Filling A Vacuum
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Filling a Vacuum The arrival of postwar French theater in New York started a new racket: the short evening. A play used to run for two and a half hours and up. As...
...Before he is lost to sight, we learn that his property had choked up the staircase, the street, the subway, the metropolis, the entire country, but now it is all fitted into the room...
...Don't be surprised if this debris deposited by a thousand episodes of Mary Worth takes the next Pulitzer Prize for Drama...
...For years actors have been searching for better material than this variety of homegrown drama has afforded them...
...Still, the theater is a persistent phenomenon...
...And listen to this, feller·: the daily reviewers loved it...
...Like Nature, it abhors a vacuum...
...This complex and energetic operation yields less comic issue than it promises...
...The sky was drenched in sunshine...
...a group of mourners who vie with one another in grieving for the deceased—and in putting in their requests for refreshments (at one point the widow comes back into the tear-soaked parlor and says, "I think I got the order wrong...
...Talent wins promotion...
...and a man who cannot unfasten his gaze from the TV set even when his wife dances naked at the front window, threatens him with divorce, and warns him that their children have died —even when the latest late movie gives way to station announcements, the national anthem, and a blank, faintly humming screen...
...The hero, a bourgeois named Choubert...
...who staged the commendable Beebee Fenstermaker off-Broadway, to direct Roses...
...This is the first presentation of the Establishment Theatre Company on East 54th Street...
...Dad and Son drink beer and comment on it...
...Its latest manifestation has recently opened at the Premise on Bleccker Street...
...Hence the improvisational revue, which has come to quick maturity in a matter of six or seven years...
...Yet in this play he introduces a poet named Nicolas— the word is almost an anagram of Ionesco—who strolls in at the end and starts to spout about "a new theater": "We'll get rid of the principle of identity and unity of character and let movement and dynamic psychology take its place . . . Personality doesn't exist . . ." All very well, but the play has established these points...
...The Third Ear tunes in avidly to the music of our sphere, particularly the discords...
...The bad is weeded out to make way for the flourishing good...
...Michael Howard, taking this elliptic task wholly to heart, sprawls on the floor ("The tunnel's blocked up . . ."), mounts a chair that wobbles on top of a table ("Another mountain ahead of me . . ."), and copes wistfully with some monologues that sound as if they had been pre-empted from early Claudel: "This morning our path was strewn with flowers...
...And once again the world is a room...
...Ed Wittstein has designed an ingenious set, an open yellow framework backed by black curtains...
...For its length the play offers a very fair ration of jokes and four witty cameos topped by those of Brian Bedford as the bland philosopher and Roddy MaudeRoxby as the gawky, girl-craving hero...
...In the second half, two furniture movers bring in the tenant's effects—jars, lamps, pictures, tables, wardrobes and assorted wreckage—which methodically crowd him into the center of the stage...
...There are no weaknesses in the casting, though...
...A few weaknesses show up in the "instant" ones that follow the suggestions of the audience, who look embarrassed at being asked and come up with some pretty uninspired ideas...
...During the first half, a concierge presses her services on a new tenant while he takes the room's measurements...
...Or an intellectual conclusion will be reached, as when Mom says, "We have to solve our own problems...
...But he does not have to be a total cynic or anarchist to enjoy the bulk of them...
...Luckily, the director —Michael Kahn—has proved resourceful...
...What keeps the play skimming along is his inventive reversals, as when the movers strain to lift a little vase and then push a sideboard with one finger, or when the tenant switches the positions of two identical stools ("Yes, they're much better that way...
...His first, Who'll Save the Plowboy?, was at the Phoenix last year...
...he rides the performance hard over these and other flat areas of the text...
...The two Ionesco plays at the Writers' Stage on East 4th Street, for example, run for less than two hours...
...Since the visit of Chicago's Second City company to Broadway, hardly a month has passed here without the presence of this new type of comedy, which the performers in effect write for themselves...
...The burden of the plot is how (and how fast) a man can make a girl...
...Most of the sketches are well packed...
