Stage

...early fourteenth-century Tuscan representations of women...

...The opening methodological section may try to do too much...

...Bits of Foucault, Sassure-via-Barthes, Victor and Edith Turner, Clifford Geertz, Gadamer (all the "usual suspects") surface in text and notes...

...Precisely because artifacts are mute, their messages are multivalent...

...Stage ALL IN THE FAMILY 'PRECIOUS SONS' G EORGE FURTH'S Precious Sons is an old-fashioned play, suggesting the period in which it is set...

...At the end of the first act, Fred and Bea have a wild and presumably characteristic fight in which Bea not only smashes dishes and rips her clothes, but turns over a heavy china cupboard...

...But Cardinal Lustiger's closest, call has come within the church of France...

...At the end of the play, he turns down the advancement that would take him away from Chicago, blesses his actor son, and makes a tiny gesture of defiance by leaving open a door on the untidiness that his wife wants to screen from the guests who have begun to arrive to celebrate the marriage of which he disapproves...

...This is a modified happy ending to a play that does not need it...

...A similar soapiness predominated in the book Furth did for Stephen Sondheim's Company (1970...

...The play would be more honest with its material if it conveyed something of the horror of Strindberg's The Father...

...If, to paraphrase P6guy, the mystique hasn't once again degenerated into politique, it is because both sides are in the last analysis guided by their love of the Church and their respect for each other...

...There are two plays at war within Furth's script: the tougher one finally falls victim to a sense of popular drama that has marked most of Furth's work...

...Nell Gifford.Martin static and, further, that one must evaluate the variable relations between "message given" and "message received...

...There is a distinctly airless quality about the theology that the harbingers of the French spiritual renewal rely upon, as well as a certain contempt for mundane historical reality...

...Because historical method and hermeneutics are simultaneously up for revision, as preface to a programmatic analysis of non-verbal texts, the tbrm 25 April 1986:249...

...In the scene in which his son announces his run-away marriage, Fred goes silent...

...Lustiger is a strong man for whom, in Tillich's further words, "Love...

...It is telling that one of Lustiger's key supporters -- the philosopher JeanLuc Marion, co-founder of the French edition of Communio -- looked forward to the right's return to power, not because he or Lustiger supports the right, but so that the church in Paris might demonstrate its distance from a conservative government...

...The real victory in Precious Sons belongs neither to Bea nor to the playwright but to Ed Harris, who has created a wonderfully complex wounded creature out of the materials that Furth has given him...

...The playwright and the performers create a sense of family out of and beyond the constant bickering...

...The only tools, according to the author, are a skilled eye, an active and sympathetic imagination, and long practice...

...is an element of strength...

...In the second act, once again in control, she reveals that she has either acceded to or maneuvered the decisions by which the sons avoid the father's desire that they get the education he thinks they need to do better than he has done with his life...

...one has the feeling at times ,~ having stepped into a tennis stroke on the wrong foot...

...Suddenly, she seems genuinely demented, as crazy as Fred keeps saying she is...

...The characters, particularly the parents, Fred and Bea, are somewhat raunchier than their counterparts would have been in the late 1940s, but otherwise Furth's attention to period detail and midwestern idiom gives his play the verisimilitude expected in the heyday of that genre...

...Augustine on the Body was published in 1979 in the American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series, followed in 1981 by Fullness of Life: Historical Foundations for a New Asceticism (Westminster...

...The historian who chooses to spread her net more broadly than texts must proceed aware of the elusiveness of her object and the strong possibility of projecting a desired outcome upon materials of the past...

...Up to this point, Bea appears as a comically querulous nag, catering to her husband and sons even as she abuses them...

...My doubts about Precious Sons as a play do not extend to Judith Ivey and Ed Harris as Bea and Fred...

...Professor Miles's territory is the space where reading and seeing might meet...

...Fred, on the surface at least, is a cocky man, playfully Commonweal: 248insulting his wife, rough-housing with his older son, teasing his unresponsive younger one...

...He is also prone to ulcers and uncertainty, and to sudden indications of the love he has for all of them, offered in embarrassment and usually rejected...

...With those qualifications in mind, Ms...

...To be fair to Furth, the final, small upbeat gestures may not be the playwright's attempt to tidy the situation for a likable curtain, but the character's way of papering over their despair...

...The neo-orthodox imagination" confronts "the 'Word of God' in an empirically inaccessible realm...

...Professor Miles's own field is Western Christian history of doctrine, and her accomplishments in that field are already considerable...

...But concrete human beings do not exist in such a realm...

...In the words of Ren6 R6mond, the distinguished French historian and strong Lustiger supporter, "His actions and reactions are intuitive, but they can be dead wrong...

...It suggests that what Precious Sons is about is a strong woman's holding her family together against the wishes and without the knowledge of her insufficient husband...

...Indeed the cardinal has been "lucky," but luck isn't all or most of the explanation of his success...

