An Ending and Some Beginnings

...Moral choices (and tenderness) certainly interest Thornton Wilder...

...Wilder, our most durable and universal dramatist, has for the first time written especially for off-Broadway as well as for the non-proscenium stage...

...Regardless of quibbles, however, I look forward to the remaining plays in both cycles as they are unfolded on the Circle-in-the-Square stage over the next few years...

...The probings and yearnings of childhood, its frustrations and fantasies, and the inept good will of parents (understandingly portrayed by Dana Elcar and Betty Miller) do not leave us untouched...

...Duerrenmatt's special dramatic talent lies in framing his conceits and ironies within the terror of a nightmare world that becomes frighteningly real...

...Whatever the period, he plays Restoration comedy trippingly, though I wish his haircut had matched his toga...

...one performer's acting style stems from the Actors Studio, another's from summer stock...

...ON STAGE An Ending and Some Beginnings By Alan Schneider Whatever the reasons, we're still diluting Duerrenmatt— since Brecht's death, probably the most important playwright writing in German...

...but, in this case, imaginatively and evocatively woven into strands of delicate imagination and real feeling...

...Here we have the standard theme of misunderstanding between the opposing universes of parents and children...

...Alan Schneider has directed, among other plays, Beckett's Happy Days and Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle...

...Three seasons ago, we took the bitter bleakness of The Old Lady Pays a Visit, his modern parable of an ancient harridan wreaking vengeance by cynically exploiting human greed, and filtered it through the glamor of the Lunts into the much softer The Visit...

...I think" Vidal announced in an interview shortly before the opening, "that Duerrenmatt and I may be the only two playwrights in the mid-20th century who are interested in moral choices and issues, and not in love, tenderness or loneliness...

...He is a theatrical cousin of Kafka and Camus...

...the set is serious while the costumes are not...

...With the first two of his opening trio, he has succeeded at least in this respect...

...In Romulus, all we are allowed is a spoof with overtones (Rome is the U.S...

...Howard Da Silva stalks about grimly and genially as Ottaker the Conqueror, who discovers he has more in common with the past than with the future...

...and the Goths are you know what), a melange of aphorisms and anachronisms, more gagged-up than genuinely witty...

...By the time Ottaker, the leader of the Goths arrives and we discover him to be a good guy worrying about the bad guys who might follow him (and intelligent enough to compete with Romulus), the play is over...

...Nor does the production help the confusion...

...And one suspects that the new tenant at the Music Box, "Gore Vidal's Romulus" (as program and advertising proclaim in large type), is considerably less biting than Friedrich Duerrenmatt's original Romulus the Great...

...The others, including attractive Cathleen Nesbitt, seem hopelessly mired...

...But it should be starting...

...Turgid and over-cryptic (though Lee Richardson makes a most human St...

...What might have been a sardonic historical fantasy, or at least a penetrating high comedy about a Roman Emperor who seems to prefer raising chickens to saving his Empire from the Gothic invaders— we eventually learn he did it all on purpose in order to hasten its deserved downfall—turns into fairly low comedy, replete with stock characters and a series of third-rate Shavian conversations...

...This is the culmination of his life-long revolt against traditional theater conventions, which began with the sceneryless experiments of his early oneacters (Happy Journey, Long Christmas Dinner, Pullman Car Hiawatha) and developed into the mastery of Our Town and The Skin of our Teeth...

...Cyril Ritchard has an emperor's field day as a historian turned ruler of Rome...

...I am not interested in the ephemeral," Wilder has stated, "such subjects as the adulteries of dentists...

...Wilder's intention, however, remains highly laudable...

...The third play, Someone from Assisi, represents Lust but remains an enigma without enough variations...

...A peculiar mixture throughout, it is too literal and yet rarely credible, obvious without being clear...

...It is a bit over-extended and under-directed, and Sid Caesar once did a skit with the same idea...

...I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of millions...

...Leaving aside the patent inaccuracy of this statement, if there were moral issues in Romulus, they went unnoticed by me...

...Certainly it suffers also from not belonging to the same cycle as the other two...

...Two years later, we succeeded in making his The Deadly Game seem dull...

...Childhood is closer to the "old" Wilder, at once playful and wise, in whose world chairs become buses and make-believe becomes incantation...

...Francis), it is the only one which could have been written by someone else and presented with greater effectiveness behind a proscenium...

...His Plays For Bleecker Street (Circle-in-the-Square) is a major event, although disappointingly minor in scale and, perhaps, in achievement...

...one must respect the size and scope of his newest and perhaps final work, of which these three plays are a part: two cycles of seven plays each, one cycle concerned with the "Seven Ages of Man," the other with the "Seven Deadly Sins...

...One scene is totally unlike another in tone...

...The three latest one-acters are slighter and fainter than their predecessors, and they open up no startlingly new theatrical doorways...

...Perhaps Vidal had better stick to some of the more amoral issues which made him successful...

...Infancy, a vaudeville sketch about grownups and infants out in a park, complete with Keystone cop, romantic maid, practical mother and two baby-carriages and their occupants, is amusing in its insights, and uproarious in the gurglings of its "infants"—portrayed with terrifying reality by two folded-over adult actors...

...But I defy anyone who sees the play to look again at a baby-carriage, or a baby, with the same innocence...