Stage

...A bricklayer is to be hired, which means a union card for the chosen man, and although Thomas is much praised when he tries for the job, the bricklayers, made nervous by that smoke from Cambridge, choose Beauty, who is willing to step down for Thomas until the contractor makes clear that Thomas will not get the job in any case...

...It is the work of a man who has spiritually mutilated himself in the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment...

...The audience still wants to see Cady brought down and the Bowdens saved...

...Although Feldshuh's focus is on the individuals involved, the play inevitably chronicles a horror story, an American shame perpetrated while we were all being properly outraged at Nazi science...

...Hovering over the action is the smoke rising from the fires set during the race riots in Cambridge, July 24-26, 1967...

...The moral center of the play is Miss Evers, the dedicated nurse, the friend of the men she looked after, who finally recognized what she was part of but, after the death of a man to whom she belatedly gave penicillin, "just fell in line...

...In 1969, H. Rap Brown (whose name keeps coming up in the play) was tried for his part in the incident...

...Heelan has suggested that his play offers a metaphor for racial harmony, and I suppose it does, but the ending is a great deal darker, sadder, more painful than the opening...

...close-knit group is also at the heart of David Feldshuh's Miss Evers's Boys, a play that has been in process since 1986 and has been moving from one regional theater to another since its 1989 debut at Baltimore's Center Stage...

...tt is not even a reportorial play in the present...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE INFECTIOUS GROUPINGS 'DISTANT FIRF.S' & 'B_9 evin Heelan's Distant Fires takes place on an unfinished upper floor of a beach hotel being built in Ocean City, Maryland--presumably the kind of construction site on which the playwright worked for three summers in the early 1970s...

...With this revelation, the characters explode, each in his own way, but at the end the work goes on and the group seems to be re-forming...

...Feldshuh, a physician as well as a director and playwright, has used the celebrated/infamous "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" as the starting point for his play...

...It is the work of a man who has lost all contact (if he ever had it or even wanted it) with the beauty of everyday life and with the concerns of nonobsessed people...

...Unlike Foos, Thomas--momentarily in charge of the group while the lazy, well-connected white crew boss is away--is convinced that by working conscientiously he can move onward and upward in the best American tradition...

...751...

...who would be building a hotel in the 1990s...

...Heelan expertly handles the emerging and conflicting personalities of the individuals, but the play's greatest strength is in the presentation of the group...

...The play, which was first produced by the Hartford Stage in 1986 under the Dramatists Guild Foundation's New Plays Program, finally reached New York in an Atlantic Theater production...

...These scenes are intercut with direct statements from Miss Evers's testimony at the 1972 Senate hearing on the project, and an Epilogue in which Miss Evers ("What kind of friend could do what you did...

...These fires are distant by more than twenty years...

...Cape Fear isn't a negligible failure because Scorsese's cinematic expertise doesn't allow him to produce anything weak and pusillanimous...

...There are no Rap Brown activists here...

...The play is set in 1932, when both Nurse Evers and her patients believe the men are or are about to be treated for "bad blood," and 1946, when an attempt is made to keep the men from the penicillin which has now become available at antivenereal clinics...

...The trouble is, because the Bowdens have been so grotesquely reduced and Cady so grotesquely glorified, the audience's simple need to see virtue vindicated and evil punished is frustrated...

...There is a sixth character, the contractor in charge of the project, whose sole concern seems to be the job and who is unable to show overtly his sympathy for Thomas when he gets burned by the distant fires...

...It is interesting that Heelan, who is black and who must have had a somewhat similar role in the crews he worked with in his own summer-vacation days, has made the character white...

...12/20/91 I I I I ! 20 December 1991...

...One can believe that these are men doing a real job and borrowing what strength they can get from one another...

...Distant Fires is not a historical play...

...The group here are four men (representing the 400-odd study participants) who are held together not by their work (farming) but by their band, which they name Miss Evers's Boys, and their desire to dance and play their way out of the hardscrabble world in which they live...

...Well-acted, well-directed, well-designed, well-received, the production extended its original off-Broadway run, but even so the play will be gone by the time this review appears unless, as rumor has it, Distant Fires gets picked up for further exposure at Lincoln Center, which the play certainly deserves...

...It is a men-at-work play (like David Storey's The Contractor) in which five workers--three black, two white--pour and spread concrete, while they joke, complain, protest, accuse, and protect one another...

...Cape Fear is a very low point in the career of America's greatest filmmaker...

...Of the whites, Beauty, who is proud of his body and his sexual exploits, is closer in spirit to Raymond than to Thomas, with whom he competes for a promotion to bricklayer...

...The seeds may come from Heelan's past, but the tensions among the characters are recognizable in the present...

...Instead of getting a thriller, they must sit through a movie of uncontrolled, crackpot complexity...

...The two doctors--the black scientist from Tuskegee and the white one from Washington--might be villains in a doctrinaire play, but here it is never clear how selfdeluding they are in their quests for racial equality and scientific knowledge...

...It is not a misnomer...

...and the doctors are accused by the crippled Willie...

...Although the blacks among them have felt the indignities that led to the fires in Cambridge, they and their white fellow workers are fueled by personal rather than larger social concerns...

...Between the two of them is Raymond, an older man, who has chosen to do only the work demanded--which he does well--and with no expectations beyond the immediate job to take his comfort in personal pleasures...

...It is powerfully loathsome even when it is patently absurd...

...yet the program says, "Time: the present...

...GERALD WEALES p--------_______ l m l l i m ~ I C O M M O N W E A L i I I i 15 Dutch Street, New York, N.Y...

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...Angel, the college-bound temporary who got the job through his father's connections, is a likable boy trying to be one of the men and inevitably is the butt of most of the jokes...

...Foos is a whiner and a drinker, angry at being short-changed by white society, unable to understand why he has not been rewarded for the work that he avoids doing...

...This movie is, rather, an extraordinary failure which grips the viewer not with suspense but with cinematic hysteria and stomach-churning violence...

...I saw it at a recent production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company...

...he is the most articulate about the wrongs blacks suffer and with reason since, a resident of Cambridge, he has been picked up and roughed up by the police who mistake him for one of the rioters...

...The treatment, which was in fact nontreatment, began in 1932 and continued until 1972 (even after the discovery of 750: Commonweal penicillin in the 1940s) so that the effects of the disease could be recorded...

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