On Stage
MILLER, JONATHAN
ON STAGE By Jonathan Miller A Plausible Forgery Edward Albee's The Ballad of The Sad Cafe is a lulu, and since bad currency always drives out the good, one can only regret that it has gotten...
...The protagonist of tragedy must walk whole upon the stage...
...Without the usual frivolity of an intermission, and beginning and ending with the same halfchanted elegiac chorus, it establishes a tendentiously tragic symmetry...
...For plays of this sort not only take up precious stage space but they also take up valuable space in the minds of the theater-going public, stuffing them out with worthless ersatz so that the real thing never gets in...
...The action moves, the author must have thought, in a grave ellipse which arrives at the point from which it set out...
...The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a good example of such plausible forgery...
...Take the general shape of the play for instance...
...who represents thwarted virility...
...It is only in the light of this ordinariness that the outlandishncss of the Ballad seems so meretricious...
...Who but we the audience could know what turbulence was enclosed by that simple figure...
...And it usually takes a whole season to digest one antelope, so if the gizzard is currently taken up with something bad it may be a whole year before anything better can get on the line...
...Genet creates magic out of perversion, but for him it is a thing in itself, a transcendent state of experience with its own mysterious laws of fantasy...
...It yields a drama which Robert Warshow once diagnosed as a play of Jacobean humors...
...The plot is strengthened further by introducing a mortal combat between Miss Amelia and her horny husband...
...Because such a drama works by going beneath the surface of things, it is automatically guaranteed against accusations of shallowness, and by playing fortissimo throughout the evening it bullies the audience into conceding the gravity of the occasion...
...Oddness is no failure...
...Miss Amelia, for example, is the overpowering frigid Lesbian Type set up against Marvin Macy...
...A quick orange drink and away...
...Such symbolic jiggerypokery, far from going deep, simply establishes a new sort of shallowness...
...The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a fairly ordinary tale of sexual incompatibility which makes a bid for more shocked attention by introducing a dwarf as the apex of the sexual triangle, and by turning the heroine into a bizarre Amazon...
...In Virginia Woolf Albee employed a baroque device involving impotence, man-eating and phantom pregnancies, all brought to a suitably shocking conclusion by a tendentious exorcism...
...Colleen Dewhurst is appropriately heavy-shouldered as Amelia, but comes on a little bit too much like John Wayne in drag...
...Roscoe Lee Brown is in good voice as the entirely unnecessary chorus, darting about the stage with unsettling litheness or pausing unseen in some vaguely historic present to deliver his priestly ironies...
...It is this failure to get his characters to walk whole that maims Albee's talent, apparently beyond repair...
...Jonathan Miller, formerly a member of the cast of Beyond the Fringe, is currently directing Robert Lowell's The Old Glory, which will soon open Off-Broadway...
...Conscientiously set aside, it is true, and "think" pieces are dutifully hauled off to the conversation pit...
...What is more, with each succeeding season audiences are being conditioned to prefer the fakes and thus reject the real thing when it comes along...
...Just as there was with his Virginia Woolf, which once separated from its decoration of smart black magic, reduces to a fast bitching comedy—simply good Noel Coward...
...The language of the play is unbelievably odd, riddled with weird, supposedly rural tenses, and all delivered with sacramental slowness...
...The whole piece is visibly engraved with fake effects...
...This contest, which was ludicrously staged, smells suspiciously symbolic...
...Dramatists like Albee simply "plant" freakishness to give employment to their own muckraking and since, unlike Genet, they inhabit a fairly conventional world they merely exploit perversion to "beef up" failures of the imagination...
...and while, as he points out, a comedy of such humors was successful precisely because of the excessive clarity of its characters, such simple caricature absolutely prevents a tragedy...
...He has a long, rather beautiful romantic face which lights up with a wonderfully malignant cheerfulness...
...An apparently normal, happy household, town, village or family is shown up and exposed as a structure built on rotten fictions, and each character contributes to the inevitable debacle by working his or her "humor" to its logical conclusion...
...Michael Dunn is best of all as the treacherous dwarf, scooting about on his mini-legs like a cruising portrait bust...
...The faults of the play no doubt originate in the novella, but this was the material with which Albee chose to work and he has wrought his own dire influence on it...
...But of what...
...His plays are cartoons of seriousness made up of florid "types" animated by a largely theoretical viciousness...
...Drama which works according to this typological scheme is then necessarily fastened to a plot line which has become painfully familiar in the American theater...
...In view of the actual meretriciousness of that turbulence, this solemn outline seems no more than a bid for reverence, put in like Gothic shapes in a modern church to claim the pious veneration of the audience...
...Of little more, one suspects, than the battle of the sexes...
...Under the outlandishncss and brutal oddness of it all there is a startling ordinariness...
...One knows from bitter experience that a limited compartment is set aside by the public for serious drama...
...ON STAGE By Jonathan Miller A Plausible Forgery Edward Albee's The Ballad of The Sad Cafe is a lulu, and since bad currency always drives out the good, one can only regret that it has gotten such wide critical approval...
...The actors do almost as well as can be expected with the material provided...
...One could have done with that intermission...
...But once the space is filled by whatever it happens to be—Luther, Virginia Woolf or The Ballad of the Sad Cafe—nothing else gets in until the python has digested the antelope...
...The rest of the cast, as is so often the case with small parts on Broadway, are embarrassingly incompetent, and William Prince leads all here with the flabby gentility of his rural bumpkin...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 24
