Stage

...Yet, the musical form in this case belies the inten- tion...

...There are a number of good satiric moments--for in- stance, the game of musical chairs that brings Peron to power--but the total effect of the show is to gain audience sympathy for the little girl who screwed her way to power and then died young: Although Children of a Lesser God and Evita posed idea- tional questions that bothered me, my reaction to the produc- tions in both cases was unequivocal...

...Since the two shows are comfortably established on Broadway and the producers of Children have sent out a road company, I thought I had better find out what I have been missing...

...There is one inconsequential scene in Ordinary People that must give him quite a twinge, for in it Beth and Cal decide on the way to the same old party with the same old friends that they'll go to a movie instead...

...Of Beth he said," You can.., say she's terrible, but I didn't want to do that...

...If one faults the play, are the doubts an attempt to avoid making special allowances for both the subject matter and the performers--that is, is it another form of condescension...

...My problem with the play is that I do not know how to react to it...

...InsOfar as it is about Sarah's discovery of herself, it is a standard didactic play unusual only in that the hearing- impaired are the new misunderstood minority...

...GERALD WEALES Media RE-CREATING MAIN ST...

...Harold Prince has several times pointed out that Evita is not intended as an exemplary heroine, that the musical is a satiric account of her rise to political eminence and a sardonic comment on a public that embraced her image...

...She is no longer welcome at home in Lake Forest with Conrad and Cal because there the old culture of stoicism has been supplanted by the new culture of narcissism...

...The attraction that Ordinary People has for Redford lies in Beth...

...Children of a Lesser God seems to want to elicit that kind of sympathy and, because Sarah is so attrac- tive a character, it can certainly do so...

...or the Springfield (Missouri) Cardinals or the Fort Smith (Arkansas) Giants, the radio an- nouncer who gave a play-by-play account of their triumphs and disasters would take himself not to Oklahoma or Missouri or Arkansas, where the game was actually being played, but to the Hutchinson radio station...

...As I said before, the inexpressive heroes in our movies have required inexpressive stars...

...The performances of John Rubinstein and A. Linda Bove...

...He has played the person who remains ordinary against all odds...

...He never considered playing the role of.Cat himself...

...The play ends with the separation of husband and wife and with the suggestion that a reconciliation may become possible if each of them can admit a need for help from the other...

...My own sym- pathy goes frequently to the exasperated husband...

...who was substituting for Phyllis Frelieh when I saw Children, were excellent, expres- sing an emotional range that allowed me to move beyond the didactic to the more complex human drama that I wanted to find in Mark Medoff's play...

...Sarah insists that the silence in which she lives is full of richness that James or any other hearing person cannot conceive...

...One's reaction to that scene depends on whether Mrs...

...In a way her dilemma as a person is also his as a movie star...

...Now Beth comes along, with her implication that inexpressiveness is inadequate to life, and she makes Robert Redford wonder whether it might not be inadequate to movies as well...

...Lake Forest is a bad place to be geographically...

...the heroine appears to have the "star quality" one of her songs promises, to embody a kind of vitality which--on stage at least--is obviously a positive qual- ity...

...Beth and Cal are his audience...

...She decides not to let eithel" her husband or her hearing-impaired friend--with whatever affection--impose a preconceived role on her...

...There he would find a Western Union ticker sputtering a laconic report of the game's events...

...In that most un- likely how-to book, How to Have a Life-style, Quentin Crisp describes Eva Peron as the "greatest political stylist the world has ever known," and describes an occasion in which Mrs...

...The man who wants to help his wife becomes her oppressor, not allowing her to be herself, to create her own place in the world...

...what he thinks is love, she believes is ego-fulfillment...

...I suspect that for Robert Redford, Beth's inadequacies are a special source of anxiety...

...Yet he has tried to live most of his adult life, figura- tively, in Lake Forest...

...I know, being male and WASP, that no one who is not male and WASP can understand me, but sympathy on stage is directed to the oppressed minority rather than the presumably oppressing minority...

...Peron, lifting her arms to speak and sending the diamond bracelets sliding, had to wait for the "expensive clatter" to stop before she could begin, "We, the shirtless...

...As always with a Prince.show, there were richly con- ceived scenes and a remarkable sense of vibrancy, but the sound system was so bad that I could seldom understand Patti LuPone as Evita, and Mandy Patinkin, as Che, became in- comprehensible when he lifted his voice or speeded up his delivery which he almost always ~lid when he reached the satiric point of a passage...

...But now the middle-class culture in which he lives and on which his stardom relies is doing a flip-flop...

...I have been told for years that I cannot possibly understand because I am not female, Black, Jewish, Catholic, homosexual, under thirty...

...Such is usually the case with the musicals, but this year I blanked out across the board...

