Stage

...Pamela play either a passionate concern about their subjects or an Reed's Arlie is at her best in the long bragging speeches in imaginative flair for theater...

...The film's more like the title character in Conrad's Nostromo than somestory, set in Vietnam, is of a Special Forces captain (Martin one out of Heart of Darkness...

...pimp-come close to caricature, a weakness that was emIt is the story of a wild Kentucky girl, the product/victim of phasized when I saw the show by replacement performers who a difficult family-incestuous father, whoring mother, crimi- had still not made the roles their own, and the upstairs nal siblings-who moves from violence to violence in her neighbor, although nicely conceived and well played by Joan attempt to impress her own image on an indifferent world...

...Our confusion is increased by the fact that the guy with the Godfather films...

...There is a difference Coppola is&t Wars are presumably designed to say something sad and sig- seeing here between having giddy fantasies about the Mfifia nificant about the ways of being victimized by the Vietnam and having them about the Vietnam war...

...underline the playwright's weaknesses...

...Jon Jory, Producing Director of strong doubts about James McLure, at least on the basis of the Actors Theatre and director of the original presentation, these two plays...

...In real life Patton was reincarnated somewhat less gloriously in Vietnam by his own son, Col...

...Roy in Lone vered heads, and it's out of character for the captain, who has Star, who has come home to find that he is a cuckold and a not let any of the movie's previous atrocities get to him, to take stranger, and the three men in the veterans hospital in Pvt...

...Capt...

...Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who leads an air-cav THE COST OF APOCALYPSE assault on a coastal village...

...Now Coppola can't Kurtz has gone berserk with the band of Montagnard tribesmen hide his similar feelings for Kilgore...

...world that 'handles bodies cheap...

...In the dramatic present, we watch...

...On the page, Arlene seemed so muted that I ever got to New York, first in a Phoenix Theatre production, wondered if she could make a believable jump to the final then in the current successful off-Broadway run...

...Even real gangsters are a form of entertainment we outs crush out the little life the plays might have had...

...It is more of Coppola's thrashing about, pulling out all severed head of a horse in his bed, it's a ghoulish, stylish the stops, trying to get a rise out of us...

...We take the scene to be Coppola's don't share the captain's shock or revulsion as we do the movie admission that the war and the making of his movie got all Commonweal: 560...

...Buried somewhere in But maybe it's not fair to jump on Coppola for the inapprothis double bill are two small character comedies with social priateness, the sheer bad taste, of trying to apply his dreams points to make, but McLure, his directors and his actors seem about Mafia dons to this war...

...Wars are one-act comedies in which the mogul's...

...It is a substantial work and a moving Some of the secondary characters-the mother, the one...

...George S.) Kilgore is the spit and image of Patton...

...In Apocalypse Now when Kurtz dumps on the captain's movie's own, particular darkness seems to lie here, in this lap the'severed head of one of his crewmen from the boat, we episode on the beach...

...inhabit...

...They are celebrities...

...They are...

...Since the original Patton COPPOLA TOMORROW believed in reincarnation, he is probably pleased to return here as Lt...

...War and movies, Vietnam and as shadowy figures thrown into relief against the world they Apocalypse Now, get all mixed up in our minds...

...For instance, all the way up the river the captain studies he hits the beach during a fire fight, there is a guy there with a a dossier he's been given on Kurtz...

...and as films...

...In that film when the movie mogul wakes up with the effect...

...Kurtz's whole encampment is festooned with sefarcical tone swallows the serious implications...

...Although there are occasional quiet, almost touching be concerned about organized crime, most of us aren't...

...GERALD WEALES the script for the movie Patton, he does worse...

...Wars, were first pre- in which Arlie, caught at an earlier, happier moment of rebellsented by the Actors Theatre of Louisville...

...There we often see the characters backlit, the camera is Coppola himself...

...has staged the New York production with a sure sense of the First produced in 1977, Getting Out went on to play Los way the two characters interpenetrate, Arlie's scenes sparking Angeles and to be chosen by a commitee of the American off Arlene's, working alongside without intruding on them...

...Yet the heart of this touch...

...When Coppola first created the Sheen) sent up a jungle river by patrol boat to assassinate a character of Patton, he couldn't help admiring the general's legendary colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando...

...But all she said was, "I keep thinking about pends on her not seeing change in her daughter-Arlene elects Jackie's twin, the one his mother said, 'didn't have much to make a tiny space in which she can take the first, tentative chance.' Jackie didn't have much chance either...

...For a minute we are unsure how we are supposed after an incident where the captain goes berserk himself, to read the scene...

...There are A NEW AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT parallel scenes-Arlie's last long speech in solitary, Arlene's hysterical outburst which leads to her monologue on how she MARSHA NORMAN'S Getting Out and James McLure's tried to kill the Arlie in her...

...Most talented neophytes dis- dampened down, perhaps, but not extinguished...

...The captain is especially movie camera who yells at him, "Run through as if you're absorbed by a dark, poorly lit photograph of the colonel...

...Although we should war...

...Apocalypse Now re-enlists Patton himself to fight in Vietnam side by side with Coppola's Mafioso...

...Presumably tamed biographical information that is unnecessary since Arlie's by a long stay in solitary, she tries to carve her evil self out of speeches and Arlene's confrontations tell us all we need to her body with a fork and, once she is physically well, Arlene know about the character...

