Stage

...Morrison's band first flaunted its celebration of primitivism, anarchic sex, and promiscuous drug-taking in 1967 with "Light My Fire...

...Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, God "likes to he asked...

...Morrison had a romantic eschatological vision that combined megalomaniacal amoralism CI can do anything," he wrote) with a pantheistic longing to merge with the universe...

...There may even be such a miracle that I can come to see God present in the small moments as surely as I find grace offered in a crumb at the Lord's table...

...By the grace of God, through Christ our Lord, "gladness and singleness of heart" can still be ours for the asking--and the giving...

...Gert is so upset in her mother's presence that she hyperventilates, fluting her sen- tences into hysterically altering vocal ranges...

...I believe, with all my heart, that God longs to speak such a word, but that like the great lion Asian in C.S...

...A Yale college dropout and Vietnam veteran, he has strong ideas about and an obvious identification with the period...

...To understand everything may be to forgive every- thing (although I doubt it), but it certainly does not make for tragedy...

...Grandma Kurnitz comes closer to being a case study of a self-created victim and begetter of victims...

...The bread is meant to be broken, to be given and received, new each day, like manna in the wilderness...

...Much of the play is funny, in a flesh- crawling way, although Diana's husband is too much of a bully and the sluttish Evelyn, with whom he had it off (sort of) in the back seat of his car, is too involved in her own boredom to be comic--at least as they were played at MTC...

...Perhaps each day, as well, is meant to be blessed and broken and given away...

...The celebrant does not attempt to fit the broken pieces back together again like Humpty Dumpty...

...Still, The Doors is essentially a religious narrative...

...the characters share performance space but go unseen, however ludi- crous their behavior, by the other characters, momentarily at rest, who are presumably on other floors...

...But he is at a real loss in trying to sort out the troth--with a capital T--from the imbecilities in the life of Jim Morrison, the notorious rock star h la Dionysus...

...Bella is functionally retarded, a grown-up child slavey to her mother, whatever she might prove on an externally administered examination...

...the strength and hope of wholeness that are given in the Eucharist...

...What Stone delivers, alas, is a pretty standard Hollywood rendition of wounded and self-destructive celebrity...

...In the preface to the published version of the play, Ayckboum says, "unfortunately, it's possible to gain only an inkling of a play's merit from reading it...

...We do not see enough of Gert to know whether or not she gets her voice under control...

...10:14) and"draws us out of many waters" (Ps...

...Morrison was a self-styled poet whose lush voice and sexual mystique made The Doors a wildly popular rock band in the late sixties...

...Taking Steps is a farce about sex and real estate in which one woman decides not to leave her boring husband, another decides to run away from her even more boring fianc6 (he puts himself to sleep when he talks), and the boring husband decides to buy a white elephant of a house none of them wants...

...Grandma Kurnitz is an icy martinet of a woman who has pretty much wrecked her children...

...In my own life, in my long days of breaking time into ever-smaller fragments so there will be enough for every need, I can only hope for unity and peace if Christ is present...

...Louis is the tough son, who learned from his mother and became a minor gangster, on the run from the bosses he tries to cheat...

...STAGE DOWNSTAIRS, UPSTAIRS 'LOST IN YONKERS,' 'STEPS' & 'FRIENDS' ome of the more enthusiastic admirers of Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers have suggested that he fmally found his tragic figure in Grandma Kumitz (I think he came closer with the drunken protagonist of The Gingerbread Lady back in 1970...

...I suspect that silent prayer of aspiration, repeated throughout my hectic days, might in fact redeem the time--not that the breaking and the pouring out might end, but that they might be revealed to be sacramental...

...Maybe God will so "enlighten the eyes of my heart" (Ephesians 1:18) that I will come to see that all my time--no matter how broken and scattered---is in God's hand (Psalm 31:15), a loving hand that also "takes up troubles and vexations" (Ps...

...Brenda Blethyn, on the other hand, gave a hilarious performance as Diana, even during the character's final breakdown at the end of the play, an intensely painful moment that was one laugh after another...

...In telling this grim tale Stone seems to be aiming for the solemnity and mystery of a High Mass--no less than a re-presentation of Morrison's passion and sacrifice...

...This final petition of the liturgy may hold the key: my life, my time, perhaps my heart, will be broken again and again, into ever-smaller pieces...

...I cannot do this alone, but God can do it in me...

...No iron-fisted act of will can help me, but an act of faith might accomplish much...

...It is "in Christ"--perhaps only in Christ--that "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17...

...This time, the single set depicts three rooms, one atop another, the room identified in each case by particular articles of furniture...

...Drugs, sexual experi- mentation, and the violent generational antagonisms surrounding the Vietnam war figure centrally in his work...

...Still, it's well-meaning in its own confused way...

...For the most part, however, the comic bits----even when they are predictable and repetitive on the boys' part--work better for me than the touches of pathos, which are a shade too treacly, as though sugar had seeped upstairs from Kurnitz's Kandy Store on the first floor...

...Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you, with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord...

...But I cannot see how to get there from here, how to bridge the gap between this disintegration and that integrity...

...3May 1991:293 ne of the commonplaces of casual criticism is to suggest or to deny that there are strong similarities between Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn...

...But even the broken pieces may have meaning, may give strength...

