Stage

...played body-and-mind games...

...The moviemakers never expect to touch bottom, but they show us marvels and monstrosities as we follow their cord many fathoms deep...

...No, this movie is a plumb line lowered by its creators into the depths of human nature...

...Does this man still carry his burden...

...Sometimes all the photographer gives is a series of legs and feet struggling to dig into a muddy slope...

...Sam is shepherded by Bud, a bright Irish Catholic lawyer, who admires Sam and his WASP connections (the old-boy network), but does not want Sam to look too preppy for the general public...

...1986...

...It seems inconceivable...

...I do not make pictures to give anybody a bad conscience," he told Wald...

...In another, six women in flowing saris and splendid headdresses clear a canal under construction by carrying the dirt out in wok-like pans balanced on their heads...

...States of Shock, which played a limited run at the American Place Theatre, is set at some unspecified time in which the United States is being destroyed by an unidentified war, represented by bombing attacks (courtesy of the sound and lighting designers), vigorous percussion work, and news of offstage and onstage shortages...

...The exhibit opens with a 1986 series of photographs from Brazil's Serra Pelada gold mine...

...His indictment of class has special resonance since Sam's oldboy network once controlled--and still does to some extent--the levers of power in this country...

...Therein lies the problem...

...The exhibit, which opened in San Francisco and moved on to The International Photography Center in New York, is now on view in Norfolk...

...He is concentrating on securing the final rung and then moving onto the ledge...

...Like Cartier-Bresson and Evans, Salgado's subjects are people tested by events and made memorable by the artist's attention and discretion...

...This kind of scene is a natural in the theater and the audience inevitably roots for Sam's rebirth, but Gumey, as though he distrusts the sentimentality of the occasion, mixes Sam's speech with Bud's phone call to his wife in which the event is analyzed as it takes place...

...Much of the play is taken up with the Colonel's attempt to restage the scene with toy soldiers and tableware so that, as he keeps insisting, he can understand how his son's death happened...

...It should not be missed...

...At the end of the play, when Stubbs gets up, in more ways than one, conquering both deficiencies, and the Colonel retreats to the wheel chair, the play reverts to the good Greek theme of the son's replacing the father...

...Scarcely ever has a photographer rendered them so lucidly, so unforgettably, and under such circumstances as this forty-seven-year-old former economist who was forced to flee Brazil in 1968 for political reasons...

...The Old Boy closed after a brief run at Playwrights Horizon when several of the performers were highjacked by a lush TV special on which Stephen Collins (Sam) will play John Kennedy...

...It never happened at all, or so we assume as it becomes clear that Stubbs is the son, rejected as an imperfect chip off the old block, impotent as well as wheel-chair bound...

...The white of his eye, at the center of the photograph, indicates the total effort of his concentration not to loose his grip...

...teased...

...The characters tend to be stereotypes, but that is really only a problem with Perry's mother who, as Nan Martin plays her, comes through as the wicked witch of the West...

...The play is supposed to reopen elsewhere off-Broadway in the fall...

...he has brought Stubbs, in his wheel chair, on an outing from the hospital for a gooey ice cream treat...

...The nearly ninety black and white photographs rival the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Walker Evans...

...The Colonel is another of those characters (like the protagonist of Lanford Wilson's Burn This) in which Malkovich could pull out all stops...

...He soared in Shepardian lyricism, cobbled out of patriotic clichrs...

...Yet, along the way, particularly in the demented patriotic rhetoric of the Colonel, the play shows not only that fathers and sons fail one another, but that fathers, in this good American context, provide wars in which to sacrifice sons...

...GERALD WEALES ART GRACE ABOUNDS SEBASTIAO SALGADO'S PHOTOGRAPHS 6 n Uncertain Grace" is a suggestive title, but it hardly captures the riveting photographic collection that makes up Brazilian photo journalist Sebastiao Salgado's first retrospective in this country...

...The play, which is constructed of fragments and disparate images, was effective in the theater, building out of often broadly comic material a cumulative effect of loss...

...The play ends with the entire cast reprising "Goodnight, Irene," which the couple had sung earlier, with the emphasis on the stanza about lying down to die...

...But Salgado has immortalized him, much as Pablo Neruda did Cristobal Miranda and the sodium nitrate shovelers at Tocopilla...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE DEMONIC GAMES '$H_9 & '_9 BOY' here has never been any doubt about the social and political implications of the plays of Sam Shepard and A. R. Gumey, but neither playwright had been particularly overt in spelling out those implications...

...it closes later this year in San Diego...

...When Pope John Paul II writes in Centesimus annus that "the human inadequacies of capitalism and the resulting domination of things over people are far from disappearing," he might have been providing a gloss on Salgado's photographs...

...Such scenes--masses of humanity laboring like insects in an open pit mine---could be from Land of the Pharaohs, but surely not A.O...

...In States of Shock, I suspect that Malkovich and Shepard were playing the same demonic game with a shared disruption of all rules...

...I am sure that the same limited vision can be found in ward headquarters in an Italian or a black district here in my own Philadelphia, but that is not Gurney's subject...

...There is a particular emphasis on the rigors of work in the third world--Brazil, India, Ecuador, Bangladesh--and on life and death in the face of famine and civil war...

...In one photograph, an army of bodies ascends crude wooden ladders, ten across, twenty men deep, shoulder to foot, shoulder to foot, up from one landing in the Pueblo-like pit to the next...

