Stage

...Aunt Dan and Lemon is a teaching play of sorts, but the lesson of the play is not the one that the title characters are teaching...

...28 March 1986:181...

...the escape is a good example of light mock-heroic, as the older woman dodges her pursuers in a bus station...

...For more information regarding the association and a brochure on the conference, write: The Pastoral Ministry Program, P.O...

...The Dan whom we see holding forth to the mesmerized Lemon, at age eleven, is vigorous, raunchy, funny, vituperative...

...Lemon's mother is the only character in the play whose feelings and ideas oppose those of Aunt Dan and Lemon...

...When I read the work, Jane came across not only as a good-hearted and well-organized woman, but as one whose kindness helps to cripple the inept Sheila, doing good to her as David would to the residents of his incipient project...

...It is for editors to present their aims and to defend their choices, but not to assess their achievements...

...Conference speakers will be Dolores Leckey, Leonard Doohan, Emilie Griffin, Dick Westley, Rosemary Haughton, and Elizabeth Dreyer, as well as outstanding professionals who minister in the marketplace...

...Add that the material of Lemon's speeches -- a rumination on human nature that becomes a defense of the Holocaust -- is necessarily offensive to many members of the audience...

...Drama, the old textbooks tells us, is fueled by conflict, but Wallace Shawn has played an impressive variation on that assumption...

...By the end of the play, Sheila and Colin have separated, but Colin seems no more alone than he did with Sheila, and, as usual, she seems poised on the edge of great expectations...

...David's chief supporter is Sheila, Colin's wife...

...My father happened to be in the audience, and after it was over he sent up a note introducing himself...

...It dies of petty municipal squabbling, public indifference, changing tastes and, most of all, the overt opposition of David's friend, Colin, who acts less from principle than from an inherent desire to tear down...

...Box 4242, The College of St...

...But the question arises, is this a satisfactory description...

...Nevertheless, it attains individuality because of the strong central performance, and the pathos it achieves at portraying old age and its search for roots...

...Most of the characters have changed their own ideas on the matter by the end of the play...

...Lemon is an odd extension of Aunt Dan and her friends...

...The most painful scene in the early part of the film shows him allowing his wife to abuse his mother over a recipe...

...While both Waterston as David, and Simon Jones as Colin do commendable jobs, it is the performances of the two actresses that most define the play...

...Perhaps one advantage of The Wind and the Rain was that it was not a house journal like The Month run by the Jesuits, or Blackfriars run by the Dominicans...

...He maintained, too, that the price of freedom was that some would always abuse it, and when he was asked what it was that distinguished Ampleforth from other public schools he replied, "We educate our boys for death by way of a Christian life...

...Glenn Close is predictably the comforting and able woman, but the dark side of the character surfaces mainly in her scenes with Waterston...

...The project is never built...

...There is no one on stage to say an effective no to Lemon...

...Heard is eager to please and puts up with his wife's bossiness, saving his filial tenderness for midnight hot milk...

...Page (who has received her eighth Oscar nomination for her performance) plays Carrie Watts, living in tight quarters in Houston in the late 1940s with her son (John Heard) and spoiled, termagantish daughter-in-law Jessie Mac (Carlin Glynn...

...Paul, Minnesota BIRTHING: DELIVERING THE MINISTER IN EVERY CHRISTIAN DAR LA LUZ: PARTEAR EL MINISTRO EN CADA CRISTIANO l l l l Sculpture by Paul Granlund A new church is being born in which more of God's people are becoming aware of their own unique call and gift of ministry...

...As played, Benefactors is an invasion play, like Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, in which the refugees take over and redesign their refuge...

...It contrasts perfectly with Jessie Mac's late forties', svelte, high-shouldered scarlet suit...

...For his Rule makes it clear that educating boys or the brethren is neither a more nor a less monastic occupation than tending the crops or looking after the cattle...

...The play begins and ends with long monologues -- very long ones (the closing speech runs almost eight pages in the printed play) -- and American audiences are not supposed to be able to listen so attentively...

...If our magazine had antecedents they were Bernard Wall's The Colosseum or Martin Turnell's Arena, although in 1941 we had heard of neither...

...The tension in Aunt Dan and Lemon is between audience and characters...

...Ampleforth is listed in Whitaker's Almanac and elsewhere as a public school...

...That was a view I put forward in a lecture on "little reviews," which I gave in 1953...

...In the scenes that follow, we see her friend Mindy sell herself for money and then, as a paid killer, murder a man...

...Join us in St...

...The film's surface isn't bountiful: it even echoes other recent Texas movies like Places in the Heart, using some of the same locations, and, at one point, the same central hymn, "Blessed Assurance...

