Stage

...As the detective, Sam Shepard provokes a question: how did this most verbally exuberant of playwrights become the most taciturn of good screen actors...

...I don't think I've seen another murder mystery that depends so much on people watching people and interpreting what they see...

...Once he was a Roman Catholic...

...But it, too, was dealing with the outsider and with an insistence on the perception of self that refuses to be a foreign country...

...How do the two beings coexist in the same body, feed on the same temperament...

...Martin handles his subject with such deft- ness and alert qualification that he avoids any sense of the reductive: however, char- acter is fate...

...GERALD WEALES All things counter and spare dmit that Gerard Manley Hopkins's strength was artistic greatness and his weakness psychic imbalance and this biography has a neatly polar form...

...Martin is extraordinarily fair and is determined to right some old biographical wrongs...

...htis Cinque's solo performance, which I saw recently at the Painted Bride in Philadelphia, was a far cry from the splendor--past and present---of the En Garde Arts production...

...Ajax (Bruce Hlibok) has a lovely speech (trans- lated against his wishes by one of the chorus) about how he could not hear music but could feel it in the bench, and how he came to love the piano for its beauty and its silence...

...There is a large chorus which, for some reason, the program calls "Angels...

...On the other hand, rejecting Bridges's neg- ative assessment of the effect of the priest- hood upon Hopkins, Martin shows how essential for Hopkins was his Jesuit voca- tion and how concerned his superiors were to support and to promote this talented but eccentric priest...

...Despite its defects, Another Person was an earnest play in a spirited production in a fine setting...

...Against the widespread disparagement of Bridges as a fusty Victorian in the years when Hopkins was seen as a protomodernist, Martin shows how much Bridges meant to his col- lege friend and correspondent and how much he had to forgive in Hopkins's fre- quently insensitive and demanding letters...

...I was saved by laundry," she says...

...But Robert Bernard Martin's willingness to rest the biographical evi- dence on the razor sharp vision of the poet- ry also makes reading the story of Hopkins's life deeply painful...

...Later, in black tank tops, they become menacing as they join the prin- cipals in images of demotic collapse that, despite Bogart's inge- nuity, provide more descent-into-chaos doings than the perfor- mance really needed...

...The movement from introduction of the characters through riotous destruction to rebirth (Ajax, the deaf character, dies dramatically and is brought back to life) is clear enough, but the journey is strewn with stumbling blocks as well as felic- itous passages...

...He argues for the great debt Hopkins and Hopkins's readers owe Robert Bridges, the close friend and editor of the first edition of the Poems...

...She and the other characters were at once individuals and metaphors for a larger cultural and political isolation that was Mee's main theme...

...For most of the evening, she was carried around or sat on the table like an animated centerpiece, but at one point she had a speech about pity and how it is based on insufficient knowledge, suggesting that she might be happier than those who did not know how to respond to her presence...

...The order was strict, but it was also solid, and Hopkins needed a firm structure of belief and behavior within which to move...

...You won't like Defenseless if you feel that all good murder mysteries should take place in rural England and be solved by dotty maiden ladies who memorize train schedules...

...The acting makes it work...

...Clean Sheets (part 2 of Growing Up Queer in America), is a fairly straightforward narrative about a lesbian love affair that turnsugly and dangerous...

...Edward Wheeler ordained...

...In his quiet way Hopkins was a very headstrong man, determined on extremes...

...no chance of his not being GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS A Very Private Life Robert Bernard Martin G.P...

...The priest-poet, his biographer, and their readers cannot but be driven into dis-ease by the cruel mysteries of flesh and spirit...

...Putnam's Sons, $29.95,448 pp...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE ALL THE WORLD'S A RUIN 'FOREIGN COUNTRY' & 'SHEETS' / ncreasingly one goes away from the traditional venues in search of theater...

...Later the Towers Nursing Home, it was closed in a cloud of scandal in the 1970s and it has been increasingly at the mercy of vandals...

...Even if the Jesuits, like almost everyone else 11 October 1991:583...

...And ordination almost inevitably meant that he would not be a simple parish priest or even a member of one of the easier orders...

...I nominate Shepard the successor to Steve McQueen as Cold-Eyed Master of Minimalism, but not even McQueen was as tightly coiled as Shepard...

...The situation is a picnic with the speak- er's dead cousin Michael--dead of AIDS presumably, although that is never said--whose photograph (actually Cinque's picture) BOOKS sits in a beach chair surrounded by junk food of the 1950s while Cinque tells him her unhappy story...

...The building's own story might have provided the spine for a play--as that of the Victory Theatre did last year for the En Garde Arts production of Mac Wellman's Crowbar--but Charles L. Mee, Jr., the author of Another Person Is a Foreign Country, wants to work in a 582: Commonweal different way with the Towers...

...It makes use of the Towers' vast court- yard and the threatening interior facade: the windows, the scaf- folding that suggests fire escapes, the flight of steps that spill into the space from one corner...

