On Stage
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider The Shattered Menagerie ON more than a few occasions, it has seemed that only two serious themes were possible in the modern theater: one being that human beings...
...But this is a streetcar off its rails, meandering from one character and one point of view to another, baffling where it should be intriguing, rarely letting us know or care whose side we are on, sensationalizing the surface where it should illuminate the depths of its submerged desires and tensions...
...When it is all over, and Mama's confrontation with the truth has forced one son out of the house to face his own weakness and the other into the army to find his escape in death, it is too late for any of them, as well as for Feibleman's play...
...In the end, the play turns out to be more Streetcar than Menagerie...
...The main trouble with Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, the latest variant on the elusive problem of truth and illusion, is that it states both themes simultaneously, confusingly, and without much distinction...
...With the exceptions of Diana Sands, who undergoes a striking transformation from salvation to sin and gives the play its one tingling taut scene, and Cecily Tyson, who remains charmingly amusing in a subordinate role, the other performances range from the conventional to the downright embarrassing...
...Her oldest boy is in jail for murder (as she has always feared) while she worships a phony telegram announcing his hero's death in action...
...At the curtain, as with Amanda and Laura in Tennessee Williams' play of 18 years ago, daughter and mother are left behind to comfort each other amid the debris of the shattered family...
...Another son, the tiger caught up in her apron strings, is actually a petty thief and male prostitute serving the jaded white ladies on the other side of town—though he pays off the mortgage, buys her jeweled trinkets and has conveniently provided the telegram...
...The other two members of the family are shadowy nonentities, a son whom she is pushing into marriage with a local grande dame (who is actually a tough and ambitious floozie burning to get together with the tiger and his potentialities), and a daughter who seems to know what is going on but always loses her nerve and her rationality before she can do anything to stop it...
...I'm afraid that is where most of the play remained as well...
...The setting by Oliver Smith is that nowfamiliar and even somewhat oldfashioned blending of interior and exterior space which once seemed so full of poetic realism but no longer suffices to cover up the lack of three-dimensional dramatic material behind its carefully wrought, two-dimensional clapboard...
...instead it merely compounds its melodramatics and intensifying its inner confusions...
...Tiger offers the promise of a colored Glass Menagerie: a family depressed by the drab uncertainties of its environment, dominated by a matriarch of inexorable persuasion, restless, groping for a way out of its blind alley of false hope...
...What is more, the set was so designed that several of the most potentially effective scenes of family gathering had to take place offstage...
...Claudia McNeil, a powerhouse of plausibility in Raisin in the Sun, is strangely rickety here, never succeeding in making Mama either credible or interesting...
...In this case, Mama covers the ugliness and barrenness of existence with a tangle of pretense, evasion and half-lies, which ultimately mount up like festering weeds to choke off the elaborate garden of dreams by which she lives, and ends all possibility of real relationships among those whom she has protected from reality...
...or The Iceman Cometh and The Summer of the 17th Doll...
...Compare The Wild Duck and The Cherry Orchard, for example...
...Adapted by Peter S. Feibleman from his own novel, A Place Without Twilight, it is set in the household of a Negro family hidden away in the back alleys of New Orleans at the time of the Korean War...
...Nor has Joshua Logan's staging found the dramatic heart of the material...
...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider The Shattered Menagerie ON more than a few occasions, it has seemed that only two serious themes were possible in the modern theater: one being that human beings cannot live without illusions, the other that they cannot live with illusions...
...or Waiting for Godot and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 2