...Other flashbacks to The Godfather don't work as well, This Hitchcock touch is just more straining after an effect, any though...

...Then, fighting...

...exception to this one...

...Finally, there is the shared speech double bill, Lone Star and Pvt...

...He falls in with the generals and politicians who actually ran the Vietnam war, and who also believed that their meditations on World War II Screen somehow qualified them to think about Southeast Asia...

...It had, then, made a name for itself before it suddenly graceful...

...playwrights, its program of new American plays, that the When I read the script last year, I was impressed by what it phenomenon is hardly phenomenal...

...Some of Jailed for having:shot a taxi driver (both her parents drive the Arlie scenes are little more than exposition, presenting cabs), she is at first the terror of the prison...

...Is the guy with the camera some whackedkilling a peasant, he sits down with the light behind him and, in out documentarian shooting footage in the middle of a the scene's fade-out, turns into a silhouette like the man in the crossfire, or is Kilgore's strike a fake being staged as part of a photograph...

...WilHeart of Darkness, there are sporadic traces of earlier Coppola lard, the officer played by Sheen, is along for the ride...

...Kilgore's horse-cavalry hat career...

...Arlene, Stage docile and uncertain after years of doing what she was told to do, finding and turning to positive use some of the spirit which her earlier self (Arlie) used with such horrifying results...

...At the same time, often in the same acting space, we see Arlie, GETTING OUT strutting, tough, unregenerate and, finally, broken...

...both content and form...

...as much force and intelligence as Getting Out, she is an Putting aside new and old temptations to revert to type-the impressive addition to the list of good young American playguard whose desire to help her will keep her forever the wrights...

...teacherly, I wanted her to pull this story together, perhaps with favored prisoner, the pimp who wants to put her back in some truism about ghetto realities and middle class illusions of business again, the mother whose help and whose abuse dehelpfulness...

...Wars) have to know one, we brag to our friends about it...

...Both enjoy in the papers...

...Getting Out may not be quite the which she insists on her unbeatability even as her desperation masterpiece that' this long lead suggests, but it scores well on can be felt in the punching delivery, the too insistent laugh...

...When he starts applying more to be shoveling dirt over them when they should be digging "relevant" thoughts, like those he first had as collaborator on them out...

...He lived in a steps toward asserting herself...

...Pape, is to obviously a functional instructive voice...

...Marsha Norman is an was attempting to do, but there was no way to be certain that undeniable credit to the organization-she is currently the theatrical intricacies on the page could be successfully playwright-in-residence under an NEH grant-but I have realized on stage...

...It's a deft moment characteristic of the director of movie...

...If Marsha her fulfill her dream of regaining her child and creating a Norman's more recent plays, yet to be seen in New York, have protective home so unlike the one in which she grew up...

...We moments, particularly in Lone Star, the rattle of bad jokes, think of gangsters as people who kill off each other and leave the patter of platitudes, the repetitive bits and the revue black- us alone...

...Described in these terms, the play sounds like a case study, which in one sense it is...

...A few ion, begins a reminiscence in which, finally, Arlene speaks years ago...

...Outside, she ting Out is an effective theater piece which has a genuine must face the fact that the only legitimate job she can get is as a concern for the traps of both heredity and environment and a dishwasher-low-paying, exhausting work that will never let wicked way of suggesting the ambiguities of its title...

...Kilgore is only place where you and I feel it, is on the screen...

...But the one which is the source of all the others, the is the match for Patton's pearl-handled sidearms...

...The scene doesn't work any better than any other in the film...

...he has trained as guerrillas...

...12 October 1979: 559 Lone Star and Pvt...

...If we should happen Stuart White (Lone Star) and Garland Wright(Pvt...

...Nobody brags directed the plays as though they were cartoons, and all those about knowing someone who committed atrocities in Vietlarge gestures, slack jaws, funny walks, voice indicators nam...

...Theater Critics Association, most of whom knew it only in Susan Kingsley, the original Arlene, is an odd, ungainly typescript, for inclusion as the regional play in The Best Plays actress who can, with a shift of position, of perspective, seem of 1977-1978...

...A first play shared speech, but all through the play Kingsley conveys-a seldom chalks up such a record, but Marsha Norman is not the line here, a gesture there-a sense of Arlie's vitality in Arlene, ordinary beginning playwright...

...In presentation, however, it is much more than that...

...He THERE ARE many places where the failure of Apocalypse strides along the beach under fire just the way Coppola's Now will be felt: at the box office, in conference rooms Patton strides up and down a North African street which is all over southern California, in Francis Ford Coppola's being strafed by a German plane...

...In Coppola's treatment of this Kilgore's strike against the village provides Apocalypse story, which he and John Milius adapted from Joseph Conrad's Now with its one, unintended moment of pathos...

...it, might have been news to have two Kentucky lines with her, laughs with her, indicates dramatically that transplants running at once in New York, but the Actors what was best in Arlie-her vitality, her drive-has not been Theatre has so admirable a reputation for its hospitality to new killed, cannot be killed if Arlene is to survive...

...Despite these shortcomings, Getdwindles into a model prisoner and a parolee...

...It seems that bravado, his dash, his colorful brutality...