Stage:

...These characters, who have a certain credibility when we hear them described in a sentence or two in Folly or July, become animated platitudes when they walk the stage for more than two hours...

...is a former preacher, running away from a vocation which he never believed in, who arrives in Zion, which has been churchless, preacherless since the church burned down...

...this reading was emphasized in production by the fact that Beatrice Arthur brought so much of Maude into the character...

...Now, fresh from an engagement in Saratoga Springs, it had come again to Circle Rep...

...and in the pathetic-comic mixture Allen attempts...

...At the end, however, Basil - who has earlier called Buddy's condition a' 'blessing'' since he predicts the weather - says that the death is also a "blessing,'' but for whom (Buddy...

...helps to trigger the final catastrophe...

...In the real world, many an anti-Semite likes kosher pickles and many an anti-Italian likes Italian coffee...

...Aside from the escape of Sally, who appears briefly at the end of the play, the main action in Tale is the decision to sell the clothing factory to a conglomerate (1944 seems a bit early for conglomerates), an act of both community and professional irresponsibility, since the machinery will be moved out of town, rendering many people jobless, and the quality product will presumably give way to shoddy...

...By the time this review appears, it may have ended its limited run or then again it may be off to Timbuktu, but it is worth talking about because the play and certainly the author will be heard from again...

...A new playwright appearing at Wilson's Circle Rep might be expected to name the older playwright as one of the chief influences on him, but in this case the Wilson of The Rimers of Eldritch can be seen in The Diviners without the aid of the publicity throwaways...

...the town...

...When C.C: Showers asks Buddy if his itching is "better," the "better" carries into the next scene in which Melvin is trying t6 teach Dewey to dance...

...And that final speech does not appear to be ironic - as the epilogue to Death of a Salesman is - at least in the playing at the Circle Rep...

...At the end, C.C, gets Buddy to bathe in the river, but the women arrive en masse (if four is a mass), singing,'' Shall We Gather at the River," coming to give witness to another soul saved, and C.C., in his distress, argues with the women while Buddy, who now is convinced that water does not interfere with breathing, goes out too deep and is carried away...

...For me, it is more rewarding than The Rimers of Eldritch, but that may be be cause I first met the Wilson play on the page, where its weaknesses were particularly obvious...

...Enid is a nag...

...And historically, since the war seems not to exist at all in the Allen play...

...I am not quite sure...

...I am not thinking of the actual staging of the drowning - a mimetic suggestion of the boy and his would-be savior under water - but of the fact that C.C.'s absorption with his own problem allows him, still standing in the water, to lose sight of Buddy alongside him...

...Her hope proves as elusive as that of Amanda's for the' 'Gentlemen Caller" of The Glass Menagerie...

...Two recent examples that have attracted a great deal of attention - both praise and blame - are Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb, which has finished its run at Lincoln Center, and Lanford Wilson's A Tale Told, the latest installment in the chronicle of the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri...

...The suggestion is that that role has been imposed on her by her attempt to keep the family afloat and by her own sense of her loss of youth, but she comes across simply as a shrew, making verbal attempts to one-up everyone in the house...

...He resists the attempts of the townspeople - the women primarily - to force him back to the pulpit, but he is a natural preacher/teacher, and he slowly wins Buddy to the kind of faith in him that lets Buddy risk the rain, then the river...

...WHEN I SAW Jim Leonard, Jr.'s The Diviners in August, it was probably the only show in town with rave reviews from Kuala Lumpur and Manila posted outside the theater...

...Max Pollack,.who, as Allen said of his father, works "a million short-lived jobs" (New Yorker, February 4, 1974), is currently a waiter in debt to the loan-sharks...

...Buddy is a diviner, able to predict the weather, to find water with a rod...

...There is an ambiguity to the play that is a little disturbing, for it is not so much the ambiguity of artistic richness as a conflict between implicit and explicit presentation of the theme...

...Unfortunately, the Allen script sounds like a series of one-liners imposed on a schmaltz situation...

...The Diviners is a fascinating play, despite its flaws, and it introduces a playwright with a good ear for Indiana speech and an observant eye for the tics of character...

...He is waiting for the lucky number that will let him escape his family and his situation, and go off with the young woman who makes him feel that he is still young himself...

...This is another case of the "Gentleman Caller" (the best conceived character and beautifully played at Lincoln Center by Jack Weston) - a down-at-heels agent whom Enid hopes will package Paul and his magic and lift the family out of their rut...

...Information Service...

...To aspire to Chekhov is admirable, but a comparison of Enid Pollack and Bessie Burgess - and the characters have many similarities - suggests that Allen still has to get to Awake and Sing...

...Of the boys, Steve is a street-wise kid going wrong to escape the household, and Paul, who like the youthful Woody Allen spends hours practicing magic tricks, retreats into his bedroom and his fantasy to insulate his fear of the world and the distress he feels with the family...

...Something seems to have happened to the clan...

...Much publicity has been given to that fact, but The Diviners is no more a student play than Leonard, at twenty-five, is an ordinary student...

...The main plot is a double one, built around the confrontation between C.C...

...the comic lines in Odets clearly belong to the characters...

...WOODY ALLEN'S PLAY, like Wilson's, is set in the 1940s, but the Pollacks, walking the poverty line in Canarsie, are far removed from the Talleys, economically and geographically...

...The suggestion that the town absorbs the eccentric and the violent and continues to flourish is not so much dramatized as stated...

...Showers and Buddy Layman...

...The Odets quality lies in the New York poverty setting (a 1930s play set in 1945...

...The theme is treated comically, when Buddy guesses how many jelly beans are in a prize jar, but that event - transferred to C.C...

...Leonard, like Wilson, is primarily a verbal playwright, and he uses overlap and repetition to get from scene to scene...

