On Stage

...Even though one play was done off-Broadway, the first question is obvious: Did we see these plays as their authors intended, or did various exigencies and compromises in production distort their true texture and worth...

...The only real mystery is how it came to be produced on Broadway...

...The crucial premise in Andorra is that someone who looks and acts exactly like everyone else is treated differently because he is thought to be Jewish...

...Yet it is that very simplicity and directness which gives this play its point...

...For Frisch, Andorra is an imaginary country whose inhabitants have habits and motivations all too real...

...In general, the fault here was less with the script than with the production...

...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider The Failure of Seriousness That old indoor game of figuring out why certain worthwhile plays fail to succeed in the commercial theater is never out of fashion—or ever won...

...Jack Richardson, talented as he unquestionably remains, has written a rhetorically pretentious hodgepodge of pacifism and romance...

...whether even if perfectly cast, acted and produced, they could serve the needs of our ultra-sophisticated, ultra-blasé mass audience...

...he is a writer of style, wit and originality, and not to be dismissed lightly...

...The Firebugs is not merely a statement of something obvious, but a demonstration in depth of how the obvious works, similar to Brecht's Mann ist Mann...

...The second question is whether any of the three belonged on Broadway at all...

...Again, what with our varied problems of translation, acting styles and an audience uncomfortable in the presence of so much open talk about antiSemitism, we can only guess how it might be otherwise staged...

...Andorra, which has been presented with distinction throughout Europe, is partly realistic, partly abstract, an etching in acid of human bigotry and chauvinism...

...As seen in previews, the staging and some of the performances seemed overelaborated, as though apologizing for the simplicity of story and moral...

...But the recounting in detail of their respective defeats on and off Broadway seems less important than an attempt to understand the reasons for those defeats...

...This has been especially true in recent weeks when, within a short interval, we have been disappointed by the successive failures of three widely heralded plays: two by a European and one by a young American, and all with serious intentions...

...Broadway's patrons are attuned to sensation, speed and sentimentality...

...The issue of the American casualty, Lorenzo, is easier to assess...

...The play can have serious impact only if its incongruities and madnesses are held in place by an invisible network of terror, as in Kafka's The Trial or Duerrenmatt's The Visit...

...Both of his works are morality plays, parables of the world's contemporary evils and guilt...

...This is easier said than done, of course, but done it must be if our theater is to be spared further debacles when it goes on to attempt Brecht, Ugo Betti, Henry de Montherlant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Ghelderode and the other serious dramatists of this century...

...But one thing at least is clear: Likeable and eager as Horst Buchholz was in the lead role, he was simply miscast...

...Except for rare productions peopled with, say, the Lunts or Zero Mostel, the New York theatergoer is generally disinclined to allegory (sweet or sardonic), irony (bitter or otherwise), moral fervor, or poetry (whether subtle or overblown...

...There is no question that whatever the virtues or limitations of the plays involved, Andorra, The Fire-bugs and Lorenzo, none of the productions proved satisfying...

...In the case of Frisch, guessing is most tempting...

...In the end, he turns out not to be Jewish at all, though by that time he insists on considering himself so...

...The Firebugs, originally entitled Herr Biedermann (Everyman) and the Arsonists, is a Rube Goldberg cartoon of human weakness—or selfishness, or blindness, or stupidity, or fear, or a combination of all of these—which allows the fanatics of destruction, little by little, to enter our tents (as Hitler was allowed to enter the Sudetendland, or country X is allowed to store up atom bombs...

...The playwrights in question are the Swiss Max Frisch, who ranks alongside Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Duerrenmatt as one of the leading postwar dramatists in the German language...

...Unfortunately, in the Andorra seen here the proper blend of realism and stylization, of the human and the symbolic, which makes for reality and identification, was only occasionally achieved...

...Biedermann is a real individual caught up in a dilemma whose solution is almost impossible to imagine...

...The people, including Biedermann himself, hardly change from their first bumbling concessions to the frightened zombies who, in a gesture of good faith, shakingly hand the matches to the imperturbable termites in control of the household...

...The Firebugs, which reminded me thematically and stylistically of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, suffered, among other things, from opening too soon after Andorra...

...Set amid the warring countryside of Renaissance Italy, and offering ample opportunity for philosophical (and non-dramatic) debate on life, art and warfare between a company of ham actors and a capricious general, it is the kind of play usually written by undergraduates (which, originally, may well have been the case here...

...Yet until the Frisch and Richardson plays are revived—and they will be —we can do little more than guess at the answers...

...Buchholz was so different from the other townspeople in every respect, vocal, physical and emotional, that no basis for reality —or for our belief—was ever laid...

...and Jack Richardson, in recent years bracketed with Edward Albee and Jack Gelber as a coming hope of the American theater...