Stage

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

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

...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...

...Although the problems facing the characters are essentially serious---or would be in other circumstances--the play is pri- marily an amiable exercise demanding very little emotional response from playgoers...

...For the most part, however, the play moves along easily, carrying the willing audience with it...

...Even the father's paralysis is tempered by the actor's stepping out of the wheelchair to speak to the audience...

...There is vigor in the cross-taik of the scenes, but the characters are too much functional representative figures, the action aimost all retrospective...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA SUNDAY WITH DAVID A SABBATH OF SORTS E ver notice--not, please God, to sound like Andy Rooney--but ever notice that Sunday always feels like Sunday...

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

...But, then, that is what the Winterfest plays are for...

...In the early acts, he talks enthu- siastically about what he will do as soon as he gets a paycheck or two ahead, but he resists Ed's attempts to get him to quit the mill, to sign an application for college...

...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...

...am Kelly's Pill Hill, which I saw in a production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, was first done as part of the Yale Repertory's 1990 Winterfest...

...For the younger men, it is a dead end, literally, since the mill is scheduled to close at the end of the play...

...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...

...There is an oddly ambiguous ending to the play...

...Chadie, the older man, has retired and is ready to move back to Mississippi...

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

...Tony discovers that his new affluence will not protect him from the daily battle against prejudice in the real estate business...

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

...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...

...There are some very effective things in Sum: prim Joyce's sudden wriggle of pleasure when she still sees marriage on the horizon, and Dad's inability to tear himself away from the would-be lovers, his attempt to smooth Jeff's way having become confused with his own need for company...

...Walt Whitman would have understood...

...on that day is a major cause of cancer...

...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...

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

...As Ed leaves, Joe says, "Take me with you," and Ed answers, "Where I am going I can't take you...

...Ed comes to see his position in the law firm as the equivalent of Charlie's in the mill--doing the white man's dirty work...

...Ed and Joe are left onstage alone...

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

...Wait, who would have made a great TV critic, believed that a democratic, materialist society would eventually produce rites and observances as pow- erful and satisfying as those of the "dead" religions of the past...

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

...For the older generation, of which there is one member in the group, the mill has been a desirable destination, one that rescued them from field work in the South and gave them the middle-class rewards of salary, home, and security...

...At the end, he is drinking heavily and is about to move--temporarily, of course--to a wel- fare hotel, a victim, he suggests, not of society but of his own inability to take the risk...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...There is much talk of cars and clothes and houses, of the arti- facts of success, but underlying the play is the assumption that black success is always marginal in a white-controlled world...

...Even if you're the kind of hardnosed secularist who snorts at ritual, the Sabbath, and all that, the day just forces you to behave that way, anyhow...

...It hasn't happened...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...Pill Hill has its virtues, but mainly it shows the strong promise of Sam Kelly as a playwright...

...Joe, the central figure in the piece (well performed by A. Bernard Cummings), has gone nowhere...

...He has been given a case in which he must defend a com- pany against a class-action suit from mostly black workers, and he knows that refusal to take the case will ruin his prospects in the firm while taking it will violate the memory of his father, dead in his forties in the mill, and of the world he once lived in...

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

...Joe is left alone, stating into space...

...22 March 1991:195...

...Scott is a successful drug dealer, for the moment...

...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...

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

...In the order of service, only the steak and eggs are optional...

...Most of the action takes place offstage and is recounted as nar- rative...

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

...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...

...Another working-class play--an upward mobility one---it concerns six blacks who work or have worked'in a Chicago steel mill...

...By that time, Ed has become a lawyer with what I would call a prestigious real estate firm if I used fake words like prestigious...

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

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

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

...It consists of three acts and the gathering of a group of friends at five-year intervals...

...steak and eggs and Heinekens at Carrow's (we always just beat out the Methodists because their sermons----heh heh--are longer...

...So Sunday always involves 9:30 Mass (thanks to my wife, who doesn't believe that getting up before 10 A.M...

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

...That line could mean that he is staying with the firm, denying all the Joes, or that he is going to mail the resignation he has already written, which means that he will destroy his image as the superachiever in the group, robbing Joe of the dream that he represents...

...Leaves of Grass, after all, is nothing if not his heroically arrogant attempt to write the epic poem of that new mythology...

...Charlie may be better-offthan he was in the Mississippi of threat- ening sheriffs who humiliated him, but his bosses at the mill, who congratulated him verbally, never provided him written recommendations strong enough to give him the advancement he expected...

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

...It's entirely subjective, of course, but there's a difference about the day: as if light itself were moving just a little slower than its assigned velocity, and hence so is everything else...

...Brinkley," I want to suggest, is the nearly ideal enactment--in its limitations as well as its brilliance----of that hoped-for secular sacrament, the assertion that you shall understand the news, and the news will set you free...

...Al, the hustler, has moved from selling Bibles and encyclopedias to selling something that makes it possible for him to buy a home on Pill Hill, where the black elite live...

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

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

...and then "This Week with David Brinkley...

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

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

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

...I suppose I could adjust to Sunday without "Brinkley," which is the way all true cultists refer to it: but it would be a wrench...

...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...

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

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

...Tony has become a successful real estate man...

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

...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...

...It looks as though Jeff and Dad will be left with only one another--a 194: Commonweal prospect darkened when Dad is invalided by a stroke--but at the end Greg reappears, and Jeff and the audience are left with the possibility of what in The Sum of Us passes for a happy ending...

...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...

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