...I never quite believed the sixteen-year-olds of Patricia Wettig and Laura Hughes, but most of the roles fell on the happy side of stereotype...

...Their characters thus become presences, coloring the events even when they remain quiet, properly unresponsive not"to detract from center stage...

...before he can make it to Uncle Vanya...

...Would be lost, that is, if Wilson did not insist on sending the character on stage to describe his death and make a point about the cosmetics of home-front propaganda, the integral use of which point would not be clear even if it were convincingly presented...

...Even Lottie (the earlier generation's counterpart of Sally), who is dying of radium poisoning (capitalistic greed: she worked in a clock factory), has to use lines like' 'kiss my ass" to assert herself, to get her laugh...

...Leonard, like Wilson, wants to suggest a community (Zion, Indiana, pop...

...The fatal telegram, so laboriously set up early in the play, gives the family a momentary jolt, the play a sentimental moment, but the death of Timmy on Saipan is lost in the general flurry of discovery and recrimination...

...These characters take part in an action which imposes a Tennessee Williams plot on a Clifford Odets setting...

...It still seems to me the best of the Talley plays, but I found the production disappointing, lacking the cleanness and the clarity of a performance that I saw at Temple University last year...

...but in Wilson's Talley world, narrowness is always complete - political, economic, social, gustatory...

...There is a subplot about an illegitimate daughter of Eldon Talley (father of Sally and Buddy), but it seems to be as pointless as it is uninteresting...

...Buddy is an "idiot boy,'' to use the play's words, a child of fourteen whose condition stems from his having almost drowned at five, when his mother died saving him...

...Besides, it would make C.C...

...Brian Backer played the character with Allen mannerisms, but whatever autobiographical overtones the play has, the character comes across as a young man hopelessly trapped by his inability to operate in society...

...The women are diviners, on the lookout for small miracles, in need of the comfort of a clerical presence, a figure who can restore community to Zion...

...The Diviners was first done in November 1979 at Hanover College, Indiana, where Leonard was a student, and it won first prize at the American College Theatre Festival in April 1980...

...All in all, A Tale Told is a standard family package (adultery, illegitimacy, potential incest, greed, generation gap, sibling rivalry, death by cancer, death on the battlefield), but the characters elicit neither the distaste they might command as types nor sympathy as human beings - except when individual performers (Helen Stenborg, Patricia Wettig) give the semblance of life to Wilson's surface figures...

...This scene is necessary thematically, but I have some trouble with it...

...Talley, a cutthroat Christian, at once self-righteous and ruthless (a bravura part as Fritz Weaver plays it), the family members are blandly nasty, built out of 1940s realistic touches and caricatured bigotry...

...and The Diviners had the benefit of a generally good production...

...This is the kind of play with which the Circle, Rep is most comfortable, and Robert MacNaughton, who was brought in for Buddy, was impressive, not so much in the physical things he found to do, as in the sudden and very revealing changes that he recorded with his face, his eyes, his smile...

...the "Showers of blessing," as the old hymn says, and I am not sure I am ready for that...

...It had played at Circle Repertory early last season and, after its run, had gone on a Far Eastern tour sponsored by USICA (the unfortunate acronym for what was once the U.S...

...Before seeing A Tale Told, I visited the Talleys on Broadway, looking in on the successful run of Fifth of July...

...is a diviner, able to touch the heart of Buddy and of Buddy's sister, who falls in love with the older man...

...We are used to the appearance of young playwrights - the Sam Shepard of the early 1960s, or the, David Mamet of the early 1970s - and it does them less service to cluck over their youth than it does to look at their work...

...Such connections are hardly intrinsic, but they are serviceable devices to help make a totality of the fragments that constitute both the play and the town...

...As in Rimers, the performers are on stage most of the time, sitting on benches, waiting their turn to step into scenes...

...Perhaps it is supposed to illustrate the way Eldon "has allowed his morals to be eroded by his business sense," as a publicity throwaway put it, but Eldon is the spokesman for quality rather than quick money, and therefore moral in business if not in private life...

...He has a panic fear of water, sure that he cannot breathe when it touches him, and as a result he is suffering from ringworm that keeps him continually scratching in an attempt to ease the itch...

...A Tale Told is a compan-ionplay to Talley's Folly, which won a Pulitzer for Wilson last year...

...Except for old Mr...

...40), and to use it as both the setting and one of the dramatic elements for the central action of the play...

...While Sally Talley and Matt Friedman are getting engaged - the action of Folly -the rest of the Talleys are up in the Talley Place splashing around in a bath of revelation...

...Allen recently told a Chicago Tribune interviewer that he had no immediate plans for another play because there is little point in writing one unless, like Chekhov and Strindberg, you can come up with a masterpiece...

...The naturalistic simplicity of the other scenes makes the artificiality of this one the more obvious...

...This brings us back to Lanford Wilson again...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Given the drowning of Buddy, which is the failure of C.C.'s best human impulses, the play would seem to be ironic about the usefulness of trust, of faith, and the longing of the women for a salvational presence, which turns out to be destructive...

...Leonard is playing with his title...

...Buddy, home on emergency leave - he helped drive Matt off the place before the curtain went up - tells about tasting Italian coffee and having to spit it out on the ground...

...There is a great deal of incidental and sometimes humorous material in the play - Dewey's attempt to court Darlene in spite of her ferociously proper aunt, Basil's trouble with his bicycle, the laziness of Melvin, jokes about Hoover since the play is set in the early 1930s, Darlene'.sretelling of the story of Adam and Eve (standard fakcfolk Biblical comedy, this last) - and bits of rural wisdom, usually from I would like to think that Basil's comments are quietly comic, too, but the play's use of that character, to open and close, putting a frame around the action, suggests that Basil is to be taken seriously...

...Altogether, a propitious debut...