Stage:

...many other devotional maconfrontation are his way of facing, or refusing to face, the The Sunday Propers as terials in both forms, prepared by , the Society Braille and Large Print...

...His generation, he said, was one to (Tony Perkins), and his wife (Berry Berenson...

...This last, clearly an easy comic device, is probably also intended by Thompson to indicate the connection between generations not Screen apparent with Norman and his daughter...

...Although physical decay and forgetfulness are the hazards of the aging process, the awestruck celebration of the OFFERED FREE BY XSB octogenarian who can still move, still think, is the loving equivalent of the cheerfully shouted first person plural with NEW YORK -The Large ing an active leadership which nursing-home attendants let the residents know that they Print and Braille tran- part as lectors during the are both deaf and drained of individuality...

...His jokes about death and are designed as a conveni- All materials are mailed debilitation, which Ethel says he has been making since she ent companion to the book free of postal charges first knew him, cover his deep terror at an increasingly faulty of the Ordinary, or un- throughout the United changeable parts, of the States and Canada...

...I know I am...

...After the per- only a few months between their releases, and announcements formance, Weller came out to talk to anyone in the matinee of new projects pour from the offices of his company, Lion's audience who wanted to stay...

...The Neal and his wife turns into terrorism...

...Since then, his career has been a constant without penetrating them...

...In the context, however, it is more than that, since-stage turns out, are no more conducive to theatrical truth th4n cliche or not-an aging person, disoriented by the loss of old Thompson's neatly tied package, and the latter at least has the duties, old chores, can find new strength when unexpected virtue of making me refuse to be surprised that V. S. Pritchett, demands are made on him...

...He makes films so quickly that there is sometimes Michael Weller's Loose Ends earlier that day...

...Emily makes whom things come easy, who had no need to scramble for anonymous phone calls, follows Neal to his job at a housing necessities, but who found their lives no easier for the absence development, sneaks into his yard and destroys the flowerbeds of struggle...

...After the audience-there lies my misgivings about On Golden first trying to establish himself in Hollywood in 1945, he Pond...

...He insists on imposing shape on preciation with the critical equivalent of "Gee whiz, no one what might best remain a simple theatrical image and he does would know the old man was pushing eighty...

...I saw Sez;ette in which Mae West, in her mid-eighties, pre- The Thayers have a daughter Chelsea, a woman in her tended to be the broth of a girl she was when she came to forties with a failed marriage and a series of unsuccessful love Hollywood at thirty-nine...

...Against his will she overcomes his suspicion and appropriate image for his play since Susan is a photographer, dismay at her re-appearance...

...There is only so much that one person can play could not end with the reconciliation of the play's central do, however...

...THE WEEK that I finally got around, to seeing Ernest Thompson is not content to provide two talented performers Thompson's On Golden Pond, the New York Times with a platform, to entertain an audience and to remind it, Book Review ran a front-page notice of V.S...

...Full the Braille or Large Print permission for these tran- assistance...

...Although Gross's remark lacked affairs to her credit...

...memory, just as his game with the want ads underlines his Mass which is also availFor further information sense of life's having no further use for him...

...In eight brief scenes we follow Paul and going in for cloning...

...Anyone who grew up on Shirley Temple emotional, intellectual, spiritual background to make sense of movies knows from the moment the boy sets foot on stage that the moment...

...scriptions of the Sunday Sunday Masses in their Mass readings for Cycle A parish...

...She shatters their difficulty is that Paul and Susan and all their friends and windows in the middle of the night, and sneaks into their house relations never get beyond stereotype, and-for me, at least- in order to stalk from room to room just out of sight of the they are less amusing, less interesting types than Norman and unsuspecting wife...

...There are only so many films Altman could couple (they could make a go of it, one man insisted, if they make in one lifetime with that distinctive Altman stamp on would work at it), Weller said that he had no solutions, that them...

...It's uncanny...

...Susan from an idyllic romp on a Bali beach in 1970 to a final Two Altman proteges, assistant director Alan Rudolf and farewell in a New Hampshire cabin in 1979, from a principled scriptwriter Joan Tewkesbury, have recently made movies that indifference to conventional success and its material rewards are not only too much like Altman's work, but almost exactly to an accumulation of both...

...ed the Xavier Society for urgical prayers Xavier pubthe Blind by the Interna- lishes a Manual of Prayers, Norman is-or pretends to be-an irascible man, but his tional Commission on Enga Braille calendar, and wicked, wounding wit and his talent for deflecting direct lish in the Liturgy...

...pain of his diminishing powers...

...oddly this shell of a character gives Frances Sternhagen room to expand, to find the woman in the busy work...

...they catch their Tewkesbury's Old Boyfriends also begins with an anonymsubjects in mid-gesture and expect the viewer to fill in the ous phone call, and then proceeds to revenge by seduction and Commonweal: 404...

...which Norman SEND IN THE CLONES temporarily collapses, the play insists on the lurking presence of death, but it is no longer a threat since the reaffirmation has comforted the audience with the primacy of life...

...ply write to: is that the play-again like The Gin Game-becomes primar- It has been very gratifyily a vehicle for the performers...