...Directed by Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful succeeds where his painfully understated study of Texas, 1918, failed: finding human wealth in meager settings...

...Ebullient David and efficient Jane, against their better judgments, look after, shore up, feed, and comfort acidulous Colin and helpless, hapless Sheila...

...so unmistakably Shawn, physically and stylistically, the author-actor gave so forceful a reading of Lemon's father that he carded the character into the other, smaller roles he played...

...As Lemon makes her way through her thickets of logical illogic, we can almost see again Aunt Dan, aroused by Mindy's account of murder, reaching out caressingly to touch the lips that tell so enticing a tale...

...Paul, Minnesota, 55105, or call Kathy Northrop at {303) 988-2222...

...Not only are these people willing to kill to protect their own view of the correct and comfortable life, but the killing itself is pleasing...

...Her long speech, which begins as a reasoned political statement, turns increasingly self-revelatory as her attack on the "filthy, slimy worms" who criticize Kissinger calls up a vocabulary that reveals her own attraction to violence, to blood, to corruption...

...I I Stage I II BOBBING & INVADING AUNT DAN & BENEFACTORS T HE SUCCESS of Aunt Dan and Lemon is something of a surprise since Wallace Shawn does not make things easy for the audience...

...While some of us minister in ecclesial settings, most people minister in the marketplace...

...At the end she says, "And yes...

...He had a strong distaste for that rigidity of mind, popular among some educationalists, which says that every moment of a boy's life must be planned...

...The story simply involves an old Texas woman (Geraldine Page) desperate to see her old farm before she dies...

...the desires of the present residents are of no importance in his grand scheme of doing good by building well...

...Add, too, that the rest of the play consists of set pieces, most of them by Aunt Dan, or brief scenes, presumably intended as thematic illustrations rather than emotionally absorbing mini-dramas...

...Lemon is a young woman in her twenties, a recluse living largely on fruit and vegetable juices (a wall of jars full of colored liquids looms behind her, interior decoration as threat) and filling her days with memories -- most of them second28 March 1986:179hand, having been received from Aunt Dan's stories -- and from books about the Nazis...

...lives as well...

...His aim was not so much to impart information, though he assuredly did that, as to stimulate a lively debate among us...

...He was...

...As the play opens, Lemon invites the audience ("little children") into her "little flat," into her life...

...The production is generally well-performed, although Sam Waterston's accent is at first disconcerting...

...It is worth the price of admission to see Mary Beth Hurt moving her proper, humble Sheila crabwise into the lives of David and Jane...

...Catherine, St...

...We soon discovered that it was easier to find exciting poems and stories than exciting religious articles...

...Page wants to go home (to an old run-down farm) one more time before she dies, and thereby hangs the tale...

...That at least was the effect of the scenes when I saw the play, primarily because the doubling of the roles never allowed much differentiation in the characters...

...Yet the softness of Lemon's mother is no match for the violence of Lemon's father or the overriding power of Aunt Dan's pseudo-rationality...

...Years of ecclesiastical censorship in England had sent underground independent Catholic thought...

...Paul to acknowledge the pain, celebrate the life and nurture the growth of the emerging church...

...He had the power to make each one of us feel an individual, and in 1952 when Ampleforth celebrated its 150th anniversary there was not an old boy who returned whom he did not instantly recognize...

...The private story-is where Frayn's playwriting heart lies...

...I was...

...David is an architect who, eighteen years before the play's now, is commissioned to design a public housing project that will provide living space for many more families than live in the decaying semi-detached villas of an 1890s experiment in suburban development...

...Certainly had that been so, The Windand the Rain would not have come into existence...

...Small bits count for everything here, even the way Page keeps secretly admiring and then stealthily stuffing the check back into her baggy flower-print dress...

...Catherine, St...

...The editors of over thirty journals, nearly all religious and mainly Catholic, were to reject Simone Weil's work before it at last found a place in The Wind and the Rain...

...B ENEFACTORS, like Aunt Dan and Lemon, takes place in a then-and-now intermeshing of events, but the rememberers here are the four main characters...

...Although the underlying debate about goals and means is a serious one, Michael Frayn's play takes no position on the subject...

...For him, the project is a problem to be solved...

...Commonweal: 180Benefactors may not be as fascinating or as serious as Aunt Dan and Lemon, but it is an interesting play impressively performed...

...Their playfulness masks a lack of genuine connection (the appeal of Mindy for one of the characters is that "she never asked anyone for anything but money") which becomes in Lemon an almost complete separation from other people...

...An alert student of mine suggested that her name indicates that she is living on her own not very nutritious substance...

...As a boy I had no doubt that Fr...

...Or, will there always be an uneasy sense of compromise...

...Shortly after you were born," he told me, "GK used to bounce you on his knee...

