Marathon Boredom
ROGOFF, GORDON
ON STAGE By Gordon Rogoff Marathon Boredom Some plays are born boring, some achieve boredom, and some have boredom thrust upon them. The only remarkable achievement of June Havoc's...
...Miss Harris shows signs of being wiser than her producers...
...The marathon—foreground and background—is everything except the foundation of a focused play...
...These music-hall regulars, it soon becomes apparent, join the Studio far more effectively than the Studio joins them...
...The source of the shapelessness lies in a choice strange by itself, yet all the more baffling coming from a temple dedicated—and rightly so —to the development of truer internal behavior in the theater...
...Like June, the almost-heroine in this would-be show, St...
...a cruel exercise in social sadomasochism...
...An old rule of human endeavor tells us that it is suicidal to labor mightily to produce a pea...
...Indecision is probably the disease most likely to run rampant through any theater...
...Clenching her eyes and pursing her lips, she is never less than what a star should be and always less than the actress she might be...
...The only remarkable achievement of June Havoc's Marathon '33, produced by the Actors Studio Theatre, is that it so horribly combines all three paths to our indifference...
...Given Lee Strasberg as supervisor, it becomes a religion...
...One moment it is just what we see...
...Here indeed is a painfully apt description of Miss Havoc's stance as a playwright and this production's vainly theatrical stance as drama...
...We are presumably in the '30s, yet the costumes represent a cross section of several decades...
...Neither social documentary nor personal drama, it is an elusive reminder that nothing, indeed, comes of nothing...
...We know that we are in a modish Broadway theater, but we are expected to suspend our crushing disbelief in the expectation that we shall lose ourselves so thoroughly in the eventless details of the plotless plot that we shall quickly imagine ourselves extensions of the marathon dance ordeal itself...
...By its nature, the theater piece is a half-bred neurotic, trying anxiously and clumsily to be several other breeds at once...
...But there is no indication that their interior rhythms are yet strong enough to compensate for the flair, the efficiency, the confident brassiness and all the fun that is missing...
...To try for more, however, might have been as pretentious as the theatrical conceit in which she is trapped...
...It could never have been better in text, its production bears all the marks of strenuous effort on the part of earnest men and women of the theater, and it is made to appear even more banal and trivial under the weight of the heavily epic production thrust upon it...
...Joan in the shoes of Little Miss Marker, the theater piece can never quite make up its tiny pollyanna mind...
...The Studio's actors, capable no doubt of behaving like people under human stress, perform here as if they had strayed aimlessly from their natural environment without quite reaching the outer shores of musical comedy's alien land...
...Faced with a play that is not a play, the Actors Studio Theatre has produced Marathon '33 as a theater piece, an unpatented euphemism currently popular in theater bars designed to cover a multitude of sheepish grins...
...It follows, then, that the theater piece represents an odd choice for the Actors Studio since it is always conceived from the outside-in: Any inner-life suggested by the text is automatically sacrificed at the altar of external effect...
...If I only knew what it was I wanted to be," she says wistfully, "and knew how to do it, then I know I could be it...
...Where the lighting should be harsh, nasty, white and intolerable, it is most often soft, sweet, amber and soothing...
...The most consistent performers, Lee Allen and Iggie Wolfington, are not members of the Studio, yet their alert sense of performance rarely intrudes upon the "truth" of their intimate moments...
...The emblems of his Order are everywhere...
...Quite literally, they are called upon to be the soiled children of Gypsy...
...The only thing worse is to produce a molehill in the hope that it will look like a volcano...
...Julie Harris, beginning with bangs and ending in simpers, dances shakily in the spotlight of the muddled occasion...
...the next moment it suggests a parable desperately grasping at wider meaning...
...Borrowing freely and thoughtlessly from the surface glories of everything that lies between Brecht and Broadway, it strives manfully to be more serious than show business and succeeds only in being less perceptive than serious drama...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 1
