On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley A Cold Winter On Broadway The Deadly Game. By James Yaffe, from a novel by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. Directed by William Gaskill. At the Longacre Theater. The...
...February, "the cruellest month," opened with equal chill...
...The latest De Lys program is of two short plays by Jack Dunphy...
...And everyone concerned for the health and growth of the theater has been watching the series of ANTA matinees at the De Lys, under the general direction of Lucille Lortel...
...The ANTA Matinee Series...
...The Deadly Game might have— one can only speculate—might have been more effective if Duerrenmatt himself had dramatized his story, which pictures three retired Swiss law men...
...This spirit of experiment she has brought to the matinee series at the De Lys, on afternoons when theater-folk are free...
...There is opportunity for production of off-beat plays by established playwrights, for poetic or otherwise venturesome dramas, for novelties Broadway might hesitate to handle, and also for actors to appear in unaccustomed parts...
...Lucille Lor-tel, Artistic Director...
...The season has been brighter off-Broadway...
...and Shakespeare in Harlem, to mention two presently on off-Broadway boards...
...The plays show a bright though still uncrystal-lized talent...
...Of course, any one program may prove a disappointment, but there is always the chance of a new and exhilarating discovery...
...Only one of its early plays seemed more vital...
...The Savoyards in Gilbert and Sullivan Repertoire...
...Then Too Close For Comfort shows a mad mother whose son, shrinking from suicide, is rushed into a leap from the bridge by the stupid efforts to stop him of two complacent, well-meaning middle-class men...
...Lucille Lortel's White Barn in Westport has long been the scene of theatrical adventure...
...Among the many enjoyable aspects of the afternoon, not least was the superb work of Nancy Pollock, first as the possessive mother whose son gets away with more than jewels at her brothel, then as the fabulously demented beldame on the bridge...
...a judge, a prosecutor and a public defender, playing at rendering justice...
...At the Jan Hus House...
...At the De Lys Theater...
...The Gilbert and Sullivan season at the Jan Hus House is a constant and fresh delight...
...it serves as a pontoon-bridge from aspiration to art...
...Throughout January, plays froze before coming to the city, or flickered for a few nights in New York before they fell...
...The first, The Gay Apprentice, shows the initiation of a young man into his father's trade of burglary, at a brothel run by his mother...
...Directed by Dorothy Raedler...
...Not all good intentions can succeed...
...Before invited audiences, in the summers there, she has displayed many works that have since come to the city for wider attention—U.S.A...
...The present version shrewdly tangles the "defendant" in his own ill-deeds, but also tangles the law into a hodge-podge of procedure, and leaves us to guess whether the three old men are crazy, or are somehow supposed to be symbols of a retribution that will come upon all sinners...
...THE WINTER thus far has not been severe, but the Broadway weather has been frigid...
...as the aviator said when the strings of his parachute broke...
...A bridge, indeed, may be taken as a symbol of the ANTA matinee series...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 7
