Stage
Weales, Gerald
pressed breadearner's exasperation, he serves up a rarity: a witty portrait of a simple, humorless man. Avalon may fail as social insight but it is wonderfully alive. It doesn't expand our adult...
...Greenberg intends something more, I think...
...At this point, the Greenberg of Eastern Standard, the chronicler of the fashionably correct, emerges, for Nick's decline is made clear by his ill-fitting tweed jacket and slacks, so unlike the clothes he wore when he was a prince--or, at least, a contender...
...So, too, with the fairy-tale ending, had it been possible...
...By the end of the play, it becomes clear that she has made an emotional cripple of her daughter not out of ignorance or nastiness, but because she needs to keep her...
...The play's title comes from the room-and-much- board program at the camp, but the suggestion of Nick's friend that they both marry, become good husbands, fathers, providers, and continue their affair is also an American plan...
...She speaks in the same quiet but commanding voice, at once civilized and threatening, whether she is mocking the campers across the lake, commenting on the decline of the world, or shredding the disguise of the current prince...
...and his sister, who gets most of the play's funny lines, is not much better...
...There he finds and perhaps falls in love with Lili...
...too much ugliness for Eva...
...You are home to me, she says, her voice as controlled as always, in a scene in which Lili cries out for any place but home...
...Eva is a wealthy German Jewish widow, a survivor of the Nazis, who had built elegant isolation for herself, a summer home from which she can watch and condescend to the antics of the hearty, heavy-feeding vacationers at the camp across the lake, or--like the Czarina they call her---occasionally join the peasants for mahjong...
...Unnerved by his mother's death, the loss of the family money, his father's suicide, Nick loses control of his life, gets fired, breaks with his homosexual lover, wanders from temporary shelter to temporary shelter, hopes to find salvation by marrying money...
...Avalon is a minor masterpiece of sensation and sen- sibility, flawed only by its maker's inability to reach beyond sensation and sensibility...
...Having been pulled into the amorphousness of the first act fairy story, we are smothered by specificity in the second act...
...The American Plan is a very dark fairy tale...
...In a final scene, ten years later, we meet Lili, who has become a slightly softer version of her now dead mother, and Nick, who has never built the dream city he once promised...
...The difficulty with the new play is that the situation, so neatly defined in the first act, is overwhelmed with too much in the second: Too much biography for Nick...
...Moffett) and Lili (Wendy Makkena) are an attractive odd couple who seem to find strength in one another, but there are too many holes in this prince's armor for him to outsmart the witch of the moat...
...The play's prince is Nick Lockridge, a WASP in unfamiliar country, who has come to the camp on the lake with the rich Jewish girl he plans to marry...
...She is a marvelous character--the theatrical heart of the play--and Joan Copeland is fascinating in what is probably the best role of her career...
...Like Nick's dream city, it would give them everything...
...Whatever road they took, Lili's song would still be appropriate...
...the "perhaps" because Lili (or Eva, at least) is as rich as his fiancee and he is a Cheeveresque charmer without funds...
...Had Lili, knowing all that Nick has done, run off with him (as she says she would have) and had he carried her away for love rather than money, the ending--the play sug- gests-would have been the same...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE WITCHES" TALES 'AMERICAN PLAN' & 'DIATRIBE' ili Adler, the heroine--so to speak---of Richard Greenberg's The American Plan, is imaginative (i.e., a liar), hysterical, dependent on her mother, and desperate in her dependence...
...Anderson's slow-witted son, who used to beat up both Orin and her as they grew up, and that Mrs...
...n this season of fairy tales, Harry Kondoleon's Love Diatribe is--ostensibly--the one with the happy ending...
...The play takes place in the Catskills in 1960...
...It is, of course, a promise of disaster...
...Eva is not only self-assured (at least on the surface) but malevolent...
...In fact, he has never built anything...
...That is far too neat a final statement...
...She is convinced that people die of what is said to them, done to them...
...In the final scene, Nick recalls a German song Lili sang to him which she repeats and translates: "There is happiness, but it is for others...
...It doesn't expand our adult perception of the way our society works, but it does turn us into wondering, noticing, absorbing children...
...Add that the sister, who has just left her husband, is having an affair with Mrs...
...She sees herself as a captive princess, guarded by Olivia--a hand- some, self-contained black woman with no visible life of her own--and surrounded by a moat (her mother...
...He has long since lost his lover and has dwindled to teaching math in a prep school near Cincinnati...
...Anderson from next door...
...A short play about an acrimonious family, it brings wimpish Orin, who blames his spinelessness on his upbringing, home for dinner although no one can remem- ber having invited him and there is no food in the house except that brought in by Mrs...
...Neither Orin's father, who suffers from piles and a conviction that America is in ruins, nor his mother, a nurse with aching feet and an acid tongue, can speak directly to him...
...Although, moat- like, Eva can keep away the princes that come to rescue her daughter, she is--dramatically, at least--the traditional evil witch--not the hard-breathing, cackling, Margaret Hamilton kind of witch suitable for Oz...
...In the end, unable to resist the lover who has come in search of him--another WASP loose in the Catskills--he cuts and runs...
...This is the negative version of the positive message, the love diatribe, that Frieda--a 56: Commonweal...
...Anderson blames the death of her other son from A'DS on Orin and the other kids who mocked him when he was young...
...too mechanical an introduction of the homosexual subplot...
...For me, the play is more interesting than Eastern Standard because the dark underbelly of the situation here is more believ- able than the sunny angst of Greenberg's Broadway success...
...Nick (D.W...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 2
