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...It follows that he levels an absolute condemnation against any technological means of family limitation...

...Jeff, the young man, has no taste for one-night stands, but his shyness and his awkward eagerness, or his father, have a way of pushing away potential long-term companions...

...To speak of using contraception to avoid abortion makes no sense, for the two are inseparable: "Contraception is the first step toward abortion...

...There's more to Cyrano than the clash of swords...

...This is an astonishing mindset, and one that is frightening in a man who influences church teachings...

...But the actor fit to play Hamlet is precisely that actor who can be dashing and dangerous while thinking...

...She lowers her head like some impossibly delicate bull and charges directly at the damned aris- tocrats who have deprived her of family, reputation, love...

...When Hamlet does reach the battlements, the Ghost has vanished and, while Gibson looks fearfully about, we brace ourselves for the inevitable moment when the spirit reappears...

...when they are seen to be permeating the church, frightened traditionalists direct their ener- gies not to dialogue with faithful Catholics who cannot in con- science accept their radically negative evaluations, but to simple repression...

...The motor driving the corrupt empire, in Caffarra's view, is technology...

...No amount of cannonfire and shouting can fill this void...

...The unreasonableness of the prohibition on condom use is evident enough in the case of the hemophiliac marriage or the accidentally infected health-care worker...

...It hasn't happened...

...She doesn't conceal her desire for Claudius but displays it openly, making it an endorsement of his right to the throne...

...And just as a person, throughout many years of a marriage, may know many aspects of a spouse's personality without ever grasping some central fact of his or her nature, so may a director be able to understand and illuminate odd comers and byways of a familiar text but also neglect to give his production a finn center...

...Hamlet watches his mother "work the crowd" with her smiles and her embraces of the new king, and he bums...

...SCREEN TWO SWASHBUCKLERS 'C ANO' & 'HAMLET' l ~ ranco Zeffirelli and Jean-Paul Rappeneau have obvi- ously been living for a long time with the classic plays that they have turned into films...

...Birth con- trol, reproductive technologies, abortion are lumped together...

...and introspective men (the jour- nalist in The Year of Living Dangerously) equally well...

...Ian Holm's Polonius, curiously enough, emanates more danger than either Hamlet or Claudius in the form of a badgering curiosity that can leave no relationship unmolested...

...Gibson's Prince makes incisions only with cold steel...

...Perhaps Zeffirelli cast him in the hope that Hamlet, obsessive thinker and flashy swordsman, was exactly the role that would join the usually segregated parts of Gibson's talent into a splendid whole...

...In societies where the AIDS virus has created a plague, it becomes yet more irrational to view the use of condoms as always evil, and "intrinsically" so, without regard to intention, circum- stance, and/the character of the act...

...For now, something has to be done to control the spread of AIDS...

...all are symbolic of the evil modem culture...

...Its humorous heart lies in the conversations between Jeff and Dad--in Australian working-class slang--and in direct chats with the audience that do away with the need for dramatizing much of the material...

...As the Ghost ascends some steps to the battlements, the upper part of his body is momentarily blocked from Hamlet's view by an arch and this is somehow alarming as if a headless ghost were more dreadful than a completely viewed apparition...

...Glenn Close is wonderful as Gertrude: sexy, foolish, magnetic...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE WORKING-CLASS LIVES 'SUM' & 'PILL HILL' ~,.- avid Steven's The Sum of Us has settled into a comfortable run off-Broadway...

...This play is set in an industrial suburb of Melbourne...

...ZeffireHi uses the architectures of the castle to create suspense...

...Gibson, in the course of his curious career, has played both swashbuckling heroes (MadMax, etc...

...There's privacy in the bedchamber but soldiers are posted wherever the royal ones walk, peasants are bringing their goods to market in the courtyard below, strolling players come to pay their respects to the royal family before they perform elsewhere...

...Alan Bates is fittingly self-satisfied as Claudius but not dan- gerous enough...

...Monsignor Caffarra sees the church as involved in a death struggle with the modem world...

...What made Richard Burton, Christopher Plummer, and Nicol Williamson, each in his own very different way, a remarkable Hamlet was the fact that each could make words cut, into others, into himself...

...And since the Ghost is magnificently embod- ied (yes, embodied quite solidly) by iron-voiced Paul Scofield, the ghostly interview gives us a glimpse into a past where ghosts were as real as men...

...And it is the prominent love story and the all-pervasive lyricism of Cyranothat are scanted in this adaptation...

...Catholic priests and theologians who disagree with his view he calls "priests and theologians of the corrupt empire...

...Repellently amateurish in A Room with a View, this actress here reveals a powerful, dusky voice and formidable acting intelligence...

...But kids are notoriously bored by love scenes and flights of lyricism...

...In the second act, Dad proposes to Joyce, a woman whom he has been seeing (they met through a dating service), but her initial joy in the offer is lost in her discovery that her prospective son-in-law is gay...

...for him it is a struggle between good and evil...

...People who use the "natural" birth control method, he believes, will keep a child that happens to be conceived, but if contraceptive technologies are used, an unexpected pregnancy is terminated by abortion...

...There are only two real scenes...

...The use of condoms for that purpose appears fully justified within the Catholic natural law tradition...