...Under the tutelage of Elaine May, the doyenne of improvisation, Renee Taylor, Mark Gordon, Reni Santoni, and two supporting comedians put on voices, emotions, ages and characteristics as effortlessly as most people put on clothes...
...Victims of Duty, an altogether more ambitious work, represents Ionesco's struggle to transcend the theater's limits, to get below them, above them, around them...
...Roses tells the warm and human story of three warm and human human beings—bluff Dad, sentimental Mom, and Sonny just home from the war and yearning to become a writer—who sort of love one another to distraction...
...The "realistic" action ties in closely with the words...
...This is a skimpy bill—another one-act by, say, Adamov would fortify it—but vigorous as far as it goes, squeezing a lot of theater out of the sire of anti-theater...
...Your laughter rang clear . . ." Ionesco has more than once expressed a distaste for Brecht's didactism...
...And each spectator walks out cherishing his own favorite items, according to what he holds least sacred...
...Within these dark boundaries the stage itself becomes an oppressive object...
...An ancient bed is put up and taken down several times...
...They include an award to Max Lerncr for consistent support of the State Department...
...One is tempted to say of The Subject Was Roses that the shorter it is the less pain it gives...
...Charlotte Rae, who plays the servile concierge as a braying mantis, raises a succession of ad hoc laughs as she flaunts a dumpy body and hits every line with the precision of a marimba player...
...Ann Jellicoe has written what amounts to a brief, disorganized boulevard comedy with the standard four characters, hero, heroine, villain, and a philosophical chap who befriends the hero, recites fables, and stands in for the author...
...As prices have expanded, plays have contracted...
...But not exactly hate...
...Alternatively, if Gilroy had set out to write a longer, less modest work, he might have felt impelled to write it better...
...At frequent intervals an emotion will be given voice, as when Dad says to Mom, "I want you...
...Much of its professional slickness is probably attributable to the director, Mike Nichols...
...And the lights go out...
...Instant sketches, like other instant products, too easily get diluted...
...The Knack is also a tiny play spun out...
...is driven back into his memories in search of a man whom he may or may not have known...
...The producer has chosen Ulu Grosbard...
...a reference to the retired president of an oil company who wants to head up the Peace Corps in Saudi Arabia...
...They love, but they sort of hale too...
...They are too considerate...
...Mom makes waffles and talks about them...
...some choice dialectic between two Hassidic Maccabees who are patrolling and protecting Brooklyn...
...They really do love, but they sort of get in one another's way...
...As her opposite number, Anthony Holland makes a superbly laconic anchorite out of the tenant...
...The theater in New York has just gone through an orgy of self-congratulation over yet another short entry: The Subject Was Roses, Frank D. Gilroy's second play...
...Audiences recently sat down to the 12 minutes of Beckett's Play and were then awarded a 15-minute intermission in which to recover...
...If summing them up isn't blatantly didactic, what is...
...A system genuinely operates, a merit system...
...The New Tenant, which falls into two nearly independent parts, opens on an empty white stage with a single window and double doors to right and left...
...I want you like I never wanted anything in my life...
...this is, after all, London...
...Yet 1 think that only the high-cost, highrisk, small-cast conditions of today's theater allow a play like this to be done at all...
...A room, a cell— Pinter is surely indebted to this play, which was published in English in 1958...
...Tea is consumed in quantity...
...They reached for their most emollient adjectives— "tender," "sensitive," "poignant," and that triumph of non-meaning, "touching...
...it would gain force if its two intermissions were removed and a curtain-raiser added...
...budget-juggling at a high level to make it look as if Johnson really is carrying out a war on poverty...
...In showing people dominated by objects, Ionesco cannot resist playing some bits of business so mercilessly that their humor dries up and one is left with only the object lesson...
...Producers evidently believe that their patrons cannot take too much of that difficult stuff...
...An off-Broadway playwright and director thus leave their apprenticeships behind and soar together to Broadway's dizzy heights, the Royale on West 45th Street...
...Curtain...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 13