...Cinque plays everyone around her, not so much creating characters as doing varying voices which suggest the speaker's idea of friend and foe alike...

...Often funny, sometimes soft where it intended to be tough, almost too careful about its edible 1950s artifacts, Clean Sheets was an effective solo piece by a personable young woman...

...His eyes narrow as he begins to realize her personal stake in the case, and we begin to feel apprehensive for the lawyer...

...By the time this review appears, the seats, the lights, the performers, the echoing voices will be gone...

...At the end, drinking heavily, she tries to commit suicide, but she gets distracted from her attempt to drown herself by something shim- meting and white in the distance...

...The concept was impressive...

...Barbara Hershey, as the heroine, is emotionally ambidextrous...

...Having taken the murdered man's daughter to a public beach, the lawyer squirms into a bathing suit under cover of a blanket...

...As with most of the audience, I suspect, my eyes kept coming back to Maria Clark, an attractive woman with expressive hands and a truncated body that dwindled into barely functional legs...

...Looking like the tomboy next door, Cinque does a Southern, working-class woman, wryly perky, whose perfect love affair dissolves when the lover becomes both suicidal and murderous...

...Having moved in that direction, he had a sense of compulsion to go as far as possible, so that he finally became a convert...

...Some of the performers, like Clark, were the disabilities they represented: the Lighthouse Agency Choir, for instance, blind witnesses to the action, one of whom kept reaching down to assure his dog that all was well in the turmoil around them...

...Psychological distress had to be acted, but size, color, age were explicit in the casting...

...Give [sic]his usual preference for the harder of his alternatives, his choice of order seems almost inevitable, since in all obvious ways the Jesuits would be the most diffi- cult for him, as well as for his family and friends...

...the speech would be simply tedious if it were not an occasion for Mintern, a transvestite veteran of Charles Ludlum's company, to put aside Ethyl's initial toughness to dis- play giant vulnerability alongside the assurance of tiny Steinberg...

...It turns out to be sheets on a clothesline, which brings the piece full circle, back to the clean sheets that six-year-old Michael insisted on when she visited him from knowing innocence to knowing innocence, perhaps...

...Martin adds, in another context, with only a hint of the ominous: "Yet it is pos- sible for a man to be crushed by a duty he has freely embraced...

...Once begun, a course of moral action, particularly a difficult one, had to run its full length before he could let it go in peace...

...The teen-ager simply stands and strips...

...So much gravitas weighting such a pointed view...

...the setting fascinating...

...And the lawyer's understanding of this contempt helps crack the case...

...Or does the excessiveness of one make the economy of the other possible, as Hyde's ferocity spurred Jekyll on to greater benevolence...

...At first, dressed as waiters, they intone, "May we serve you...

...In contrast is a deadpan description by David Steinberg, crotch-high to Terence Mintern, who describes the sexual apparatus of Ethyl, a hermaphrodite...

...Even as he tries to respond to the cross- examination, the cop can't help noticing the stress that underlies the lawyer's frenzied joy in battle...

...The production is site specific in a physical sense, as En Garde Arts offerings always are...

...and the landmark courtyard will have gone back to collecting its debris...

...But it is the idea of the place in its less savory days that is central to Mee's play, to Daniel Schreier's music, to Anne Bogart's direction: the nursing home as asylum as prison as ruin...

...It's a place where people went and had the door shut on them, and were cast out of the main- stream," he told New York Newsday (September 5...

...Mary Beth Hurt makes the wife an iron but- terfly with a secretion of poison...

...The text is full of anecdotes, real and bogus natural history, and, alas, general statements about life that sometimes come across as comic apothegms, sometimes as platitudes...

...A self-willed young Oxford man as pious as [Hopkins] could hardly have helped becoming progressively High Church in inclination...

...Watching the girl through the lawyer's eyes, we see that the girl's brazenness isn't a sexy come-on but an index to her contempt for her own body and, underlying that, her contempt for life itself...

...This is a fast-tempo perform- ance-the lawyer's feelings constantly collide or spill into each other--but Hershey never skates on the surface...

...Her work here is furious and lucid...

...One important ingredient that had been left out of his nature was moderation...

...But speaking for myself, the emotional heat of this movie makes DeadAgain look like a bad case of romanticism-in-the-head...

...The most recent En Garde Arts pro- duction took me to 106th Street and Central Park West, to that grand old derelict of a building (a designated landmark) that Charles C. Haight designed in the late 1880s as the New York Cancer Hospital...

...Largely plotless, Another Person brings to a dinner party a collection of what once would have been considered grotesques if one were talking about a Luis Bufiuel film, but are here presented as people whose physical and psychological differences from the norm (whatever that is) isolate them as we wall them off with compassion, contempt, fear, uneasiness...

...Later, our apprehensions are justified...