...In a memorable line of Auden's that I have quoted before, it is a case of bringing together "the real world of theology and horses...

...He was happy...

...Colin has the tacit and sometimes overt support of David's wife, Jane, who believes in the rehabilitation of buildings and...

...Our greatest encouragement for the policies which we were pursuing at Ampleforth came from a lecture that Barbara Ward gave to the school in which she suggested that the Catholic ghetto mentality ofthe last century had been replaced in this century by an exclusive Catholic club mentality ("Will he join us...

...I was happy[" Unfortunately, this important last speech of hers was almost lost in production by the positioning of Jane and David on stage and by Glenn Close's oddly quiet reading...

...One readily understands Page's determination to escape her neoGothic imprisonment, where she has to conceal her pension check to succeed at escape...

...When I was a boy I used to hear it said that Ampleforth was "a school for the sons of Catholic gentlemen" -- which seemed to me both inaccurate and snobbish...

...The trick is to step past her surface appeal, actually to listen to her words...

...The play is about public and private benefaction and what it does to giver and receiver alike...

...She is certainly no match for Mary Beth Hurt's Sheila...

...All of us struggle to identify our call...

...Can a school which is primarily both monastic and Catholic be also a public school...

...Rather, in retrospect, I now see Ampleforth as a school (and I am using that term in the widest sense) for the sons of St...

...Later, when we talked and tried to bridge the many years since we had seen each other, he said that my view of editorship would have pleased Chesterton...

...GERALD WEALES Screen I I TITLE PAGE A TRIP TO REMEMBER T HE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is short on plot, but long on character...

...W' HEN I THINK BACK tO my days at Ampleforth, this seems the place to say something of my headmaster...

...Her explanation of who she is and how she got that way will presumably enlighten us about what human beings are truly like...

...Foote lightens the tone by avoiding stereotypes and providing some comedy...

...She even turns her back on the dying Dan, whose condition might demand some sacrifice...

...This was particularly obvious in the case of Shawn himself...

...Jessie Mac is genuinely concerned when she fears her mother-in-law is having a heart attack...

...As Linda Hunt played her, she was so alive, so vital that the audience (I, at least) was initially taken in by her charm...

...Hurt's is a remarkable creation...

...Dan's own sexual adventures are depicted as similarly unfeeliqg if not so venal...

...The underside of Dan is already detectable in her amusing first speeches, but not as clearly visible and audible as in her long defense of Henry Kissinger, whom she admires as a doer whose ability to make decisions is more important than the moral or immoral implications of his choices...

...Some members of the audience, judging by reviews and comments in the theater, reject the play without realizing how carefully Shawn has devised the work as an ally of the audience against the characters and their ideas...

...Paul Nevill belonged to the great tradition of headmasters...

...Had we known it, our definition of theology was close to Richard Hooker's in the seventeenth century: "the science of things 'divine.' "For note in employing the word "divine" Hooker avoids the limitations which the term "Christian" might have implied...

...Looking back at the beginning of the play, she says, "He was happy then...

...Jane, more in control of herself and her life, recognizes her loss as well...

...Dan's refusal to consider compassion as a necessary ingredient in the decision-making process becomes for Lemon an acceptance and finally an embracing of evil...

...Later on, Emil Brunner, Gandhi, and Jacques Maritain were to be contributors...

...The actress has developed a bowing, bobbing walk for Sheila and a grating laugh that turn her into an aggressor whose uncertainty and 'lack of assurance become oppressive...

...David and Jane are still together, but not close, and David, the most obvious victim of their good deeds, is deflated by his professional failure and reduced to assuring the audience that they are "happy enough...

...Benedict -- both lay and religious...

...The audience, unless it is seduced by the plausibility of Aunt Dan and her peculiar pupil, has to do its own rejecting...

...Under Foote's direction, Page conveys a fine sureness of tone here, poised perfectly i i TENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON LAY MINISTRY LA DECIMA CONFERENCIA NACIONAL SOBRE MINISTERIO LAICO Sponsored by THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR LAY MINISTRY Patrocinado por LA ASOCIACION NACIONAL PARA EL MINISTERIO LAICO JUNE 3-6, 1986 The College of St...

...At first glance, Aunt Dan appears to be a marked contrast to the emotionally desiccated Lemon whose experiences are largely vicarious and whose deliberate speech, in Kathryn Pogson's compelling performance, underscores the death-inlife quality of the character...

...So we invited her to write about secular and religious freedom in our third number, and in our fourth issue we had Clifford Bax discussing Buddhism and the Buddhist attitude towards the soul...

...Once a week he taught the IVth form a subject called modern history and would take as his starting point some item of news from The Times...