On Stage

...Whereas the rather tuneless language of Long Day's Journey is the instrument for communicating O'Neill's knowledge of his characters, the Chekhov-derived language of The Rope Dancers is a device for suggesting meanings which are actually not present in the play...

...The situation became mildly agonizing...

...But like his Mr...

...Wishengrad's Mrs...

...At the head of the cast stands— looms, one should say—Siobhan McKenna, a woman of such electric power held under such remarkable control that it is almost more than one has a right to ask that anyone else on the stage with her make himself adequately felt...

...Wishengrad, the opposite can be reported...

...But it amounts to the same thing: She keeps her physical distance but not her psychological separation from her audience...

...The Hyland family about which Mr...

...It can be put quite simply that what makes it useful to suffer O'Neill's psychological explorations but merely wilful or morbid to endure Mr...

...Hyland defiled their marriage bed the night the child was conceived and who, in her shame, keeps the child mittened and imprisoned in their tenement flat and finally drives her to convulsions, St...

...If both playwrights share a taste for leading us into the darker places of human behavior, this is the beginning and end of any similarity in their approach to their chosen material...

...There is no intention of reality in the part as written, so Miss Hayes provides her own reality...

...I'm always being told that Anouilh in French is something else again from the sampling we have had in English, that he is not clumsy but frothy, that the froth has a large support of Gallic wit and intelligence and that in his native language and in the very midst of the artificial trappings in which he has his dramatic being he even has something to say...

...It isn't yet true that she makes no single unnecessary movement, but it is unmistakable that that's her goal, and already she has an economy that would mark her out even among the veterans...

...Niggardly indeed is O'Neill's offering of drug addicts and drunkards compared to Mr...

...Miss McKenna has the rare ability to fill the stage with quiet...

...I could write pages about the complex joy of watching Miss McKenna hold back a line, it is so seldom one encounters such a proud and proper tyranny—an actress who understands that it is the job of her art not to flatter but to master her audience, not to defer to our anxious demands on her but fiercely to assume her superiority and impose herself...

...She was always out in front appreciating her own cavortings...

...She did it perfectly well, of course, but with an unpardonable consciousness that here was Miss Hayes doing a ballet routine and how charming, now that she must be getting on to sixty...

...It would bo an insult to Miss Lillie to ask that she respect the plays in which she appears...

...It may be an experience of truth for Mr...

...True, I remember Beatrice Lillie winking at a friend in the fourth row or, more likely, a stranger—it was a wink public as a neon sign—and I didn't mind that a bit, in fact I loved it...

...Wishengrad's is the fact that Long Day's Journey makes sense in terms of a recognizable reality and The Rope Dancers does not...

...Wishengrad evades his responsibility both to his characters and to his listeners by laying down a barrage of psychological talk of a kind which, in our culture, is guaranteed to be evocative of "important"' ideas and emotions...

...and both are concerned with the intermingled talent for love and destructiveness which is so often the cement of family life...

...She's just as much on our side of the affair as her own, watching herself perform and all but visibly joining us in our appreciation of the fine effect...

...It has become cliche to say of O'Neill that he had a poor gift for language...

...He had nothing to say, I'm sure, even in Hungarian— but he said it with such gaiety and brilliance that he created an imperishable world of romantic-comic fantasy...

...For the most part, it's a subtle reminder, compounded of a slight exaggeration here and a smirk there, but unhappily not to be missed—certainly the first-night audience didn't miss it and liked it, perhaps especially the moment that was not subtle at all, when Miss Hayes did a ballet dance...

...it was part of her appeal...

...Here is an actress still young in the theater, but among present-day performers I know no one to compare with her, and not only because of her high voltage, which is birthright, but because of what she has already learned about the use of her body and voice...

...not physically, that is...

...And since there is nothing to which a contemporary audience associates more readily and grandly than psychopathology...

...Anyone on the same stage with this much controlled energy is bound to suffer a diminution and it is much to their credit that Miss McKenna's colleagues—Art Carney in the role of a windy would-be writer, Joan Blondell as an ample-bosomed salt-of-the-earth daughter of nature of the sort that is supposed to inhabit any self-respecting slum, Beverly Luns-ford as a tortured statement of juvenile psychopathology, and all the minor actors, too—meet her competition with grace as well as valor...

...Hyland, for whom articulateness is the always-available means of side-stepping responsibility, Mr...

...Despite the atmosphere of significance which surrounds The Rope Dancers, one looks in vain for the source of its intensity either in thought or in understood emotion...

...Inevitably, such is the essential spiritlessness of Anouilh's play, one thought of the marvelous heights to which a theater of contrivance can soar—the plays of Molnar, for example, and in particular The Play's the Thing...

...But no effort of performance or direction compensates for content in a play...

...Both plays are set at the turn of the century and deal with American families of Irish background...

...She supplements her display of technical virtuosity by reminding us that at least she herself is real, that she is Helen Hayes and unconquerable and much loved, that she has been playing for many, many years and that she is now no longer young, though her zest and skill are as acute as ever...

...But the juxtaposition of the two plays brings into cruel focus the essential failure of The Rope Dancers...

...Morton Wishengrad's first Broadway offering could scarcely be better acted and mounted...

...Wishengrad is writing is not without its resemblance to Eugene O'Neill's Tyrones in Long Day's Journey...

...Hyland, who thinks her daughter was born with a sixth finger on one of her hands because Mr...

...we should not be surprised that Brooks Atkinson writes of The Rope Dancers, in the Times, that it restores the Broadway theater as a palace of truth...

...As for her voice, it is naturally lovely, but what transcends endowment is her ability not to speak, not to allow herself to be hurried, whatever the pressure from across the footlights...

...Atkinson to be reminded of the range and variety of our sick possibilities without any ordering of the data...

...Certainly the life of the Hyland family has no dearth of psychological horrors with which to stimulate such a fashionable response...

...But the years were not wiped away by her strategy of self-awareness...

...No one ever leveled such a gross accusation against Molnar...

...he has a more than common command and flexibility...

...But it insults me if Miss Hayes doesn't respect any play in which she appears, even a play like Time Remembered which is called a romantic comedy but is actually just a stage contrivance, neither particularly romantic nor very funny...

...we were not helped to forget the implacable movement of time by Miss Hayes's recalling to us that she is a human being, indeed that most vulnerable of human beings, an aging actress...

...Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered is an offense of a quite different sort, an infringement of what I take to be a cardinal rule of the theater— that no actor or actress has a right to be on both sides of the footlights at once...

...Of Mr...

...But myself, I found it only an assault on the nerves...

...But it was not alone Miss Hayes's personal intrusion into the part of the aged duchess that made Time Remembered a troubling, almost memorial occasion...

...Wishengrad's dialogue is not an instrument of communication: it is merely a stimulus to our own processes of free association...

...I suppose the difference lies in how we define a vehicle for a top-flight comedian and for a first lady of the theater...

...I do not mean that Helen Hayes actually takes off from the stage and circulates among the audience...

...Vitus dance, and death—all of these enlivening symptoms acted out, by the way, right before our eyes...

...On STAGE By Diana Trilling Siobhan McKenna Triumphs, Helen Hayes Postures in New Offerings If one went to the theater for an experience only of its craft, if superlative acting and staging were all that were required of a play to establish the illusion of dramatic reality, The Rope Dancers would surely be a striking addition to the current theatrical season...

...Anyway, Miss Hayes romps, capers and postures through her role of the indulgent, fabulously rich aunt of a moony young man whom she undertakes to rescue from his memories of a former love affair with a famous dancer, now dead, by supplying him with the live image of his beloved in the person of a pretty little milliner...