Stage

...Wherever the artists and their gal- leries have gone, real-estate prices have immediately climbed...

...In a city with a 1.9 percent housing vacancy rate, the art-and-real-estate connection is likely to persist...

...Like the pioneers of a century ago, the artists have made territory once considered dangerous "safe" for those unwill- ing to risk the new...

...I have difficulty sorting out Henry's and Stoppard's clichts, for everyone with the possible exception of Annie (thanks in part to Glenn Close's perform- ance) is a stereotype...

...The first, the result of Trent's Washington investigation, is that everyone involved in the numbers game, the scenario juggling of deterrence, knows that the system does not work but does not believe what he knows...

...It is about the prospect of nuclear annihilation...

...In the late 1970s, however, when the museum decided to expand again, it faced a very different set of circumstances...

...The battles it had poured so much energy into during its pioneering period were now safely in the victory column...

...With its understated construction and airy spaces, it provided an environment that assumes MOMA's position in the art word rather than chal- lenges the viewer to notice it...

...The founders of MOMA were determined to get Americans to look at art that challenged the traditional master works which then dominated established collections, and they wanted a building to sym- bolize their intentions...

...He remembers, with a little help from Stone, that he once stood at an open window and contemplated Commonweal: 404 tossing out the infant son he adored, and the ugly thrill that stayed with him even as he closed the window and turned away is allied to the attraction of annihilation, the curiosity and fascination edging us toward the end of the world...

...That magnificent memorial listing their names in the thousands upon thousands is a deeply moving experience for all who have made the pilgrimage to it...

...But then much in the play does...

...Henry, Stoppard's playwright, has a speech on words that has been much quoted, out of context, since the play opened...

...In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, there is no question that the building should be a background to the collection," Pelli has declared...

...When in 1964 MOMA expanded with an East Wing de- signed by Philip Johnson, it was being consistent with its initial building impulse...

...End of the Worm effectively embodies it...

...There are two secrets to be uncovered...

...In 1939, when it moved from the Rockefeller-owned town house that held its collection to the international-style building of Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, MOMA was making a clear statement about its purposes...

...But those black marble slabs and the gleaming white tomb should be seen as commemorating not heroes but victims...

...Sharply delineated by Linda Hunt, she is a motherly figure whose pastel suits and tea table manners cover a steely profes- sional...

...Kopit's play, like Stoppard's, is not really about play-writ- ing...

...Michael Trent, Kopit's playwright, has decided that a dramatist is a kind of detective who must ferret out the secret in any situa- tion...

...I somehow neglected to write a review of it when it opened, but now that Broadway has received another drama about a playwright's problems --Arthur Kopit's knobby, demanding, unhouse- broken End of the World --perhaps some comment on the successful Stoppard is an appropriate approach to the much more interesting Kopit play, which was certainly not received with open arms...

...others went willingly, thinking that their efforts were on behalfof their country, on behalf of Vietnam, and this faith was betrayed...

...The unknown dead deserve their more preten- tious memorial, too...

...The Real Thing is neat and amiable and a touch banal...

...This defense of the writer as professional, which may well be Stoppard's point of view, is answered by Annie, who pulls a page from his typewriter and reads a fragment of jargon from a sci-fi filmscript...

...a Russian expert with a thick accent (a bit too Strangelovey this) insists, a touch too enthusiastically, on the inevitability of war...

...Good intentions or deep convictions are not enough to fuel a play, Henry says (more elegantly...

...Now the Soho gentrification process is spreading to the Lower East Side...

...but I am sure they would insist that whatever honor we pay them must be shared with thousands of others who perished for speaking out against the oppressors and persecutors our nation supports...

...Streets that used to belong to junkies and the poor have become, with the arrival of a 1980s' generation of g~,lle~ies, a desirable place to rent and build condos...

...Stage PLAYWRIGHT'S DILEMMA STOPPARD & KOPIT T OM STOPPARD'S The Real Thing has become the pseudo-serious hit of the season...

...The result is a lesson in real-estate management that urban museums with a need for cash and space are sure to notice, but the overriding significance of what MOMA has accomplished in the middle of Manhattan lies in the renovation itself...

...By allowing a fifty-two-story condominium tower to be built over property to which it controls the air fights, MOMA has been able to finance a $55 million project that doubles its exhibition space and gives it a new six-story West Wing...

...His diffi- culty in dramatizing such a subject becomes his conceit, and the play is about a playwright commissioned to write a play about the end of the world who finally decides the only way to do so is to write a play about a playwright who...

...She seems a single-note comic character until the last act when, asked to face what Trent has discovered in Washing- ton, she becomes suddenly human and vulnerable and, unwill- ing to believe what she now knows, escapes into the Connec- ticut countryside...

...With good reason...

...The Real Thing is more about the personal than the profes- sional education of Henry...

