On Stage

...Inge's Flood family we quickly know that, whatever the problems it will be made to confront in the course of three acts, a humorous and untragical domesticity will essentially triumph...

...If I could be confident that Mr...

...Then, too, the setting of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs has a particular appeal...

...It is also the third play to base its chief claim to seriousness on its psychopathological content...

...Flood's sister...

...Certainly Don Giovanni, taken with its whole force, is as humbling an experience as opera has to offer...

...To a certain extent, this means me, too...

...And I kept wondering what it is in our sense of ourselves that accounts for such a mistaken reading of Mozart...

...and the incestuous possibilities need no further underscoring...

...And this is not entirely self-deception...

...Inge develops his theme of mother-son love, like the supposed sophistication and the explicitness with which he explores the marital relation of Mrs...

...From the opening bars sounded by Mr...

...What was remarkable was that there was no slightest sign of unease on the part of his audience because Mr...

...Well, we'll have no valid drama, of course, until our writers learn better than to try to bring the clinic onto the stage, and neither will we advance our knowledge of ourselves by practicing this kind of half-educated and unlicensed psychiatry...

...But after all, this is my profession, maybe my obsession, keeping count of the received ideas of our liberal culture...

...it may be we can no longer afford to feel this small before a work of art...

...Inge knows better than this, I' m certain on the evidence of his truthful observations of character when he isn't being clinical...

...Inge mentioned a Jew, no least stiffening or embarrassment or instinct to self-defense of a kind which would have been an absolutely automatic reaction to the word "Jew" spoken by Gentiles in a play twenty or twenty-five years ago...

...Inge's play reflects the advances we've made in recent decades it reiterates the new follies and deceptions we have been contriving for ourselves, also in the name of enlightenment...

...we can afford to be tender about our lost innocence at the same time that we feel vastly superior to a society which supposed itself so adventurous and knowing but was too simple to know of itself what all of us now know about it...

...No one can deny the good taste in the Metropolitan's new production, and no one would want to who wasn't more concerned with power than with charm...

...Still, he must have his fashionable go at the morbid, with his director, Elia Kazan, assisting him in full measure...

...So we use taste, good taste, to cut our art down to size...

...With the generous permission of Mr...

...In the '50s we are ourselves sufficiently prosperous not to have to be envious of those booming days...

...Inge's heart was never in this pathological stuff in the first place—when the mother has both her husband and her good sense restored to her and sends the poor boy packing...

...One wants to remind a playwright like Mr...

...Inge has let himself portray...

...then we move toward the curtain...

...But I recalled Ezio Pinza's Don, with which London's version has in common only an equally shapely pair of legs, and the quiet implicit violence which Pinza was allowed to bring to the role...

...The bouncy Mr...

...and no woman becomes frigid for the simple reasons which are made to motivate Mrs...

...On STAGE By Diana Trilling A Small Town's Psychopathology I would say that The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the new play by William Inge, author of the successful Picnic of a few seasons ago, has just about everything it needs to make its way with the people who will go to see it...

...It is with considerable relief that there arrives the inevitable moment of redemption— Inevitable because Mr...

...Yet, of course, not everything that stems from the progressive side of present-day American life is progress, and perhaps even more than Mr...

...Karl Boehm's orchestra, I knew that this muted, delicate Mozart was not my Mozart or, I flatter myself, Mozart's Mozart either...

...Except for Eleanor Steber, who, in both her acting and her singing, was scratchy and awkward, all the performances were charming...

...Lisa Delia Casa, playing Donna Elvira, was an especially good singing actress in the mood established by the direction...

...If we are out to measure our cultural maturity, as who of us is not these days, there's probably nothing more reassuring than to compare ourselves with how we looked and talked, dressed and danced and combed our hair just a short thirty years ago...

...Inge's play takes place in a small Oklahoma town in the early 1920s...

...I can hardly blame George London for giving us a Don entirely stripped of evil...

...There's the moment in his first act, as the most striking example, when the Floods' 16-year-old daughter, who is afraid of social competition and takes refuge in her studies and music, is about to go to a party with a blind date, and it is announced that the boy who is taking her is a Jew named Sammy Goldenbaum...

