On Stage

...Or "Madge," he tells his sister, "we come from the same womb...

...Brook imposes himself from without, instead of interpreting from within...

...He tries to make the spectator swallow whole one character's estimate of another: "When I read your paper I realized I was reading the greatest dissertation in the history of physics...

...the play moves over a surface carved with a pinpoint...

...And again, "Doctor, I'm fed up with the same old figures in my unconscious...

...At the end, three physicists who are feigning insanity—there is a light flirtation here and there with Pirandello—vanish behind padded doors reciting potted biographies of Newton, Einstein, and King Solomon...

...Stephen Porter's version of The Alchemist, first mounted at the McCarter Theater in Princeton and now brought to the Gate on Second Avenue, has to contend here with a cramping stage...

...The best contributors to Galaxy, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Astounding bother to demonstrate some familiarity with scientific issues by discussing them...

...Since this son had such mischievous habits as gluing small animals to twigs and cutting them up...

...Miss Hansberry is an unabashed craftsman...

...But as a package, Traveler is well within the 44-pound limit...

...Peter Brook's direction does not sharpen the play's evasive claims, but actually confounds them even further...

...Almost, but not quite...

...Bummidge the comedian turns self-analyst...

...The word is a misnomer...

...It opens as a round of Greenwich Village chitchat, painless enough to take...

...Kass modestly confines himself to extracting the most from his actors, and lines that ring shrilly in the writing come with quiet, convincing passion from the mouths of Gabriel Dell, Rita Moreno, Alice Ghostley and a next-to-faultless cast...

...she takes sly pokes at a queer playwright and his untidy, self-pitying, avant-garde compositions...

...Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (Longacre), like The Last Analysis, deserved a friendlier greeting from the daily reviewers...

...Finally, her wit and her insights into the people she depicts, not merely her social pugnacity, give the play urgent and satisfying relevance...

...It takes place in 1936 and concerns Ben Gazzara, who has become an amnesiac as a result of World War I and is being claimed by Mildred Dunnock as her lost son...

...As in his novels Bellow puts forward the beleaguered hero, the victim, the man who is his own enemy because he is everybody else's friend...

...What is there to stop him from shedding his ugly past and this demanding family by pretending that he isn't the son, after all...

...Wipe out bossism...

...Vote reform" echoes Miss Hansberry's cry for integrity in public as well as private life...

...And when his Tante Frumkah is describing how he was bom on a bus she explains, "You didn't want the breast so your mother said, 'All right, I'll give it to the conductor.' High comedy, which depends on extraordinary verbal dexterity and physical grace, is almost bound to be undercast in New York...

...He now has a kindly new personality that he has constructed for himself since his accident...

...Levene, a likable clown, resorts to a small vocabulary of gestures— clutching his forehead, his heart, and, for one perplexing instant, his private parts...

...one can only infer that she and her other son, who once wished the boy dead, are now capsizing in guilt...

...In Jonson's hectic plotting precision is almost everything...

...Like Duerrenmatt's physicists he is worried about his place in the world, but his worries proceed from himself, not from the world...

...The sign in the window that says, "Clean up local politics...

...Joseph Anthony's direction, and much of the playing, including Sam Levene's, has a walleyed desperation, half a spectrum of sensations away from the needed elegance and coolness...

...Movement and emotion are controlled with a fine hand by Peter Kass the director—a hand, I should add, that never makes itself visible...

...There are points of comparison other than the humors between Jonson and Bellow...

...Bellow's play slips restlessly in and out of naturalism...

...Both playwrights get intoxicated with quaint names, grotesque lists, incantatory lines and sorcery: Bellow's headshrinking spells match Jonson's black magic...

...and resolves into a collection of character studies as set pieces...

...since he knocked up the maid, took over his brother's wife, worked a financial swindle or two, and hated his mother, it is not easy to understand why she wants him back...

...So he does...

...The Last Analysis could have used a director like Cyril Ritchard, who has been squandering himself on television and Broadway messes since he left Restoration comedy, but Bellow's comedy nevertheless has more inventiveness and entertainment than we have seen in years...