...Grandma Kurnitz is finally less interesting to me as a character than as a role that allowed Irene Worth, one of the most elegant actors on the American stage, to transform herself through makeup and through performance into an ugly, angry old woman...

...not so that my work will change to leisure, but that I might find God in the midst of it...

...Only love spreads such a feast...

...Benedict Nightingale was in the denial column recently (New York Times, February 10) in an article preceding the opening of two early Ayckbourn plays, Taking Steps (1979), which is still playing at the Circle in the Square, and Absent Friends (1974), which played the usual limited run at Manhattan Theatre Club...

...Both playwrights are phenomenally successful in their own countries and not much admired abroad, and their styles are certainly very different...

...He merged in 1971 at twenty-seven, worn out by alcohol and drugs, thus joining a growing pantheon of rock musicians whose "creativity" was linked to fatal excess and whose purity of pur- pose was preserved by precocious death...

...Mercedes Ruehl makes an effective and affecting moment out of Bella's speech about what her mother has done to her...

...In Grandma's big speech in the second act, we learn that she is a widow, a refugee, trapped in Yonkers and the candy store which she hates and which fed her family, and that the death of a beloved child taught her to wall herself off from all affection that might make her vulnerable to new pain...

...What they have in common is a very black view of human pos- sibilities and a desire to illustrate it in comfortable, comic sur- roundings...

...Tristram, the young solicitor who is so shy that he is practically tongue-tied, is tedious on the page, but on stage, as played by Spike McClure, he is very funny...

...I can see that they are different--the weariness and discouragement at the end of my fragmented days...

...The boys, standard clever stage kids, win the old woman's heart, and her harsh exterior becomes simply a mannerism that no one any longer takes seriously...

...So too with the bores, who are simply boring on the page, but funnily boring in the flesh, and the stairway business is more amusing than one might expect from a visual tiptoe gag that is endlessly repeated...

...The fractioning of my days is not likely to end any time soon...

...His new play seems less a tragedy to me than a mishmash...

...It turns out that they never much liked him when they were presumed to be his friends, they have not seen him for years, and he is so smugly comfortable in his memories of his beloved that her presumed perfections give him the excuse to diagnose them incorrectly and prescribe unlikely happy endings to their insurmountable problems--of which there are plenty...

...There is more to Absent Friends...

...The broken pieces of my time, may be (as in the sacrament) evidence not of failure but of love...

...In the sacrament, only the real presence of our Risen Lord makes it possible for us to "keep the feast...

...As part of the general if minimal happy ending, Bella grows up enough to assert parity with her mother, Eddie proves a success after all, and Louis finds in the army the proper setting for his learned aggression (it is 1942...

...Director and writer Oliver Stone previously has demonstrated great narrative strength and visceral power, if little intel- lectual imagination, in Platoon and Wall Street...

...There is not much substance to Taking Steps, but none is intended...

...When bread is broken in the Eucharist, we do not rush to mend it...

...The main device, however, involves the kind of scenic trickery that Ayckbourn has used on other occasions...

...Eddie is the soft son, the wimp marked for failure...

...Morrison 294: Commonweal...

...The play is full of not very funny devices about the wrong persons being in the wrong beds and someone's being trapped in a closet and an offstage motorcycle that elicits verbal caresses of the word Yamaha...

...Eddie, whose wife has recently died, leaves his sons with Grandma Kurnitz while he goes off on an extended business trip through the South (funny letters, voice over...

...Stone reputedly conceived of The Doors as the final panel in a triptych about the sixties which includes his Vietnam war movies Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon...

...Only grace provides in such abundance...

...When, on that Galilean hillside, a multitude was fed with one child's picnic lunch, it was possible only because Jesus was there...

...18:16...

...Not even the sentimental endings of Simon's recent autobiographical work can mask the sense of impending disaster that is more obvious in broadly comic works like Last of the Red Hot Lovers and The Prisoner of Second Avenue...

...We end up with only the tedium of empty ritual...

...They went on to release a handful of albums char- acterized by cryptic lyrics, dreamy rhythms, and an insistent organ line...

...O Lord, I am unworthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be whole...

...The action is very different from the situation as defined by the characters...

...Anyone who grew up on Shirley Temple movies can recognize the taming-of-the-curmudgeon plot, even though Simon wants to plant it in emotional and ethnic reality...

...But perhaps--by a miracle of grace, by the grace of God--I can come to see myself not as meaninglessly disintegrated but as broken and given like bread, poured out like wine...

...Escalating my striving will not help...

...This is clearly true of Taking Steps...

...The real test occurs on a stage...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN SEX, DRUGS & ROCK "N" ROLL OLIVER STONE'S 'THE DOORS' he Doors is pretty awful---certainly it's dull, and in large part obtuse, even silly...

...It is for fun or for nothing and, happily, it is often for fun...

...It is cus- tomary to talk about how Ayckbourn's comedies have darkened in the last decade or so, but I cannot recall that the fun and games of the earlier ones grew out of any sanguine sense of human relationships...

...No act of will, however Herculean, can transform my brokenness: no feat of time-management or jaw-clenched determination will ever turn my falling into rising, my mourning into dancing...

...It is about a group of insuf- ferable people who have been brought together by Diana, who is determined that they should console the even more insufferable Colin on the death of his fiancre...

...The crowd of crocks above Kravitz's Kandy Store could have learned a trick or two about laughing angst from Diana and from Brenda Blethyn...