On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Middleton and Lowell It was unlikely that the Lincoln Center Theater company would live up to the windy claims made on its behalf before last season's opening. It...
...Her deficiencies of speech, presence and timing are so marked that between words a decade drags by, between sentences a generation, and between acts the house thins out...
...But why...
...The play has moved into a threepart counterpoint: the Spaniard's desperation as he issues his oblique warnings to Delano to get off The San Domingo while he can...
...I could barely manage to keep reading...
...They were missing the ironic heartbeat of the play...
...On and on she goes, like a simpering holdover from silent movies, enlisted into talkies by mistake...
...And a body (or sack) falls from a great height with a dull thud...
...Madmen leap to the accompaniment of David Amram's Iberian version of—could it be the Saber Dance...
...they were hints to Delano...
...What Lowell has done is to write into his text a run of beautifully graded ironies...
...and the insertion I am suggesting is a modest one...
...And yet, as a reader, I found it almost impossible to stay interested...
...But he puts nothing in their place...
...Nor is there much in the way of relief...
...The wait seemed interminable...
...This takes some doing...
...his works are tightly knotted and compressed, seeming to resist their metrical confines...
...the slaves have captured his ship...
...The perils and penalties of adaptation have been articulated ad nauseum...
...All to the good...
...The set by David Hays, a drawbridge with platforms to either side of it, all suspended over a moat of red velvet, calls up a vision of the Triborough Bridge with Randall's and Riker's Islands lying in an East River of blood...
...They had no idea, any more than I'd had when I read the text, of what was going on...
...the duality of such a relationship makes for a stark, Sartre-like paradox...
...Lester Rawlins' performance as Delano is strong but clotted with acting mannerisms for quick laughs...
...without the necessary information there is no game...
...and the Negro's delight at the discomfiture of the two white men...
...Oh, there are effects all right...
...At the opening a beggar in a black cloak crawls the length of the drawbridge like a spider...
...In one double-edged line after another he is saying that he no longer controls the ship, that Babu is secretly taunting him and holding—in one scene, literally holding—a blade to his throat...
...For After the Fall he and Arthur Miller engaged an unknown named Barbara Loden to impersonate Marilyn Monroe...
...This captain, Don Benito Cereno, is sick and lethargic...
...It hardly becomes a critic to hand out instructions to a playwright, but the script has already undergone considerable modification since it appeared in print...
...I am only sorry that the construction of the early scenes does not allow the audience to appreciate the depth, subtlety and variety of the personality he very richly assumes...
...Miss Loden had none of the sensual, outrageous innocence of Monroe...
...All the technical tricks available to Melville in prose—the suggestiveness of the storyteller who is outside the happenings and can color them with sinister or mysterious statements—are clumsy when used in the drama, and Lowell wisely avoids them...
...Another organization asking for communal backing and sympathy, the American Place Theater, deserves more of both than does Lincoln Center, although it has been handsomely endowed by the Ford Foundation...
...It is unreasonable to expect most of them to have read Melville beforehand, or to pay a second visit in order to let the middle of the play register, or to sit back at home and recast all the incidents in retrospect...
...Even if they had the memories to do this, they would still have lost the theatrical experience...
...It seemed at the time more like an act of defiance to the memory of a wickedly clever comedienne than a lapse of judgment...
...Benito Cereno is a prisoner...
...it is only hard to want to follow...
...the American Place does announce itself as an experimental group...
...Skirts are lifted...
...the American's increasing bewilderment as he gets nothing but evasive replies to his questions...
...Listening to her pronouncing "horror' as "hover" and praying "Hail, Mevvy" to the mother of Christ, one thinks painfully: It must be a joke except that it isn't funny, only one hover after another...
...It needs, for the role of Beatrice, an actress of consummate ineptitude...
...He sees and boards The San Domingo, a drifting Spanish slaver which has been visited by storms, yellow fever, thirst, and starvation...
...Only at the end did the play spring its surprise...