...Anouilh offers no clues...

...It is superior in almost every respect to A Raisin in the Sun: wider-ranging in its sympathies, more vividly written, fuller and more varied in its characterizations, and founded on at least as bold a theme...

...apart from its philosophizing, it has something—but not much—to say about the artificial nature of personality...

...since he crippled his best friend by bumping him down a flight of stairs...

...it is high comedy (as distinct from low comedy, which is all wisecracks and tripping over furniture, and from the slender comedy of manners), an exotic bird in these days of gray plumage, and a first-rate specimen of it...

...it's not like having a room in the same hotel on different nights...

...He is skillful at this, certainly, but taken to its ultimate conclusion it is the kind of skill that ends up in Radio City with the Rockettes...

...He can continue to take refuge in it and make a new beginning, that is, a fairy-tale ending...

...By crude assertions, by stale tricks of suspense and surprise, Duerrenmatt forges a play out of his audience's ignorance, and therefore mistrust, of science...

...Like Anouilh's hero he is finding his identity—but deliberately, not by chance...

...Gazzara is a one-voice, one-stance, watch-memeditate performer...

...melts into a study of a young couple whose precarious marriage is threatened by every thoughtless word...

...At one point he remarks, "Apart from my amnesia, my memory's very good...

...With so much trash around, a Jonson play done professionally is a rare event and I hope that this realization of The Alchemist, narrow though it is, persists if only pour décourager les autres...

...Farce presupposes an antic world that legislates its own disorder...

...Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis (Belasco) is billed as a farce...

...After alternating between the promises of gravity and levity, The Physicists concludes, appropriately enough, sounding like extracts from the children's Britannica...

...Yet there is more to the play than a handful of portraits...

...Our hero-as-lifebelt becomes increasingly horrified as he hears more about his youthful misdoings...

...Doctor," Bummidge the patient pleads with Bummidge the analyst, "why can't I live without hope like other people...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel First of the Season With The Physicists (at the Martin Beck Theater) Friedrich Duerrenmatt, repeatedly hailed as one of the monarchs of the postwar drama, awards himself a secure place among the lesser creators of science fiction...

...Her Brustein is Dr...

...he concentrates his efforts on coordinating, if not regimenting, his actors' movements...

...he is backed up by a reliable cast and a discriminating director, Robert Lewis...

...Duerrenmatt tries to get off the hook by letting his scientists name a few scientific laws, thereby providing mere intimations of relativity...

...While some of the supporting actors hurry along embarrassedly (once again, too fast is not slow enough), Roy R. Scheider as Face, John Heffernan as Subtle and Philip Minor as a fully-fleshed Sir Epicure Mammon relish the detail in their dialogue and give their roles all that can reasonably be asked of them in such crowded conditions...

...He is also given to imitating wisdom by means of such aphorisms as, "Only in the madhouse can we be free" and "It is the duty of a genius to remain unrecognized," but these statements, unlike those made by the masters of the s-f genre, are neither plausible in context nor provoking as epigrams...

...It is, though, precisely the neat rounding-off of her scenes that makes the play sentimental and uncomfortably upbeat in tone and, in places, almost undoes it...

...Bellow's characters, like Ben Jonson's, are personified "humors" with a rich command of language...

...Another nearly weightless item, Traveler Without Luggage (ANTA Theater), exhumed from Jean Anouilh's early career, might seem like a precursor of many recent plays on the fashionable topic of Man's Search For His Identity if the dialogue did not have the occasional wet clang of Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics with the rhymes gone...

...But her play belongs squarely in its contemporary setting...

...What, indeed...

...I have a similar feeling about Traveler Without Luggage: apart from its comic moments, it's quite amusing...

...Stockmann of An Enemy of the People, reborn after 82 years and pitted against the same kinds of corruptive pressures as those Ibsen denounced...

...I recommend it warmly and immediately: It has just won a reprieve from the producers...