so many Wilson plays, it is a milieu piece, a gathering of types---this time in a down-at-heels residence hotel soon to be torn down, the only community or family that most of the inhabitants know...

...It provides the ideal Commonweal...

...Bogdanovich's adaptation couldn't be more scrupulous about following the original Henry James novella, and the locations, the costumes, the lighting--ah, especially the !ighting---could hardly be more becoming...

...Their success, like that of The Championship Season and The River Niger on Broadway, may be trying to tell us something about the New York audience...

...Sometimes the process becomes too mechanical--another turn for turning's sake---but the characters take on a touching solidity, partly because they are around and talking for so long and partly because the performers flesh them out...

...The virtue of the production, when I saw it early in the run, was the ensemble playing of the company, a delicately balanced presentation marred in only a few instances by the kind of overpunching that turns character into caricature...

...Charles Manson), tormenting a group of people in a diner...

...GERALD WEALES WHAT'S ENTERTAINMENT...

...It is her presence, I think that takes the saccharine edge off the final curtain, the desperate but tentative embrace of the couple, and that makes the play as effective as it is...

...On the surface, it gives us a demented young man, a bully, perhaps a moralist turned evil side up (cf...

...But in the context Of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, even What's Up, Doc?, Bogdanovich's tribute to Hawks' comedy style, begins to look like mere screwball atmospherics, as if old movies were themselves simply another historical epoch for Bogdanovich to recreate...

...It is true that Teddy has no personality of his own and has constructed one (or several) of mannerisms borrowed to hide the fact that he is another loser in a world which has lost its heroes, but the borrowings seem to belong to the actor rather than the character...

...A Citation from the CPA AT LAST MONTH'S annual convention of the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada, meeting in Denver, Colorado, the CPA Board of Directors adopted the following resolution: "In recognition of 50 years of distinguished service to Church and nation, the Catholic Press Association presents its citation of merit to Commonweal magazine...

...Still, the movie is a perfectly lovely evocation of the Grand Tour in the late 1800s...

...Frequently controversial, fiercely free, committed to the layman's responsibility in the Church, Commonweal stands as an example of thoughtful analysis and determined integrity...

...The Sea Horse, by James Irwin (really Edward J. Moore, the play's co-star), the Circle's most recent contribution to off-Broadway, shows that Mason, as director, is as comfortable with a two-character play 28 June 1974:~160 as he is with an actor-packed kaleidoscope...

...That way, Bogdanovich must have reasoned in his direction of Miss Shepherd, nothing Daisy says will seem arch or revealing, and she will remain inscrutable as she ought...

...This last may seem an unfortunate choice of phrase since the actress is Conchata Ferrell, a very fat woman whom I first saw as the noisy prostitute in The Hot L Baltimore, but Ferrell is not only an actress of considerable skill, she is also, despite her size, one of the loveliest women to turn up on the New York stage in recent years...

...Send/or a Trial Subscription . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Issues for $3 . . . . . . . . . . . For New Subscribers Only COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N. Y. 10016 Please send the next 17 issues to: Name Address City, State, Zip D I prefer a full year at $15...

...The :only indiscretion is what appears sometimes in Miss Shepherd's glance, a come-hither look that she also uses to sell eye shadow and that creeps in ineluctably, but nonetheless inappropriately, here...

...Even Cybill Shepherd does not acquit herself so badly as one might have feared...

...What they share, according to Mason, is a concern for values...

...The play itself is a mixture of possiblities which never quite merge into a single work...

...Since casts change and productions tend to unravel during a long run, the ensemble may no longer be all that impressive in Baltimore, but the play is still available for anyone who wants to see the work of a playwright who approximates Mason's concept of the "ideal writer...

...The group performs the work of classic playwrights from Aeschylus to e. e. cummings with a heavy emphasis on the great modern writers---Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg --but it is known primarily as the source for a handful of new American plays that have moved into successful off-Broadway runs where they have been celebrated both for their productions and for themselves...

...Kevin Conway is the Mari Gorman of this production, giving an eccentric performance, heavy on tricks and---for me, at least -----completely without the menace that the play demands and that others have found in it...

...He is never clearly a metaphorical figure, as Duke Mantee is in Robert E. Sherwood's diner in The Petrified Forest, but all the harping on long-gone Western heroes (the answer to the titular question is "Never") suggests that he is the product and the victim of an America which has moved away from old certainties or, as Mason would say, old values...

...6-28-74 IMPERFECT CIRCLE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE One man's sentimentality is another man's substance...

...The play catches its characters--the tough proprietor of a waterfront bar and her seaman lover--at the moment when the lover's proposal of marriage forces to the surface her fear of commitment and his sense of his own inadequacy...

...Bogdanovich's Hollywood heroes are John Ford and Howard Hawks...

...This is hardly a dancing-in-the-streets review, but let me temper my negative reactions by insisting that, despite any shortcomings in these three productions, the Circle is plainly alive and sure of itself and that, in these tired and tepid days, is important to the American theater...

...OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN Peter Bogdanovich is turning out to be, disappointingly, a master of atmospheres and periods...