On Stage

...He is, I am afraid, another victim of that failing common to American playwrights: a susceptibility to the slightest shifts of the winds of fashion and favor, which eventually destroys the artist's real talent...

...For years Inge has tended to be placed a notch below the top, on the second echelon of excellence in American theater...

...He is pawed-over, eviscerated, even starved to satisfy the fleshly demands of the mistress of the household—until she is made to realize that she needs his purity of spirit more than he needs her handouts...

...In effect, he has removed Flora almost completely from our range of feeling...

...But if the play achieves, even partially, its artistic intention, you will find it possible to pity this female clown even while her absurd pretensions and her panicky last effort to hide from her final destruction make you laugh at her...

...But on that level he has always been a careful and sincere craftsman, gentle, quietly perceptive, and given to illuminating the darkness of middle-class existence...

...They are touched by one another—the woman who has always reached out to destroy somehow softened by this apparition of purity...

...Fair enough...

...It is only fair to mention that in a program note written on the occasion of the play's first being performed at the Spoleto Festival last summer, Williams clearly explained his intentions...

...We often laugh at her, but seldom with her...

...Despite uniformly effective performances by a talented cast, Natural Affection is really no more than an uncensored version of a half-dozen television plays we have all seen at one time or another...

...But it is necessary to add that more than any other contemporary playwright, with the possible exception of Samuel Beckett, Williams stacks the deck against himself...

...but we never actually pity her and, through her, ourselves...

...Yet even she cannot find enough in a rhinestone role to make it shining or credible all evening—despite costume and wig changes, and a brilliant witches-sabbath dinner party which she shares with Mildred Dunnock, a deliciously decadent rival...

...His later writings, particularly those following the disturbing experience with Camino Real, have sometimes seemed sensationalized or so tortured in their selection of sexual involvements and aberrations as to be merely clinical...

...The only possible explanation is that Inge, like many of the writers in today's commercial theater, believes it is absolutely necessary to sensationalize his material in order to have any kind of a chance for success...

...Into a fairly conventional domestic problem play—a no-longeryoung career woman is forced to choose between her zombie-like delinquent son, and her clod of a lover—Inge has crammed almost every possible variety of sordidness and sensuality, most of it totally unjustified by either the characters or the circumstances...

...But in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (Morosco Theater) he has written, for him, a poor one...

...If one is disappointed by Williams' latest work, one can only be dismayed by what has happened to William Inge...

...Though we relish the febrile vitality of the gorgon herself, the bloodless contrivance of the young man's "angel of death" character and function is highly questionable...

...Into this gilded flytrap drifts a pale young man of poetic temperament and a vaguely opportunistic past...

...His protagonist this time is Flora Goforth, a bejeweled and tumescent monster of an expatriate awaiting death and love amid the glossy emptiness of her series of villas on Italy's "Divine Coast...

...By day, over a network of intercoms, she dictates her memories of mates acquired and devoured to a compassionate but weak-willed female secretary...

...With Natural Affection, Inge's latest play (at the Booth), it is almost as though he had grown tired of his subordinate role and deliberately set out to shock and horrify beyond the wildest dreams of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—or Sigmund Freud...

...In Milk Train, he has cut all the underpinnings from the central figure whom we are asked to pity...

...But the exploitation of ugliness for its own sake rather than its necessary inclusion in the artist's vision of order seems to me almost inexcusable...

...He is presenting, as he puts it, ". . . the death of a clown...

...The trouble is not that the new play is a carbon copy of his earlier ones, but that it is only a faint carbon copy, so faint in fact that its figures are blurry, unclear and, ultimately, unbelievable...

...Yet they have always remained intensely alive, fascinating in their exotic plumage, and glowing with the language of a theatrical poet...

...But the audience is touched only intermittently...

...the apparition somehow enabled to conquer his own inner violence and loathing...

...Hermione Baddeley, playing with iridescent colors of vulgarity, manages to get all the sympathy possible for La Goforth...

...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Carbon Copies Tennessee Williams represents, along with Arthur Miller, the achievement and the essential quality of the postwar American theater: its corrosive intensity, its concentration on the lonely and the lost, its groping for beauty and truth among the ruins...

...Again he is concerned—or rather obsessed— with his most constant vision: the conflict between spiritual beauty and material ugliness, the artist as the only true solace in a corrupt society...

...The portrayal of ugliness has been and always will be the legitimate province of the artist...

...He now gives the impression of a small boy determined to scrawl the dirtiest of four-letter words in the boldest possible letters on the nearest fence...

...Nor does Paul Roebling—or his director—succeed in buttressing the fragility of the poet against a rock of reality: Everything about him is revealed within the first five minutes of his appearance, but it is not enough...

...By night, bedecked in finery of various periods and styles, she matches wits and lovers with rival vampires...

...Williams could never write a really bad play...

...His Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire stand with the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Miller's Death of a Salesman as classics without which no American repertory can ever be complete...

...We feel sorry for her at times because she is, after all, alive and suffering...

...There is hardly a bit of nobility, nor even of dignity, in her fiercely resistant approach to life's awful adventure which is, of course, that of dying...