...Although Gedda was not, of course, up to John McCormack as I have heard McCormack sing Mozart on records, the fact that he bore a family resemblance to that greatest of Mozart singers was enough to make him the bright star of the evening...

...Flood's garrulous sister started talking about Catholics, that her author would indicate that the lady's prejudices were indeed extravagant but would not feel called upon to introduce a fine and noble Catholic to wipe out such residue of error as might have been left in the minds of his listeners...

...Like no other period in the American past, the decade of the '20s, especially its early years, evokes just the right combination of nostalgia and scorn...

...He leaves home and the wife is alone except for her 10-year-old son, of whom it has already been established that she is overly fond...

...I've an old debased taste for plays that deal with family life as if it were interesting merely because it is recognizable, and that resolve the most killing dilemmas by a cozy shift in domestic deportment...

...Inge's title: An act later, the hoy is afraid to go upstairs in the dark, his mother accompanies him...

...Eugene Berman's settings are charming, the costuming is strikingly handsome, the singers move about on the stage with an ease and definition which indeed marks a new era for the Metropolitan...

...The stage darkens...

...As a physical production, it's a lovely show...

...I submit that this clinical "depth" and overtness with which Mr...

...The acting in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is uniformly splendid, but perhaps special note must be made of the distinguished little performer, Charles Saari, who plays the 10-year-old Sonny Flood...

...Flood, who is an ex-cowboy and a harness salesman, has quarreled with his attractive young wife about various wholesome things like money and the husband's interest in another woman...

...Inge's credit that his clinical probings have a real struggle asserting themselves against his talent for social observation and against his nice natural impulse to take people on the sweet level of consciousness...

...Our liberal emancipation being what it is, this news was no sooner broken to me than I knew that Sammy would turn out to be a lovely character, perhaps the young hero of the piece...

...I'm sure he must have been directed so because all the other singers, too, and the orchestra as well, perform like highly skilful practitioners of a civilized but domesticated art...

...And of Mr...

...Inge spells out a few of them for us...

...Flood of the rest of his play would be so uncontrolled as to act out her incestuous impulses even to the degree that Mr...

...But because we live in a society which has made a big thing of teaching mothers not to allow their 10-year-old sons into their beds and which has popularized the statistics of female sexual coldness, a talented playwright lets himself be deceived that this kind of open pathological approach to character is weightier and more significant than insights into motive which are only implied in characterization and in the working out of dramatic conflict...

...At last we know the meaning of Mr...

...Hibbard James, I intrude into his musical sphere to record what seems to be an isolated minority opinion on the Metropolitan's new production of Don Giovanni...

...Only one member of the cast, and even he without violating the general geniality of the occasion, managed to suggest a requisite grandeur —Nicolai Gedda, who sang Don Ottavio with the sort of long, flowing line which is what we remember when we refer to the classical vocal style...

...We have some good, solid reasons to congratulate ourselves—Mr...

...Flood's sister and brother-in-law, are not so much tasteless in themselves as ugly because they do violence to Mr...

...Inge would do no wrong by Sammy, I could be equally certain, later in the play when Mrs...

...Inge's actual perception of his characters...

...Inge that when an ex-patient who was a writer sent Freud a new novel inscribed with gratitude for the help psychoanalysis had given him in his understanding of fictional character, Freud is reported to have groaned and lamented another loss to literature...

...Obviously no woman like the Mrs...

...In other words, the important thing was not that I was unworried...

...It can be said to Mr...

...The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is the third new American play of some pretension to seriousness I've gone to in these last few weeks...

...If this isn't progress, I'd like to know what is...

...The nearest I could come to an explanation is that perhaps we no longer dare make statements about life which are bigger than we can imagine ourselves controlling...

...We have been lulled into a false security through most of the first act...

...The only thing lacking is the opera itself, the fierceness of conception without which Don Giovanni is merely a remarkable series of musical inventions on the theme of male neurotic impulsivity...

...Flood moves toward her son to receive comfort in her desertion, and she is made to spread herself backward on the floor at his feet in a posture of unreserved seductiveness to which the boy responds by throwing himself on her in a fierce kiss...