...He has shunned celebrity, lived in rural Utah (which is a movie-star suburb), stayed married to the same woman for twenty years, and shown his feelings in public only where traditionalist liberal causes like conserva- tion and the environment were concerned...

...Since no marriage--however close, however loving--can make two people one, can bring full understanding, can avoid the intrusion of ego, the special cases of James, as teacher, and Sarah, as unwilling pupil, can become metaphors for any marriage...

...When the Larks would go forth to do their best against the Muskogee (Oklahoma) Reds...

...Evita also offers problems in perception...

...In Lake Forest today, the residents are coming to the conclusion that a person like Beth is an empty shell...

...He is not John Travolta, after all...

...It's caught in the middle between New England and southern California...

...I want the play to be more complicated than that...

...The presence of Che Guevara, as a cross between a master-of- ceremonies and a political lecturer, is supposed to insure such a reading...

...When he sees Cai and Beth's home break up in Ordinary People, he must feel as if his own is threatened...

...Peron's aplomb be taken as an example of style or evidence of social and political irresponsibility...

...But then, when they drive up to the party anyway, we see that the very idea of going to a movie was a joke, something each knew the other would never take seri- ously...

...But now catastrophe is so rare, and the middle class so numb from prosperity, that not showing your feelings raises suspicions you haven't got any...

...Heroics no longer depend on concealing your emotions, but on acting them out...

...More important than that, though, he must feel as if his stardom is in jeopardy...

...certainly the play, bound in by the need to translate, cannot begin to convey that silence...

...Stars like Redford have had an inferiority complex about acting anyway...

...Redford has always pursued the traditional role...

...James, attracted to Sarah, breaches the wall she has built around herself and takes her into a marriage which at fLrst seems idyllic but which contains the seeds of its inevitable collapse...

...From Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Three Days of the Condor to The Sting and Brubaker, he has played the hero who maintains his equanimity every time the bottom falls out of his world...

...Her family sloughs her off the way a spring beetle struggles from its husk...

...The marriage is not only en-dangered by what the two people bring to it, but by the fact that Sarah, as a member of a minority, is accused by her activist friend and ally of sacrificing the cause to a selfish desire to find comfort and acceptance in the hearing world, an accusation which, as uncletomism, was once a clich6 of Black drama...

...A LOOK AT 'DUTCh' REAGAN i lN KANSAS in the 1930s I would sometimes listen to what was called a "re-creation" of baseball games played on Ithe road by our local team, an ineffectual Pittsburgh farm club whose only distinction was its name, the Hutchinson Larks...

...I had seen neither Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, which won three awards--Best Play, Best Actor (John Rubinstein), Best Actress (Phyllis Frelich)--nor Evita, which picked up seven Tonies, including Best Musical...

...Unlike that other Prince show, Sweeney Todd, Evita has the shape of a success story...

...Children of a Lesser God, an account of the making and the breaking of a marriage between a deaf woman and her teacher, is a difficult play to discuss...

...Stage BELATEDLY, THE TONIES STRANGERS ON THE STAGE R ESPECTABLE DRAMA CRITICS are supposed to be au courant, but when the time for the Tony Awards comes ~around each Spring I find that many of the contenders and often the winners are strangers to me...

...Evita offers that same leeway for response...

...He wanted to "see her as somewhat admirable...

...In ordinary circumstances presumably two people talking in signs would do so without the constant verbal flow necessary to explain what is going on to an audience who does Gift Subscriptions This Christmas 1 Gift Subscription $20 2 Gift Subscriptions $35 Room 1310-232 Madison Avenue New York, N.Y...

...If one praises it, as most of the reviewers have, one risks the error of the husband in the play, offering an embrace which becomes a kind of condescension...

...10016 24 October 1980:595 not understand the language...

...To complicate matters further, the play is both a play and a translation...

...Sitting alone in a bare studio, with nothing but this ticker, a Commonweal: 596...

...Is it the play that is being applauded, or the occasion that allows some talented members of the National Theatre of the Deaf to move into the mainstream of American theater...

...Redford not only works in southern California, but hails from there origi- nally...

...He identifies with her rather than Cal, who, he revealed in a recent interview, "was not a character that interested me...

...In the old days, when life was full of catastrophes, it went without question that people were full of feelings they had to control...

...Tim Rice's lyrics may have undercut Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, making Evita the political musical Prince says it is, but if you cannot hear the words, how can you know...

...In attempting to see the play in those terms, however, I may simply be showing my oppressor's sympathy for the husband and making Sarah's case for her...

...The play is a conventional one, familiar enough in the feminist drama of recent years...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Acting is supposed to be showing your feelings, but stardom has required the opposite, and has therefore made stars doubt whether they were capable of acting at all...

...At Evita, on the contrary, I was completely undone by the technical inefficiency of the produc- tion...

...They touch a nerve...