...one woman, going down, extends an arm to another coming up...

...The latter, wounded in a war that sounds like a combination of Vietnam and Desert Storm, has a very visible wound, courtesy of makeup, where a shell passed through his body and killed the Colonel's son who was standing behind him...

...From India (1990), a group portrait of three coal miners, blackcovered magi whose eyes search the inscrutable camera's eye for the star of deliverance...

...Yet, looking back at it after a few weeks, I find that the force has dissipated and that the ideas seem either faulty or obvious...

...The problems...

...Set in what the characters keep calling a"family restaurant"---one table and one booth in Bill Stabile's brightly austere surroundings--the play consists of five characters who connect only minimally...

...We (and Sam) come to recognize that he is a product and a victim of the narrow society which created him, that although he can be admirable (as a public servant), as a human being he lacks the capacity to feel deeply...

...Both clouds and women seem to be dancing, albeit to different choreographies...

...But Open Doors is not a Costa-Gavras job in which leftist opinion equals virtue and right-wing extremity defines evil...

...Through flashbacks and noisy confrontation scenes, we learn that Perry was a confused homosexual, forced to go straight by Sam, his "old boy" (student mentor), who elects to "save" Perry by setting him up with Alison, the shopkeeper's daughter who was Sam's own first love (i.e., sexual partner...

...The Colonel (John Malkovich in the most incredible hodgepodge of military dress I have seen since the Marx Brothers defended Freedonia in Duck Soup) commands the booth and finally the whole restaurant...

...A worker welds the hull of a boat in Brest, France (1990...

...Sam's self-discovery (after an angry denunciation by Alison) brings him to a speech that is a mea culpa for having failed Perry and to a collapse into tears which presumably wreck him as a viable candidate even as it opens him up as a human being...

...Two clouds move unhindered in the background as the women ascend and descend a slope...

...But immediately, one confronts individuals in situations that reveal an essential element of their humanity: unself-conscious contemporaries, impervious to the lens of the camera but keenly attuned to Salgado's own humanity, seemingly enslaved by circumstance but generally unbowed...

...swooped from ingratiating softness to fulminating anger...

...These were followed by an essay on the photographer by Matthew L. Wald...

...His performance was a delight to watch even as I wondered--as in Burn This--if there were a character being consumed rather than created by Malkovich's fire...

...That, as it turns out, is the least of Bud's worries...

...The New York Times Magazine (June 9) carried his photographs of oil-well firefighters in Kuwait...

...At first look, the shots of Serra Pelada seem like stills from a motion picture set...

...What remains are some strong images, a remembered assault of sound and visual effect, and, most of all, an incredible performance by Malkovich...

...Despite the weightiness of his subjects, Salgado's photographs are neither overwrought nor sentimental...

...The Serra Pelada photographs are like Stations of the Cross...

...Therefore he was able to free himself of the the burdens of Alison and Perry by manipulating them into a marriage that was a foreordained disaster...

...On command or on impulse, he bares his chest for the audience...

...There is a keen, dramatic suspense in the moment: the man senses he might yet topple back eight stories into the pit below...

...Through the multiple meanings of "old boy," the play suggests that Sam's deficiences are those of his class, that he represents high-minded, intelligent men (a gender specific noun) who do 438: Commonweal not have the compassion or the understanding to see that America is a heterogeneous society...

...Shepard's plays are full of elusive fathers and discomfited sons, but in States of Shock the generational theme is elevated into a political statement...

...Salgado's settings vary, from ritual to war, from survival to children's games...

...This is a sample of Gurney's playing with the realistic surface of his work, less flamboyant than the theatrical tricks in The Dining Room and Sweet Sue, but The Old Boy still comes across as too tidy, too predictable, too obviously moving toward those cleansing tears...

...cajoled...

...We can mind the problem of others and not be on the defensive about the problem...

...Salgado manages to be on the latest firing line...

...The grace in Salgado's photographs is anything but uncertain...

...The waitress, named Glory Bee for heaven's sake, is a very pretty young black woman, inept at best, otherwise downright mutinous in the way she ignores the exasperated couple to concentrate on the Colonel and Stubbs...

...Another photograph depicts an angular, mud-covered Sisyphus from above as he makes the top of the ladder, a bundle of slag strapped in a bag to his shoulders...

...Their most recent plays--Shepard's States of Shock and Gumey's The Old Boy--mark a change...

...he OldBoy takes place in familiar Gumey country, this time a classy New England prep school to which Sam--the perfect image of a candidate for governor--returns to make the graduation speech and, almost as an afterthought, to announce a tennis complex to be funded by the mother of his dead friend Perry, whose name it will bear...

...The tag next to the photograph indicates the broader context: "In the Serra Pelada gold mine, each worker makes up to sixty trips daily, transporting bags of dirt from the bottom of the mine to the sediment dump on top...

...The schema of this movie resembles that of a Costa-Gavras film like Z or State of Siege: an investigation of an apparently isolated crime uncovers a network of government corruption...

...A middle-aged couple, dressed in meticulous white, sit at the table and wait for their clam chowder to be served, watching the more flamboyant behavior in the booth with a mixture of disapproval and open fascination...

...We see his protective goggles through the eye of a huge steel 12 July 1991:439...