...Faust, Mephis- topheles, the Antichrist, Wagner, Marxism, modernity, utilitar- ianism, nihilism: Caffarra resorts to these names and concepts again and again in his commentary on sexuality, the family, and the modem world...

...Her shrinking into herself after the closet scene is deftly done and helps explain her subsequent behavior toward both her hus- band and son...

...In one, Jeffbrings Greg home for the night, hoping for something more, but Dad comes in, joins them for a beer or several, and talks to death the romance he wants to help succeed...

...It looks as though Jeff and Dad will be left with only one another--a 194: Commonweal...

...Diffusing information about the use of condoms to prevent HIV infection not only increases homosexual relations but actually serves to spread AIDS--a truth, for Caffarra, that is never mentioned in the media, and "woe to him who mentions it...

...Used as a temporary protection against possible infec- tion, it serves as preventive medicine, as well as the only plausil~le and practical way to help assure that chddren, when they do come, remain uninfected...

...And Helena Bonham-Carter as Ophelia gives the best performance in the film...

...One way to continue human life in threatened areas is to permit couples in the first period of their marriage to make use of the condom until they can be certain that they are free of infection, and only then to start their families...

...They have a close, bantering, bickering relationship, a fondness for one another that never makes up for their individual loneliness, the need for another kind of love...

...Gibson is basically a colloquial actor who hasn't the vocal or emotional equipment for this part...

...All this accords with the prism of categories--black and white, good and evil, God or the devil--through which he sees the world...

...What we now call "image" is as important for the rulers of this medieval place as it is for our leaders, and for the same reason: the leaders are nearly always in public view...

...The main con- ceit of the play is that the father is so intent on seeing his son happy that--like a mother courting her daughter's courter--he is overly cordial and in his acceptance of his son's sexuality somewhat unnerving to a young man used to his own disap- proving father...

...She plays Ophelia's madness as a species of anger...

...The play is about a working-class family, a randy widower and his homosexual son...

...He is dash- ing and dangerous in the swordplay scenes (in the concluding duel with Laertes, he becomes Muhammed Ali as he literally runs circles around his opponent), and he makes a reasonable attempt to look introspective or at least subdued, during the solil- oquies...

...If a vaccine or a cure for AIDS is found and made available globally, there will be plenty of time for further academic analyses of sexual morality in pro- fessionaljoumals...

...they "belong to the culture aligned with death and make death man's friend instead of his principal enemy...

...Both the play, D which has come to New York by way of ~w,,~_ Williamstown and Los Angeles, and the author are peripatetic...

...It's a horror movie effect, but it works...

...Stevens has worked in England, New Zealand, Australia, and now lives in California, but he is generally considered an Australian writer and director...

...So, no great Hamlet to listen to, but what a great Elsinore Zeffirelli's camera tours...

...Does the church, which rightfully prides itself as standing on the side of life, stand by and observe the dissolution of life in parts of Africa and Latin America...

...It is a castle-town in which all citizens live either behind its walls or within its shadow...

...To hold that the only acceptable alternative is sexual absti- nence condemns a person already under sentence of death to abjure not only the pleasures of sex but the consolation of total intimacy in a time of ultimate stress, and to require the same of his or her partner in marriage...

...Again and again he refers to the modem tech- nological world as the "corrupt empire," a phrase reminiscent of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan---except that Caffarra wraps both Marxist and capitalist societies in the same diabolical cloak...

...Democratic values and respect for diversity are viewed with suspicion...

...he void in Zeffirelli's Hamlet is Mel Gibson, but I'm not about to launch into a diatribe against this fine actor...

...Gertrude is not only Hamlet's mother but the matriarchal figure for the whole town...

...Caffarra's views on AIDS are predictable.9 Like all other tech- nologies which "interfere with nature," condoms are evil...

...As already noted, however, the consequences that may follow from applying a fundamentalist ethics to the case of condom use for prevention of AIDS infection are simply unacceptable...

...His viewpoints on a range of issues came through clearly in a long personal interview (three full pages of small print) published in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio last April...

...The law of the machine, which is the law of matter," he believes, "is being applied by man to himself and it will reduce him to slavery...

...Zeffirelli's Hamlet is a remarkable movie, but it is also that infuriating paradox of paradoxes: Hamlet without the Prince...

...Both of these adaptations are handsomely mounted, well acted, and filled with inventive business...

...Similar views, expressing a siege mentality in approaching the modem world, can be found in pronouncements from other church leaders, though couched in less apocalyptic terms...

...Contemporary European culture he refers to as "the great lie...

...It is my hope that this comment on Catholic moral theory, setting forth as it does the possibility of justifying condom use in certain situations, will help some friends in Africa and Latin America to do what common sense indicates they must, in their oftentimes tragic circumstances...

...The condom in such situations is not an antiprocreative device but the precise opposite...

...The Sum of Us is a comedy of simple or of almost no design...

...To say that marital acts performed by such persons must be "open to the transmission of life" is to require that they must also be open to the transmission of death...

...Both have strenuous displays of swordsmanship choreographed by cinema's greatest 192: Commonweal over the years...

...The Italian Iff director has mounted Hamlet on stage more than once, and Rappeneau has declared in interviews that a filming of Cyrano de Bergerac had long been a dream of his...