Touring the World On Broadway
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Touring the World On Broadway Three recent productions showing three faces of the world have kept the theater season sprightly. Alfred Hayes has sensitively...
...here he has woven it around warmly human figures, whose emotional responses and basic concerns are our own...
...but it is refreshing--after picnicking prurience and perennial itch--to see decency in the drama, in characters whom one can believe...
...Winning it, she can hold it only by bilking Uncle Sam...
...Its episodes of dance-dramas drawn from the classical No need no interpreter...
...Elmer Rice can always tell a story...
...He might even have come to propose marriage, but she runs to seek refuge in the Tiber, which for centuries has covered the bodies of despairing citizens of Rome...
...The girl, Lisa, hates Robert because she has given him her body to save her body...
...We see the casual GI who lashes out at everyone when venereal infection strikes him, the more matter-of-fact lad who longs for Piccadilly, and the Italians: Adele, who makes what pennies she can by serving the foreigners...
...and her much more adaptable daughter...
...they speak directly to the eye...
...he, meanwhile, has grown to like her and cannot understand her resentment of the bargain...
...The author has directed Joan Tetzel in a characterization that makes the cigarette girl a rounded figure--perplexed, striving, credible...
...This puts the problem close to the conscience of everyone who pays income taxes...
...Right here at home, The Winner3 poses a problem basic to our times: integrity...
...Tom Hel-more, as the lawyer out of Princeton, gives a suave and amusing performance...
...This is borne home to cigarette-counter girl Eva Harold when wealthy Arnold Mahler dies in her apartment, leaving her his wealth...
...With one seemingly casual stroke, Rice has achieved this --yet how much care, how much skill, how much warm humanity have gone into that judge's plea...
...Around these two, we view more broadly the effects of "occupation...
...To resist it, yet hold the audience's sympathy, Eva Harold in her turn has to reveal a deep integrity...
...The handling of the witnesses has the excitement of a real trial, with Vilma Kurer making a superb hit as the confidential secretary, and the widow's lawyer trying to break down the cigarette girl whom he loves...
...The Dojoji is perhaps outstanding, embracing every technique of the Japanese dance as it carries a woman from her early years to the ripeness of maturity...
...Except perhaps in lotteries, there is no "winner" today, for there is no clear answer...
...Alfred Hayes has sensitively dramatized his novel of the American occupation of Italy in 1944-45,1 showing a lonely GI Joe and a starving Italian girl sleeping together to relieve their separate hungers--until human nature rears its head...
...In addition to a deft and pointed story (with virtue winning a man as well as its own reward), The Winner gives us lively dialogue and moving action, especially in the scene in the judge's chambers...
...The smoothness of the production is deceptive: this is a "well-made play" that is far from routine...
...The Kabuki company,2 fresh from Japan, has filled the Century Theater with beauty...
...The death in Eva's room may not be an everyday occurrence, or her decision one that everybody would make...
...but the widow, contesting the will, claims otherwise, and to save her reputation Eva fights to keep the fortune...
...As the judge, Frederick O'Neal is admirably off-hand and objective during the session...
...Human nature is tested, and deftly revealed...
...then, during the recess, he pleads against trial recrimination and bitter battling in a restrained tone of high dignity few could have managed...
...Directed by Jose Quintero...
...all our questions are so tangled in good and evil that every course of action leaves some stain...
...4 The Winner...
...3 The Azuma Kabuki Dancers and Musicians...
...Written and directed by Elmer Rice...
...Under the sensitive direction of Jose Quintero, this is one of the season's notable productions...
...her ex-Army son, who hates everyone, including his conquered self...
...She has been resisting Mahler's advances...
...With music that sounds surprisingly apt to our Western taste, the expert movements convey their stories clearly and movingly...
...Amid the more glamorous gilding of some of the season's other starts, there is sound entertainment and enrichment in The Winner...
...2 The Girl on the Via Flaminia, By Alfred Hayes...
...There is still time to view this varied best of the Japanese stage...
...At the Playhouse...
...It was a splendid touch of Elmer Rice's to have casually made the judge a Negro...
...Presented by the Playwrights' Company...
...At the Century Theater...
...Presented by S. Hurok with the cooperation of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
...I have long maintained that most so-called race-tolerance plays tend rather to arouse resentment, and that the best attitude would be simply to show whites and Negroes functioning harmoniously together in a play that does not deal with racial issues...
...The Spider Dance (retained in the second program, now running) is a more vigorous piece, and the company's humor shows another ground where East and West can meet...
...Presented by and It the Circle in the Square...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 12
