Stage:

...Her husband is a born-again Christian who talks of the comfort of Jesus, but whose Christian Industries embraces and then abandons Isobel and her company...

...He also drives away the actor signed to play the father and takes over the role himself...

...An invigorating martyrdom...

...Her desire to withdraw, to find a quiet place (the play begins with her sitting alone in her dead father's bedroom), and the restraint which (Continued on page 676) (Continued from page 671) she brings to even her most assertive gestures make her a character for whom action is reaction...

...Now he announces to the assembled players, "you are my family," and, as the director takes us stammeringly into the rehearsal, we see that a new disaster is aborning...

...Perhaps Isobel's goodness has broken through Marion's shell...

...However tantalizing as a character, Isobel never achieves the force, the presence of those who surround her...

...he reduces the director to the stuttering boy who could never face his own disapproving father...

...When one of the characters grumbles that he had forgotten that country-house England spent its weekends slaughtering innocent animals, his remarks are more than an explanation of the sounds for the audience...

...family and has tried with no success to find a substitute for them in theater after theater across the country...

...Not even Blair Brown's attractive performance can quite bridge the empathetic divide...

...She is an official in the Conservative government and, as Frances Conroy wonderfully plays her, she dresses, speaks, and moves like Margaret Thatcher at her iciest...

...The title describes the ecstasy of that moment when a nun is united with Christ...

...Add that the engulfing interests are represented by Isobel's sister and her brother-in-law, and it becomes clear that The Secret Rapture is another mixture of the psychological and the political, recalling earlier Hare plays like Knuckle (1974), Plenty (1978), and A Map of the World (1983...

...Her choice is a political one...

...In a final scene, set three years later in a television studio in Hollywood, we meet most of the principals again, learn specifically and unnecessarily what actually happened, and get satirical comment on the mock-seriousness of concerned TV that begins to pull us toward the political Feiffer...

...This time, his protagonist is a father and a successful Broadway playwright...

...She is not a parody, but an evocation of the prime minister which gives a clear indication of Marion's pretend sense of her self and what unquestioning assurance means to contemporary England...

...The character certainly does not, since Isobel is killed by her lover...

...We are to assume that Isobel, who seems a simple character, is in fact a complex one, one who recognizes that the connections among human beings are never easy to define...

...Up to this point, Feiffer's comedy has fed his serious theme...

...For this reason, a distance remains between Isobel and her family, her lover and, unfortunately, the audience...

...in the last scene, that theme although still visible is obscured by a fairly obvious guying of television...

...yet Hare tells Nightingale that he chose it "because it's about death...

...A religious element would be a surprise in Hare's work unless it were metaphorical, a psychological or political discovery by Marion...

...Anthony Rose turns up in Kansas City, where a revival of a twenty-five-year-old play of his, The Parent Lesson, is in rehearsal, and proceeds to rewrite it, making the father, who long ago abandoned his children, into a sympathetic character, and the grown sons, his victims, into his cruel accusers...

...He may not like to think so, but he has thus allied himself with the weekend hunters, as Isobel, the play's protagonist, makes clear with the first-act curtain line, "The guns are getting nearer...

...As one would expect, Feiffer's play is knowledgeably amusing about the ways of actors and writers, the process of creating and staging plays, but its primary concern is with the family as inevitable trap...

...Nightingale says that Hare wants to "draw attention to the unpretentious private good which, he feels, has somehow managed to endure in an increasingly tough, predatory Britain...

...It is a very effective moment, a fine open-ended ending that leaves what is coming to the audience's imagination...

...There is often a difficulty with Hare heroines...

...I've noticed that goodness tends to make people shifty, and makes those with bad consciences feel judged even when they're not being judged at all," says Hare, who makes that point capture perhaps more often than necessary by having the brittle sister, the alcoholic mother-in-law, and the rejected lover react to unvoiced criticism...

...At the end, Marion cries out for her sister to come home, but the audience never knows whether or in what form there is an answer...

...The grumbler is a young artist who has just helped sacrifice his company and his boss Isobel, the woman he loves to money interests who will destroy the integrity of their design firm by smothering it in the platitudes of financial growth...

...For example, is the protagonist of Plenty an idealist wrecked by society or simply a very destructive woman...

...Her sister Marion has been confused and hurt by a world that she cannot understand as she says late in the play and she has chosen to reduce the intricacies of life to encompassing formulas...

...If, like Anthony Rose, Feiffer decides to rewrite, I hope he drops the final scene...

...While David Hare drives his psychological/political vehicle to an uncertain destination, Jules Feiffer, who shares Hare's obessions with psychology and politics, shows that he prefers to run on two tracks...

...At the end of the play, Marion has put aside her Thatcher suit for a gentler black dress of mourning and has restored her father's living room as it was when he died...

...Or a living room...

...STAGE FAULTY FAMILIES 'RAPTURE' & 'ANTHONY ROSE' The sound of shotguns can be heard offstage during the final scene of the first act of David Hare's The Secret Rapture playing at the Barrymore Theatre in New York...

...and wins the woman whom the original script assigned to one of the sons...

...In Rapture Hare wants to avoid that kind of ambiguity as Benedict Nightingale indicates in an interview piece with the playwright {New York Times, October 22) by insisting on Isobel's goodness and concentrating on the way it is received...

...She has used anger and aggression to impose a bogus rationality on the irrationalities of life...

...The brother-in-law, who says he has been out of touch with Jesus recently, describes the room as a copy of what it was, an uninspirited restoration...

...Death...

...In the next-to-last scene, Rose reveals that he has abandoned his own (ungrateful...

...In interviews in the Philadelphia Inquirier (October 15 and October 22), Feiffer talked mostly about politics, but in his new play, Anthony Rose, which had its premiere at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, he is once again enmeshed in the parents-and-children concatenation that last engrossed him on stage in Grown Ups (1981...

...GERALD weale...

...Yet, does it endure...

...Unfortunately, the play does not end there...