Stage

...In any case, the two characters are inundated by devices and never become people whose self-inflicted pain can move us...

...When the program was printed, the time was "The Present," but events in Nicaragua made it necessary for the producers to stick on a label (" 1988") narrowing the time of the play...

...Much of the evening consists of comic exposition, an account of how they met, melded, stayed together, married-a disquisition that I found only mildly interesting not because theirs is a butch-femme relationship but because I have no real taste for other people's sex lives...

...Anyone who has read (or seen) Mueller's Five in the Killing Zone knows that she has a good ear for military dialogue...

...All this adds up to a calendar and to an indictment of an America formed by men like Alfred who, in the end, becomes a victim of his own creation...

...More an extended-attenuated, one might say-nightclub sketch than a play, Anniversary Waltz was put together and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, two of the three women who make up the Split Britches Company...

...value in the use of photographic projections, and the Wilma has a passion for theatrical gimmicks...

...The Shaw-Weaver narrative was interrupted by scenes in which the performers-each taking her turn in male drag-played conventional love duets-popular songs, a bit from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-lip-synching to recorded material...

...At the end, they can separate-Mark to his wife, Kim to her post-Mark life...

...Lavonne Mueller's Violent Peace, developed by The Women's Project, is the last of her war trilogy...

...But since the play is not about role-playing, except as all life is, there seems little point to this stage device...

...Lesbian couples are presumably subject to as much Sturm und Drang as heterosexual couples, but you would not know that from Anniversary Waltz...

...Judging by most celebrity biographies and the attention given to the Trump triangle and Rob Lowe's video adventures, I am in the minority...

...Neither her skill with the spoken word nor the solid performances by Jenny Robertson and Dennis Parlato can keep the characters from coming across only as representative figures in a political statement that is even less clear than the one in Victoria and Albert...

...It takes place in a hotel room in Kansas City in which a young woman, the daughter of a general whose funeral has just taken place, locks up an army officer so that the two of them can rummage through their shared past...

...The most ambitious of the three is Donald Freed's Alfred and Victoria: A Life, which had its East Coast premiere at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater...

...Between scenes, the stage is flooded with changing images and voices, setting the political, social, and cultural atmosphere of the year about to be presented...

...The enthusiastic audience with whom I saw the piece-at the Women's Theatre Festival at the University of Pennsylvania just before the team moved on to an engagement at La Mama-confirmed my minority status...

...Like many solo performing artists-Spalding Gray, Mike Feder-who find their material in their own lives, Shaw and Weaver offer what the publicity release calls "a hilarious romp through a long-term relationship...

...However realistic the dialogue, the setting is as arbitrary and as artificial as the one in Sartre's No Exit...

...More than just time lies between these works and an innocently knowing 1950s play like Jan de Hartog's The Fourposter...

...Each of the three being reviewed here features a couple and deals with love and sex within the intimidating context of American society-or one segment of it...

...They have reached a "violent peace," a term, Mueller says in a program note, borrowed from the Pentagon description of actions in Central America ("It's a peace that entails a lot of bloodshed...

...Their long relationship has produced only a dead child and resentment and pain on both sides...

...In brief scenes that cover twelve years beginning in 1968, we see Alfred hiring Vicki for S & M games, teaching her to read and understand classics (a form of domination), forcing her to abort a child she wants, finally becoming softly attached to her...

...This is not a gratuitous borrowing since Mueller, who was raised an army brat, sees Kim and Mark, as a couple, as the product of a world in which the general, a distant power figure to both of them, is a dangerous and disruptive presence-as the American military is in Central America...

...GERALD WEALESWEALES...

...It is difficult to tell whether the playwright or the director, Blanka Zizka, was responsible for the choices that went into the connecting collages and the babble of voices...

...The titular couple is not the dear queen and her consort, but Alfred Bloomingdale, one of those California millionaires who helped create Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and his mistress...

...As Inquest, Freed's play on the Rosenbergs, indicates, the playwright finds dramatic (didactic...

...Shaw and Weaver are amusing performers (Shaw had a nice bit as a ventriloquist's dummy), but Anniversary Waltz is primarily political-if not quite in the manner of Alfred and Victoria and Violent Peace...

...Alfred triumphs over the author...

...In direct conversation and in flashbacks, which do not work very well, we learn that Mark has been nanny, cook, teacher, and confidant to Kim since she was a small motherless child...

...In the final scene-a confusing phantasmagoria of light and movement as played at the Wilma-money is the dominating image...

...It is a celebratory declaration in the face of an essentially homophobic society...

...Freed said in an interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer that he saw the play as a love story, but Alfred insists through much of the play that power and property, not love, are what the world is about...

...Before the play begins and between scenes, we see the two actors making-up, dressing, preparing for the scene they are about to perform...

...Funny the first time, it was a device that quickly wore thin...

...In time, they became lovers as well, and Mark, who thinks she deserted him for a civilian on a motorcycle, learns that she has had his child and buried it with the dogtags he had given her...