Stage

...and assorted imperial musicians, who alternately snicker or dodder in clich6d fash- ion as they menace or feel threatened by "the creature...

...The Sergeant's tale is so absorbing that we are bound to lose some interest in the captain, but this is worsened when the screenplay leaves little for Rollins to do but discover the murderer, then go home...

...New York, N.Y...

...the mannerisms that make Sgt...

...Rollins plays the ramrod-stiff Captain William Davenport, a black lawyer sent to a Louisiana army camp in 1944 to investigate the murder of a black non-corn, Sergeant Vernon Waters...

...They are convinced the Klan did it...

...It is a recognition--Rabe's, if not Donna's-- that the philosophies, the answers, the pharmaceutical solu- tions are accepted by the characters, and their use of these palliatives helps frame the word from which they need protec- tion...

...White antagonism to blacks is everywhere evident...

...Nevertheless, I left Amadeus moved...

...The classic laugh at the slip on the banana peel rests in our not having to see the contusions...

...He clearly intends his Hollywood Hills coven, like his barracks group in Streamers, to stand for more than their untidy selves...

...His business is diag- nostic not curative...

...Eddie is the central figure, the character onstage for most of the three-hours playing time...

...Hers is not the positive statement it might be under other circumstances...

...Voca me ," Hulce repeats, as if beseech- ing God to call him...

...It comes from being in the world today, being barraged with information--philosophies that aren't philosophies, answers that aren't answers, one pharmaceutical solution after another...

...Hurlyburly is often a funny play, but in context the funniness is almost unnerving...

...The characters in the play are sustained, insofar as they are sustained, by drugs, drink, sex (so long as no serious commitment is involved), and convo- luted chatter as empty and urgent as any you can hear on call-in radio shows...

...He develops the metaphor, seeing all the other characters as unfeeling background to the one-man drama of his meaning- less life--and himself as d6cor for them...

...William Hurt gives a marvelous performance, catching the charm that almost masks Eddie's contempt for others and for himself which helps to explain why these crippled moths hover around his dying flame...

...All of the men work in the movies and television and all of them have broken marriages and displaced children...

...There is no family here, no community, no society, and Eddie actively disintegrates any hint of it by using his amiable malevolence to push the others away, thereby protecting his indifference...

...If Rabe were the political playwright he is sometimes taken to be, he would use his situation to point out possible escape routes for his characters and for society...

...At the end of Act II, Phil, who is more demented than eccentric, comes in with his baby whom he has just stolen from his ex-wife's home, and the four men play a sentimental curtain scene which is undercut by a joke as old as the sentiment, one that is transformed by Artie's saying that the child dumped on him, like all the broads he ever knew...

...one aches for someone to articulate the irony that Waters's racism implies or to express some creative sense of the relationship between history and the future...

...they are also obviously predictable...

...Waters, in short, is no Uncle Tom but a harsh disciple of Darwin, claiming that the only way for blacks to rival whites is to exterminate any vestige of a "lazy, shiftless" past...

...Donna, the warty waif in Hurlyburly, tries to ex- plain Eddie's presumed concern for the unknown-victims-out-there by telling him that everything is part of everything else...

...From the beginning, Rabe's plays have suggested that life is an uncomfortable encampment on the edge of an abyss...

...It was powerful, far more expressive of spiritual truth than Salieri's complaints about God's fairness...

...A $OLDIER'$5"I"ORYis a spare, literate, and at times powerful version of A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winner of several years back, Like Peter Schaffer with Amadeus, Fuller has written the screenplay for the movie, and, for the most part, he and director Norman Jewison have avoided the peril of producing a mere filmed piece of theater...

...Hurlyburly is another instance-- if an often Commonweal's '84 Trial Subscription Offer 11 issues for $9 OFFER FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave...

...Waters's main purpose in life, we discover in flashback, is not military but racial...

...The hilarity is colored by the fact that she is stripping so that she can clean the cuts and bruises she sustained when Eddie's friend P.hil threw her out of a moving car...

...Yet, he is tough enough to know that his char- acters are helping to furnish the decaying house in which they live...

...With a few brief touches -- a bus with black soldiers in the back, signs labeled "whites only," and suspicious natives offended at Davenport's presence --we are reminded of a world that, whatever else remains the same, is thankfully gone...

...All Rollins is given to do is to cry by a window...

...These characters are drawn to one another out of a need that can never be fulfilled...

...Played by an actor with the fortuitous name of Adolph Caesar, Sergeant Waters esteems the avowed enemy that his troops are so willing to fight, the little corporal in Germany and his plans for racial purification...

...Rooney a comic caricature in Act I kill him in Act II...

...their white commanding officers, suspecting something similar, want Davenport to gohome...

...But as Davenport interviews the platoon about their attitude toward Sergeant Waters, he discovers not only oppression but tensions among the oppressed...