...His obsession gives the play its frame, a parody private- eye narrative that is less amusing than Kopit hopes...

...Soho is the classic case of the art-real estate boom...

...Some were both, but most were not...

...The second act consists of three interviews: a general/physicist, now a pipe-smoking country gentleman, gives a rationally irrational explanation of the necessity of nuclear dependence...

...Any of these might be at home in a political revue, anti-nuke cartoons with no force beyond their immediate ef- fect, but Kopit has designed them to fit into the growing knowledg e and despair of his playwright, so that they are dramatically much more than satiric interludes...

...The opening scene --Henry's play --is a brittle, Noel-Cowardish exercise in coping with infidelity which is supposed to reflect the playwright's lack of feeling, but the scene in which Annie's husband learns of her affair with Henry is just as comily theatrical, although presumably it is to show the pain of the real thing...

...The play is also full of show-business jokes, the most sustained one being the playwright's agent, named after and presumably modeled on the famous Audrey Wood, who was Kopit's own agent...

...From this description, one might not know that much of the play is funny --if frighteningly so...

...In the course of the play, in which he leaves Charlotte for Annie, he learns to love, to be jealous, to compromise, to recognize that the world is not as neat as a properly-worded construct might make it seem...

...I~ERALD WEALES Art THE NEW MOMA PRESERVING MODERNISM OVER THE LAST decade New York's real-es, tate dealers have learned to pay attention to New York s art world...

...It was living in a world in which, as New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger has pointed out, "both modern art and modern architecture have become the establishment of our culture" and in the process lost their power to shock...

...The second secret Trent finds within himself...

...We can never give back what we have taken from them, but we owe them a more honorable legacy, a legacy of peace and justice, This is why we must not lose our will to search for the truth, to remember the truth, and to act upon the truth...

...The one thing we know for certain is that they were all victims, and this is what we should remember on Memorial Day...

...With its factory-like facade of marble, translucent glass, and metal, the Goodwin-Stone building was a perfect choice, one that immediately set MOMA apart from the Beaux-Arts Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...a discreetly gay couple who work for a war-games think tank, playfully expli- cate a nuclear-war scenario while they whip up dinner for Trent...

...Once artists began constructing loft studios in buildings that at the turn of the century housed the city's garment industry, a neighborhood even the middle-class wanted no part of suddenly became chic...

...There is no reason why Henry's speech cannot be true and he, as playwright, an inadequate illustration of it, but the play as a whole seems to insist that a way with words is not enough...

...But the Museum of Modern Art with the completion of its new home, has shown that the process can at least be stood on its head...

...The Real Thing, in so far as it is about the art of playwrighting, says the same thing...

...Stone tells Trent that a play is the best vehicle for his warning to the world because it is the form that appeals at once to emotion and intellect...

...yet, the idea provides a workable analogy for the artistic process and, more important, gives ideational and emotional direction to the work...

...Once again, those who went to Vietnam, and especially those who died, deserve to be remembered...

...Victims not only of the blow or bullet that ended their lives but, in a more profound sense, victims of the human weaknesses and failings which produce the hatreds and fears which lead to war...

...Speaking of those who died, we said: Some of them went unwillingly, but had no choice because of their economic status...

...The new MOMA, designed by Cesar Pelli, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and former project designer for Eero Saarinen, reflects this change in history...

...MOMA was no longer the new kid on block nor the leader of an avant-garde art movement...

...art brings small changes in the world --in so far as it brings any at all -- because precise use of language, properly arranged, can form something sub- stantial...

...Despite the witty lines, the play is essentially sentimental, which may be why it is so popular, and it ends on a lightly, lubriciously happy note that seems benignly fake to me...

...Only a few passersby bothered to take the flyers we offered them, but those who did would have found our answer to what was taking place in Washington and in so many neighborhoods in Boston...

...This is what the few who gathered in the Boston rain to name the dead were trying to say...

...Replacements for the stars are ready in the wings since a long run is predicted, and road-company cities can expect a version of it next season...

...When Philip Stone, the millionaire who wants a play written that will expose and perhaps inhibit the impending doom, hires Trent, he tells him only that Trent must find out on his own what Stone knows and that he has been chosen because he recognizes evil...

...In exchange for its air rights, MOMA has already received a $17 million lump-sum payment and in the future will benefit from tax- equivalency payments that by the year 2000 are expected to total $3 million annually...

...In its Goodwin-Stone building MOMA had not only the right home for the Ctzannes and Picassos it would feature in its early years, it also had the right home for the abstract expres- sionism it would champion in the years following World War II...

...It has received both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Tony as the best new play of 1983-84...

...I prefer Stoppard in a less cozy play like Night and Day...

...Until then Vietnam will never be over...

...The 13 July 1984:405...

...In the 1960s as in the 1930s, it was making clear that the modernism it collected would be sur- rounded by the latest in modern architecture...