"Fashion' and Passion In Current Theater
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley 'Fashion' and Passion In Current Theater Fashion. By Anna Cora Mowatt. Directed by David Fulford. Presented by Mr. Fulford and William Dempsey. At the Royal...
...Mowatt wanted to write a good theater piece, and she did...
...Most engaging of the characters is staunch old Adam Trueman, "a fanner from Catteraugus," progenitor of a long line of honest sons at the soil...
...Lucy had bought Tonio as a boy from his parents in the Near East...
...Surrender" is more cynically used in the second play, Maidens and Mistresses at Home in the Zoo, by Meade Roberts...
...It is a satire of Americans aping European ways, as was the vogue among 19thcentury nouveaux riches...
...Elsa Freed makes a medium of astoundingly ugly aspect...
...There is no drama, only spectacle...
...The first wants her to keep his jewels, as a protection from complete surrender to the second...
...But it seems that just what she wants is complete surrender...
...they tell these tales, at the Gate, to a grimy wigmaker...
...She is taken in by a French cook masquerading as a noble...
...Two plays directed by Sherwood Arthur...
...As they begin to talk, we watch each story unfold in the bamboo grove...
...The dialogue is undistinguished and banal, with occasional words spoken by the wretched woodcutter and his leering crony which are far beyond their range...
...At the Music Box...
...Presented by David Susskind and Hardy Smith...
...By Fay and Michael Kanin...
...Fashion, which in 1845 achieved a record run of 28 nights, drew drama critic Edgar Allan Poe to its first five performances...
...But the priest finds a moral in it all...
...Akim Tamiroff as the woodcutter and Oscar Homolka as the wigmaker do all they can with what is provided them...
...Rashomon...
...Each story of the crime is intended to reveal more about the nature of the teller than about the nature of the deed...
...The reflections are trite, and there is nothing Japanese in the performance...
...For the impoverished Lucy is urging her widow friend to surrender to the athletic young Tonio, who will then surrender his gigolo earnings to his mistress Lucy—whose helpless husband is a wheelchair witness to all the deals and deeds...
...But the emotions do not come over...
...At the Royal Playhouse...
...He is amusingly played by Will Geer, but no more broadly than the equally amusing society matron of Enid Markey, with her facile adaptation to "Parisian" ways and her fractured French...
...The tall loom of the ruined gate stands, like decaying shreds of humanity, against the towering palms and loveliness of nature—where man's evil thoughts and deeds intrude...
...Song of Songs, a civilized searching by Jean Giraudoux, presents a woman in the process of transfer from one lover to the next...
...But these subleties are undeveloped...
...Mistresses and Maidens...
...Each is over-talky, yet each takes strange hold...
...Leueen MacGrath gives a vivid performance as Lucy, whose money was exhausted by her husband before his debauches exhausted him and left her to use her slave to sell his potency to elderly women, to support the three...
...The woodcutter and a renegade priest were at the hearing...
...Her second lover has proposed marriage...
...Tiffany, an uneducated milliner, uses her husband's wealth to preen as a leader of New York society...
...Out of the stories that grew into the beautiful Japanese film, Rashomon, has been woven a beautifully designed but static play...
...But little else takes hold of the beholder...
...As the widow, Joanna Roos keeps the part in the proper key and helps make the gruesome drama also a gripping one...
...An ANTA production...
...Giraudoux explores her heart in quiet but thorough fashion, as odd characters flit about the Seine-side restaurant where the lovers meet and part...
...The wigmaker is a cynical mocker, who belittles the persons involved and all mankind...
...From stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa...
...Among the many clamoring off-Broadway productions, Fashion makes sound claim as entertainment...
...Directed by Peter Glenville...
...The cook is trying to snare an American fortune, but the Tiffany daughter escapes his wiles in the nick o' time and the simple souls of America are happily matched at the close...
...Lucy must mask her anguished needs to work on her widow friend, and Leueen MacGrath carries the variety of moods with a power that lends distinction to a woman from whom we might otherwise shudder away...
...A service for sophisticates is spread in the two one-act plays at the Orpheum...
...Presented by Archer King and Harrison Woodhull...
...A thousand years ago, in a bamboo grove beyond the ruined Rashomon Gate of Kyoto, there was a rape and a killing...
...As presented by the gay company at the Royal Playhouse, Fashion remains an amusing frolic...
...At the Orpheum Theater...
...All the characters are self-centered, tortured folk in an anguished tangle...
...We watch four versions of the crime: as the bandit confesses it, as the woman tells of it, as her samurai husband reconstructs it when he is summoned from the land of the dead by a medium and, finally, as it appeared to a woodcutter who claims to be an eyewitness...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 7