...For the moment, Paris is an exciting spiritual place to be...

...A pre-opening interview with Ivey indicated that her character was being softened somewhat so that she would hot come across as a complete monster...

...Furth's Broadway touches in Precious Sons come in the firstact and final curtains...

...One, fresh out of high school, gets married, thus assuring that he will go on the assembly line, not to college...

...My very weak recollection of Twigs (1971) is that it consisted of conventional sketches valuable only as a chance for Sada Thompson to show her ingenuity as a performer (and perhaps to indicate that she would eventually be ready for the high-toned schmaltz of television's Family...

...She seeks a "historical hermeneutic" -- a method of historical study that could encompass both visual and verbal sources without reducing one to the other...

...The force working for and against the three of them is the wife and mother, a determined, manipulative, sometimes hysterical woman who knows what she wants and gets it...

...The sense of pain and loss in the character, Fred, is conveyed less by his lines than by the abrupt changes in the way Harris carries himself, his macho strut giving way to a sag of weariness, his mocking tough-guy mask splashed suddenly with hurt...

...After all, Bea's victory must be almost as empty for her as it is for us...

...What the play really seems to be and to avoid being is the sardonic story of a woman who saves her home, her security, by cutting loose her two sons (perhaps by sending them where they want to go) and destroying her husband in the process...

...Certainly the far right -- the Lepenistes (followers of Le Pen) and the intdgristes (followers of Lefebvre) -- are incomparably more critical of "the Jew," as one reactionary speaker called Lustiger, than are the Communists or the Socialists...

...Unlike the characters in the backward-looking Biloxi Blues, those of Furth -- except perhaps for the son who, like Chicago-born Furth, goes off to be an actor -- seem the product of observation rather than theatrical stereotype...

...No one in the' archdiocese seems to be familiar with the kind of serious criticism that Peter Berger, for instance, makes of Christian neo-orthodoxy in his remarkable The Heretical Imperative...

...Berger's words are more relevant to the philosophers and theologians around Communio than to Lustiger himself, whose mind is actually far from closed to new ideas in theology though no longer much concerned with the "intellectual doubt" of his student days...

...N EVERTHELESS, the chief worry to my mind isn't politics without, but rather within, the church and the faith...

...GERALD WEALES Books: WITH A TUTORED EYE I MAGE AS INSIGHT is a work of exploration...

...He has been very lucky so far...

...and followed by application to the twentieth century...

...I doubt that he is as aware as many of his allies are that in his early years as archbishop he very nearly permanently divided his diocese and indeed the entire French church...

...Neither the cardinal nor his adversaries have permitted the classic antinomies -- Gallican/ ultramontane, progressive/conservative -- to divide them definitively...

...Professor Miles notes that the relation between texts and images is not given or IMAGE AS INSIGHT VISUAL UNDERSTANDING IN WESTERN CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR CULTURE Margaret R. Miles Beacon Press, $24.95, 200 pp...

...A realistic play with a clearly discernible plot, it takes place in Chicago in 1949 and, in four scenes spread across three days, it tells the story of the brief hope and discarded dreams of a working-class father who passes up his chance for promotion and watches his sons go off to destinations other than the ones he set for them...

...and the conflict over visual expressions in the sixteenth century...

...Ivey's impressive performance in an unattractive role is more than matched by Ed Harris's Fred...

...If that is the play at hand, then why the first-act histrionics, except as a high-note on which to bring down the curtain...

...Her demonstrations are preceded by a methodological chapter...

...In theory, "the denial of reality is always a bad place to begin...

...Not only does she refuse to leave Chicago, but she convinces Fred of his inability to do the job offered him even though his immediate boss and the head of the company think that, even without a college education, he can handle the more demanding position...

...the other goes into the road company of A Streetcar Named Desire rather than to the difficult but desirable Lab School at the University of Chicago...

...the anger and defeat in Harris's walk as he moves around the room and out the door says more than any exposition could about Fred's own youthful marriage and what it has become and about his disappointment in and for the son who does not, and cannot understand yet what he has done...

...Ivey indicates Bea's areas of vulnerability, but there is never any doubt outside the fight scene that she controls what is going on in that house...

...Nor is it even the strength of his personality, for strength alone, as Paul Tillich noted in one of his finest sermons, is dangerous: "Strength without love destroys, first others, then itself...

...She is, according to the publisher's press release, "the first tenured woman professor in the three-hundred-year history of the Harvard Divinity School...

...Nevertheless, Lustiger has more than once failed to keep in mind the political context, or assumed he could "transcend" it, and has appeared publicly as the ally of right-wing parties with whom, in truth, he has nothing in common...

...Miles chooses to demonstrate the possibility of a visual/verbal interpretation within three areas in which her own exposure is strongest: church architecture and its decoration in Constantinian Rome...

...His dependence on her at the end of the play suggests Doc's reliance on Lola at the conclusion of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba...