Stage

...We haven't seen it for awhile...

...With a lustrous fish tail when wet and lissome legs when dry, Madison passes between nature and culture with a slightly subversive message...

...if you can hear moderately well, blink them twice...

...Andrzej stood motionless in the middle of the room, his one hand extended in a gesture of silence, though no one had spoken for minutes...

...The plot is hokey, the lines sometimes downright silly, but Splash is oddly moving and even a little bit instructive...

...It's funny, isn't it...

...By the second act, as the play worked its magic on me, Hoffman and Loman merged and the performance almost became the triumph that has been so widely heralded...

...Despite its ads -- featuring a luscious mermaid languorously draped across a beach like a Playboy sea-bunny -Splash is not sexploitational...

...Despite my reservations, the production should be seen by anyone who cares about Miller, Hoffman~ or the American theater...

...The words, coming through distant yet clear, had a mesmerizing effect on us, not so much by what they spoke, but simply by the fact that they spoke...

...CULTURE I UST WHEN you thought it was safe to go near the water, along comes Splash, a movie that seemed, from its publicity at least, like the first Disney film to merit an "R" rating...

...Willy Loman comes to mind because Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is back on Broadway, thirty-five years after it first appeared, in a production that has come to town on an avalanche of publicity set loose by Dustin Hoffman's presence as star...

...There's very little food...

...Real Polish bigos," said Uncle Zbyszek, advertising the dish to the foreigner...

...In the condemnatory context of this setting, the possibility of other rewards may seem doubtful...

...A brave voice emitting from a secreted and widely-hunted chamber had been transmitted clandestinely over the city' s air waves and spoken to the suffering of resurrection...

...It might be interesting to contemplate what Mamet's sense of the unreliability of language owes to Willy Loman's slippery verbal grasp on reality, but Death of a Salesman has been so often analyzed in classrooms and essays that, given the limitations of space, it is probably best to stick to this much praised production...

...In Mamet' s new play, Glengarry Glen Ross, his most accomplished work since Buffalo, there is no doubt that "the American ethic of business" is a central subject...

...Hoffman, as everyone who reads actor interviews knows, is a meticulous worker, concerned with the details of voice, gesture, dress as an indication of character...

...Although gorgeous and sensual, she is also more: a naif with no experience of civilization, its language, commerce, or mores...

...Andrzej manipulated the antenna...

...She could be wonderfully effective in some moments, but on occasion ---:" the infamous "little boat looking for a harbor" telephone scene is the best example -- she seemed to send her speeches, line by separate line, into the balcony like a batter knocking out flies...

...Warsaw is plentiful compared to S weibodzin," he said...

...The tone of the movie, the second effort of television sit-corn actor Ron Howard, so adroitly synthesizes comedy and romance that there is even room for something philosophical...

...Andrzej ran to turn off all the lights, and then blinked them three times...

...Yet there is a revealing scene in Act II in which Shelly, at the insistence of the only other salesman who understands the art of con, recounts his moves, his thoughts, his sense of triumph in closing a most unlikely sale...

...We had a view onto a back lot, so we could not gauge the response, though later we were to hear that the large ten-story apartment complexes to the south of us had twinkled like space stations...

...At eight we sat down to bigos, a sort of hunter's stew...

...Moreover, despite its Disney association (under the new label of Touchstone Films), Splash isn't childish either...

...At nine o'clock on frequency seven...

...This reading of the character alters the nature of the antagonism between him and his father, emphasizing still further the degree of delusion in Willy who cannot see Biff even when he wears his wounds openly...

...There is desperation in the successful salesmen as well as in the unsuccessful ones, as the intensity of the language indicates, and they are willing to feed on one another as obviously as they do on their customers...

...All we have in the shops are shelves of vinegar...

...Such an ending hardly offers the lift and warmth that American Buffalo does, but however negative the officer manager's emotion, it does signal that there are human beings here, trapped and struggling beneath the presumed primacy of money as motivation and reward...

...Joining us at the table was their son Andrzej, who was visiting from a small town outside Poznan...

...At the end of American Buffalo, after Teach's need has pushed him from words to violence, Donny rejects him and turns protectively to Bobby...

...and nearly ktoppled her tea...

...She gave instructions: if you can hear well, blink your apartment lights three times...

...Aunt Basia, a perennially dour woman, looked up from her knitting with a smile triumphant, and wordlessly we looked from one to another with marvel...

...This allows for some slapstick at beauty's expense when, for example, she grotesquely 4 May 1984" 2 79...

...The supporting parts are well played, and Ben Edwards's impressive set suggests, without copying, Jo Mielziner's marvelous original design...

...By Sunday, similar notices had appeared in most of the churches...

...it came in with a "PG...

...As often happens among Poles of different regions, they compared food stocks...

...In the second act, we listen as Shelly Levene, the fallen star -- beautifully played by Robert Prosky (but then the performances are uniformly fine) -- traps himself with a slip of his non-stop tongue, the aggressive beseeching of Act I having given way to crowing triumph over a presumably solid sale...

...It was a news broadcast in which the biggest news was the broadcast itself...

...The movie gets off to a slow start before its boy, meets-fish love story surfaces...

...Glengarry Glen Ross, which gets its name from a shady land development in Florida, concerns a group of salesmen in a sleazy real estate company for whom words are weapons -the blunt instruments of obscenity or the stilettos of lying locutions -- and victory is measured in psychological as well as material rewards...

...In Glengarry, too, human feeling is finally stronger than greed...

...These men are jackals, for whom customers are fair game, but in Shelly's tale there is a glimpse of the possibility of achievement, of professional pride...

...The office manager, who has been willing to accept Shelly's money in Act I, now turns him in for burglary.despite the escalation of the offered bribe...

...For these days real," said Aunt Basia...

...Bribery and theft are not even a giant's step away from the hard-sell tactics of their trade...

...Teach says in Amerif f can Buffalo...

...Business...

...His explanation: "I hate you...

...Actor John Candy provides some spice as Allen's effervescent and irreverent older brother Alex, but his pranks wear thin after about twenty minutes...

...Kate Reid's Linda was also troubling...

...For days after people talked not of what they had heard, but that they had heard (and how well they had heard), and not of what they would hear, but that they would hear, again...

...Real Polish wartime bigos," he corrected himself, and executed a head bow in deference to his wife...

...The decorations in this war are getting one's name on the board, and not to be there is to be banished to the company of losers where one is assigned mediocre leads which give little possibility of sales that might rescue one from failure...

...By the end of the first act, we have seen a star salesman devour a customer, watched a fallen star try to buy his way back to the board, and heard one salesman propose that another join him in burglarizing the office for the leads that can Commonweal: 278 be sold to another company...

...The revelation in the production is John Malkovich's Biff...

...Ha, real...

...That scene recalls a more famous salesman, the much gentler Willy Loman, whose product is presumably less suspect than Shelly's, and the conflict between doing and achieving in him, between sales as a personality trade and success in its most blatant manifestations...

...All weekend the citizens of Warsaw had been in expectation of another incarnation of sorts -- Solidarity' s. Walking in the Old Town on Saturday, we had seen a notice, taped to a wall, of the first underground radio broadcast, planned for this evening...

...Mamet, who contradicts himself from interview to interview, told the New York Times (January 15, 1978) that Buffalo "is about the American ethic of business," and so it is, although it is about many other things including, most importantly, the connection between language and behavior...

...What about toothpaste...

...At breakfast when my wife mentioned casually that the broadcast was tonight, her aunt cried...

...In the evening we went to dinner at Uncle Zbyszek and Aunt Basia's in Mokotow, the southern borough of Warsaw which, though we had no way of knowing _9 then, was to enjoy the greatest reception of the broadcast...

...As Teach says, "All that I'm saying, don't confuse business with pleasure...

...No shampoo...

...at five to, we all moved into the adjoining room...

...Toothpaste...

...When Madison the mermaid (Daryl Hannah) finally shows up, however, Splash begins to surge with a rhythm that alternates successfully between sarcasm and sentiment, kvetching and lyric poetry...

...The lines come in the middle of one of Teach's bursts of pseudorationality in which he uses loaded words to persuade Donny to abandon his young friend Bobby and make a deal with Teach...

...The deal in this, the best of Mamet's plays, is a burglary which, given the playwright's preoccupation with losers, is going to be a fiasco...

...Uncle Zbyszek fiddled with the dial of what looked like a prewar radio...

...I I Hill II Stage REWARDING SALESMEN NEW FROM MAMET, OLD FROM MILLER ~ll~~lHAT ARE we saying here...

...Love -- fatherly, avuncular, whatever -- has triumphed over the platitudes of success...

...if you have difficulty heating, blink them once...

...Yet the performance disturbed me because I was too conscious at first of the actor at work, more aware of Dustin Hoffman in disguise than of Willy Loman...

...It's not a necessity," he said, then added laughing, " I f you don't eat, what do you need toothpaste for...

...So that's where it is...

...He and Uncle Zbyszek began checking their watches a good twenty minutes before nine...

...Mamet introduces his characters in three scenes, set in a Chinese restaurant, in which one of each of the three pairs is an almost uncontrollable voice washing over the relative taciturnity of the other...

...It didn't matter that barely any news was reported (the announcer turned the segment over to a balladeer...

...A prelude details the empty life of one Allen (Torn Hanks), who wanders aimlessly from relationship to relationship...

...his mother, seated in the comer, took up her knitting, my wife and I settled on the couch...

...His Willy is carefully conceived, moving abruptly from expectant glee to sullen hurt to sudden anger, all appropriate to the character...

...The vocal softness in Malkovich which could be heard through the crudeness of his Lee in True West, particularly in the television version, is here transformed into a vulnerability that shows us just how much Biff has lost of "the old humor, the old confidence...

...GERALD WEALES I I I I I I I I I Screen MERMAIDS & MONKEYS NATURE VS...

...There was a terrible burst of static ("Just like during the Occupation," said Uncle Zbyszek) before a female voice came through that we knew as "ours...