...It is an prison...

...Despite exposition, proclamation, discussion and this will be another case of the curmudgeon tamed...

...The problem with photographs-except at the hands of ruined...

...Gradually, Emily's harassment of Weller's acquaintance, it does propose a real subject...

...To a question about why he chose to out from her confrontations with Neal that he was married to do the play in fragmentary scenes over a decade, Weller said her back East and was responsible for her spending a: tern in that he saw it as '`eight photographs come to life...

...flurry of activity, as if he were trying to make up for lost I might have assumed that Thompson's staying on the sur- time-to insure that, despite his late start, he will have a face of his characters was largely a function of his desire for a filmography as long as Hollywood greats like Ford and sad-happy ending had I not wandered into the final preview of Hawks...

...She seduces him away from his Paul a film director and projections are used to bridge between new wife, and then abandons him as soon as his marriage is scenes...

...To those who wondered why the Gate Productions...

...the best artists-is that they are reductive...

...10010 lectual defenses in an unschooled world)-the sly old man, 6 July 1979: 403 thirteen-year-old son...

...So Norman teaches Billy to fish, at eighty, can write a strong sentence...

...The playwright solves that problem too, lets a few sentences bridge the gulf of years, and before the play ends the sense of family is ANNOTATING ALTMAM reawakened...

...The same week so by falling back on the curative powers of conventional plot...

...His loose ends, it is...

...I hear myself describing people I love or admire, who are vigorous, alert, active at eighty or ninety, with the chirpy SUNDAY MASS READINGS enthusiasm parents bring to baby's first tooth, baby's first IN BRAILLE, LARGE TYPE step...

...calculating the effects of his words, walks the edge of caricature, and Tom Aldredge, going for all of Norman's jokes, Stage occasionally loses his balance, slips into Shtik...

...sighted from the Xavier bring information on this Set in a sumiger house in Maine, Thompson's play presents the Society...

...I went away from the theater with a sense of having been spent two decades wandering in the wilderness of indusamused and even instructed a little, but with no feeling that the trial documentaries and TV assignments before he was able to playwright had done more than suggest depths of character return to Hollywood...

...able from the Society's regarding any of the Soheadquarters, in either ciety's free Braille, Large -.One result of Norman's verbal facility and Ethel's need to form, Braille or Large hdld fief own by elevating straight woman to comic participant Print or Tape services simPrint...

...In an unlikely final scene in...

...These changeable and its other free services .readings, called the to the attention of any parThayers-Norman who turns eighty in the course of the play, PROPERS, are transcribed tially sighted or totally Ethel who is ten years younger-and implies the social and from the text of the NEW blind person who can use natural world of Golden Pond, a double presentation in which AMERICAN BIBLE...

...And so it argument, Weller's scenes remain gesture...

...When she at last reveals herself, we figure Ethel in On Golden Pond...

...Although the remark suggests the narrowness of so his wife will find them...

...Uncomfortable with her father, who both the flamboyance and the unintended pathos of Mae seems always to have expected her to be the son he did not West's •Performance, it parodied old age as she did vigorous have, she has pulled away from her parents, visiting them sexuality...

...Since Norman gets the bulk of ing to hear that as a by- XAVIER SOCIETY product of having these FOR THE BLIND the good lines-funny remarks that are sometimes nasty in Propers some visually im- 154 East 23rd Street their implications (WASP defenses in an ethnic world, intel- paired people are now tak- New York, N.Y...

...To get around this limitation which even the most plays should have no solutions, that his own was "the descrip- ambitious artist usually has to accept, Altman now seems to be tion of a dilemma...

...converts him to literature (with Swiss Family Robinson), drills GERALD WEALES him in French, and learns teen-age slang in return...

...Asked if these characters were his the same...

...This the nerve to grow old with Mae West's lack of grace, but most time, however, she also brings her new boyfriend and his of us are capable of Gross's accidental condescension...

...Few of us have the equipment, the opportunity or infrequently, bringing anger and guilt when she comes...

...decay, change and continuity suggest that the effects of time scriptions has been grant- In addition to these litare inevitable, frightening, even comforting on occasion...

...In Rudolf s Remember My Name, a moonchildren grown up, Weller at first denied (no playwright woman named Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) arrives in southern wants to wear forever the label of his first success) and then California and begins harassing a journeyman carpenter, Neal admitted the connection...

...Ethel is a less interesting character, the protective one in the couple, a wife-mother-lover figure whose eccentricities (talking to the NEAT & LOOSE loons, battling the spiders) seem more decoration than definiLIFE IN STAGES-ON STAGES tion...

...Pritchett's through recognition jokes, that age not so much withers as The Myth Makers in which John Gross ended his warm ap- exaggerates individuality...

...Comforted SUCCESS came to Robert Altman rather late in life...

...The best thing about On Golden Pond- as with The Gin (beginning with the First In making these Mass Game last season-is that it ventilates this fatuous automatic Sunday of Advent) are Propers available the Soresponse to age and tries, working within the stereotypes of available free of charge for ciety relies on the assistthe blind and partially ance of sighted persons to popular comedy, to suggest some of the complexities of aging...