Stage

...Now Lanford Wilson has joined the cyclists...

...The cycle, moving in reverse, will carry the family and the place (Lebanon, Missouri) back to the Civil War...

...Yet the dwindling crowd of Talleys in 5th of July promises little future unless the daughter's adolescent self-assurance can be taken seriously: "I am the last of the Talleys...

...The first of the five plays which Wilson plans for his cycle, 5th of July, was produced by the Circle Repertory Company in 1978...

...Fortunately, it's on my shoulders.' ' Yet her mother, her uncle, their friends are a gallery of spiritual, intellectual, physical failures...

...Matt is the survivor in a family which was destroyed—his sister by French authorities, his parents by German—and, in his horror at official cruelty, he has disassociated himself from the war and what it must mean to all Jews and has decided never to father a child into so ugly a world...

...The courting device is one in which the wry, story-telling Matt and the shy, uneasy spinster must unmask themselves in twin confessional sequences...

...Israel Horovitz has written both The Alfred Trilogy and The Quannapowitt Quartet, related groups published as The Wakefield Plays, which Martin Esslin, in a cover blurb, calls "an American Oresteia...

...Hirsch gets to play with accents, sudden shifts of character, comic bits that edge toward pathos, a whole range of effects that he does with skill and apparent enthusiasm...

...sense of America and the forces that inspirited, controlled society...

...Set in the present, July brings several members of the Talley family—a slightly batty old aunt, a crippled homosexual Vietnam veteran, his dislocated sister, her illegitimate daughter—to the family farm which, after toying with the idea of selling out, they decide to keep for whatever continuity and comfort it offers...

...Talley'sFolly is the courtship of Matt and Sally, or at least the last night of that courtship in which the unmistakable outsider (the Jew, the foreigner, the radical) wins the Talley daughter who is, in her own way, an outsider within the family...

...A sad happy ending...

...Produced by the Circle Rep last spring, the play has now opened on Broadway and, if the daily reviews are an indication, Wilson will have his first Broadway hit, the Circle—the company he helped found eleven years ago—its first successful transfer from off-Broadway...

...Talley's Folly is, then, an ambiguous play, hinging on a final life-denying, life-creating image...

...The second of the plays, Talley's Folly, which gets its name from the ornate boathouse in which the action takes place, is set in 1944...

...So it is with Talley's Folly...

...Chekhov's name is frequently invoked when Wilson's work is discussed, but Talley's Folly is not built in The Cherry Orchard but On Golden Pond...

...It is an actor's play in which the two confessionals allow the performers to do set pieces, toughly sentimental, and in which those grand moments are surrounded by playfulness, teasing, games, slapstick, semicomic quarrels...

...Although a careful observer, he seems always to stay on the surface of his characters, and— except for The Mound Builders—his plays never find an intellectual frame strong enough to carry his sentimentality and easy irony...

...Trish Hawkins works narrower ground although her Sally is more than the primly nervous old maid she sometimes seems to be, for she moves from comedy to hysteria and displays, as she walks that line, a hint of the substance which the character will have as an old woman in 5th of July, I prefer her Sally to Hirsch's more flamboyant Matt because she seems to embody a character, he to display an actor at work...

...And the whole family has just come to nothing at all so far...

...Several younger playwrights, men in their forties, have been pursuing similar ambitions...

...When the two characters embrace after her painful revelation, it is the marriage of two sterilities, one elected, one involuntary...

...Stated this way, Talley's Folly seems to strike a positive note...

...She was dismissed as a Sunday school teacher after she read Thorstein Veblen to her class while the parents of most of her students were on strike at a factory partly owned by her family...

...The possibility of a close, warm, fulfilling though childless marriage (which is what, looking back from 5th of July, Matt and Sally are to have) may be an attractive possibility in the real world, but on stage, where images carry conventional audience expectations, it is at best cold comfort...

...On stage, it is something more, or less...

...The best of Ed Bullins's work—plays like In the Wine Time—is part of a projected twenty-play cycle...

...Sally has become the family pariah not because of her views but because she cannot bear children, and the family had hoped to use her in a marriage/ merger which would join the two richest families in town...

...GERALD WEALES 28 March 1980: 183...

...That kind of gemutlich antirealism always annoys me a little, but Judd Hirsch, a likable performer, pulls in the audience efficiently...

...Her story of the uncle who built the boathouse suggests, however, that within the traditional Talley line—conventional, bigoted petty capitalists—there is a recurrence of eccentrics who somehow enrich the family...

...Although the last line of the play ends with the words "the future,'' there is a sense of negation which the play shares with most of Wilson's work...

...Both of the cycle plays end in dramatic denouements— the decision to stay on one's own land, the marriage—which have the look of happy endings about them...

...The two characters who comprise the whole of the dramatis personae are Sally Talley, the old aunt of 5 th of July, and Matt Friedman, who appears in that play only as ashes in a candy box waiting to be sprinkled over the roses.' 'They all hated him because he was a Jew," says Sally in July...

...Your mother, your father, my folks, the whole damn town hated him...

...Sally accepts Matt not only for himself but to escape the family home, but if Talley s Folly were seen alongside 5th of July (as it was played at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles), it would be clear that the conventional Talleys, Sally's brother and his wife, are the self-elected exiles, having chosen a retirement home in California, and it is Matt whose ashes stay on the family farm...

...His performance—like the artificial opening—emphasizes the Commonweal: 182 weakness in Wilson's work...

...There is even an intimate opening in which Matt chats directly to the audience, demonstrating the set, the lights, explaining how the stage is being prepared for a romance...