...10016 Please send the next 6 months of Commonweal to: Name Address City, State, Zip [] I prefer a full subscription at $24...

...On the night I saw the play, however, the laughter came--as I think it should--in sudden bursts that dwindled into ragged fitters as though individuals in the audience were surprised into laughter, surprised at their laughter and sur- prised that the" laugh had turned sour before it was finished...

...The core of the movie becomes the sergeant' s character, and that in turn becomes both its strength and weakness...

...The most overtly comic character in the play is Bonnie, a nude dancer with mild pretensions and boundless accessibil- ity...

...Eddie tells Phil that the only reason he is ever hired is as a prop, bringing a touch of realism to the fakery of television...

...I fear that at any minute Rabe will do a cause- effect routine and ask me to weep for Eddie because, gee, where else can you go but to Cocaine and booze when God is not in his heaven and all's wrong with the world...

...A lot of what's dark in the play doesn't come from California," Rabe said in a New York Times interview (June 28, 1984...

...But they become bulky and overlong...

...It seems an investigation doomed to go nowhere...

...Beautifully played by Judith Ivey, Bonnie does an hilari- ous scene in which she strips out of her clothes, including her panty hose, while she storms around the room hurling abuse at Eddie, the play's protagonist...

...The events are worth tears, to be sure, but they deserve more...

...The flashbacks, moreover, tend to bury Davenport as a focus of attention...

...Caesar gives a harsh, mean performance, thoroughly believable, dis- gusting, and, at last, pitiable...

...Whenever Eddie harps on the nuclear bomb and other large and small horrors that fill the daily newspapers, I get momen- tarily uneasy...

...Chrissy, the pathetic heroine of Boom Boom Room (all three women in Hurlyburly are Chdssy's sisters under the skin), conspires, consciously or accidentally, in her own de- struction...

...Voca me," he gasps, urging Salieri, whom he trusts, to write in some soft soprano voices to counterpoint the harsh percussion and trumpet notes of the "confutatis maledictis" phrase...

...The company plays the murdered man's platoon, a team of baseball players who have never seen a black officer before and who eye Rollins with worshipful gawking -- before he begins to interrogate them, that is...

...Davenport relates to the story as a lawyer and soldier but not as a black, leaving an emotional gap at the close...

...They make full opportunity...

...What emerges is not just whodunit, and that key to detective fiction, a motive, but competing visions of black history and future prospects...

...As the emperor, Jones provides some unexpected comic relief by his awkward geniality, his love of music but atrocious playing, and his affectionate references to "my sister Antoinette" offin France...

...The play is sprinkled with witty lines--verbal exercises in aggression, self-deprecation, incongruity--and with Commonweal: 558 platitudes of psychology and self-help that trail off into syntac- tical incoherence...

...Although the conclusion lacked the punch its menacing devel- opment promised, A Soldier's Story is the most trenchant study of racism in recent film, providing some.talented black actors with a rare chance to do something more than play the comic fool...

...10119184 t--__w 19 October 1984:559...

...a young priest who hears Salieri's story and has nothing to Offer but deadpan horror...

...I can imagine an audience laughing easily and openly at Hurlburly, borrowing the defenses but not the pain of the characters and turning them into satiric butts instead of sufferers...

...When Davenport encounters a white captain who has suppressed some evidence about some other white officers and demands, "Tell me what they told you," we have to take a deep breath, as in Sophie's Choice, before another contrived dip into the past...

...We see them in Hurlburly...

...But Waters's dominance also involves a problem, an over- reliance on flashbacks that wrecks the film's balance in its second half...

...Where it does go involves both suspense and surprise beyond the usual materials of the inquiry genre...

...At first the flashbacks work to heighten the mystery and suspense, and keep the relationships clear...

...he wants to make inferior blacks suffer and fail, and then, when they fall behind, to gloat that "there's one less fool for the race to be ashamed of...

...Far less successful are other supporting members of the cast: principally a shrill Elizabeth Berridge as Mozart's wife Constanze...

...The movie combines the talents of HowardRollins, Jr., who stole the show in a supporting role in Ragtime, and the Negro Ensemble Company, which manned Fuller's stage presentation...

...TOM O'BRIEN Stage I I PLEASANT DREAMS DIAGNOSTIC, NOT CURATIVE A NYONE WHO remembers the drunken sergeants in Streamers knows that playwright David Rabe can be funny, but the laughter in Stret~mers is laced with an- guish and ugliness...

...The film closes with Mozart composing the Dies lrae of the Requiem, or rather, issuing instructions from a deathbed from which he can no longer rise...

...The play takes place in a house in the Hollywood Hills shared by Eddie and Mickey, usually infested by Phil and Artie (everyone's favorite butt) and by the women they pass around...