...It was downright inconceivable that the company would eventually make a deliberate laughingstock of itself...
...It was even less likely, after Michel Saint-Denis was edged out of the ruling triumvirate, that Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead would do justice to any classics...
...Led by Babu, they have been mocking Cereno by pretending to serve him...
...All the Spanish officers but the captain have died...
...Delano, a shipshape sort of fellow, would like to straighten the Spaniard out with some hard-headed American advice...
...Lowell is arguably one of the several best poets writing in English...
...I was engrossed in the action until I realized abruptly that all about me people were fidgeting and trying to ease their backsides...
...I hope he didn't mean more rope...
...The production never intrudes on the dialogue, the casting is sound, in two instances superb, and the line of progression remains clear...
...Delano is the captain of The President Adams, a sealing vessel from New England—the year is 1800— anchored off the coast of Chile...
...Cereno's riddles now made sense...
...Kazan has found her...
...When I went to see the play, aware of its resolution, the middle portion, which had seemed like so much slack disquisition, came violently alive...
...The spectators are shut out until the very end...
...She had a light, huskyish voice of the right timbre but she used it charmlessly during that oneway trip into the thickets of Miller's mind...
...he also throws away too many lines...
...Let me say here only that, like most adapters, Lowell is not as ruthless as he should be...
...As a pretext for remaining on The San Domingo he sends his men back to The President Adams for supplies and waits for them to return...
...Its first program, The Old Glory, consists of two one-acts by Robert Lowell, directed by Jonathan Miller and derived from stories by Hawthorne and Melville respectively...
...Inconceivable...
...This device would not spoil the game...
...Now that she is called on to get inside a part that has a complicated psychological texture, she can't even keep her balance on its surface...
...When I read it several months ago (in Show, August 1964), 1 was struck at the outset by the intentional flatness of the language and the looseness of the similes...
...As Babu, the most compelling characterization in the play and the source of its momentum, Roscoe Lee Browne holds undisputed, fingertip command of the stage and himself...
...Above these contraptions hangs a body inside a glass crucifix, a flying-cross conceit out of La Dolce Vita, serving no discernible function...
...Cleavages are reached into...
...It's happened...
...So does The Changeling...
...But this metaphor of 18th-century Boston transplanted to the far side of Styx (a "city of the dead," Lowell calls it) is overpowered by Miller's staging which, with the aid of Commedia makeup, noise and fussiness, dramatizes and laboriously illustrates—practically carbonates— every line...
...Nevertheless, there is one flaw in the dramaturgy that keeps Benito Cereno from making contact with the auditorium...
...A quick spell of coupling takes place on stage...
...Not long ago Kazan wrote a newspaper article pleading with audiences and critics to give him more time...
...Frank Langella, on the other hand, charges every word spoken by Cereno with double significance, but he never hams...
...Yet he could give his play more fully to the audience, simply by tipping us off at the beginning about what is really happening aboard The San Domingo...
...The second and much longer play, Benito Cereno, has been handled by Miller with far more reticence, that is, less apology...
...In the first, My Kinsman, Major Molineux (published in Partisan Review, Fall 1964), the writing is crisp and well-muscled, in tone and manner reminiscent of John Whiting's in The Devils...
...A conundrum was evidently being proposed, but it had no tension to sustain it...
...Kazan has seized on Middleton's The Changeling, of which T. S. Eliot said that it "stands above every tragic play of its time, except those of Shakespeare," and raised a laugh on just about every serious line...
...Somehow Primus manages to confer on his soliloquies an excruciating monotony...
...Lowell is forced to realign the bones of Melville's tale (not sufficiently, as it turns out), but he has made Amasa Delano into a stately and attractive stage figure...
...The poet is striving for the measured narrative pace of a playwright...
...He talks in riddles, appears incapable of governing The San Domingo, and leans on the assistance of Babu, an African slave whom he has taken for his personal servant...
...The rest of the production creaks with inapposite casting, from John Phillip Law as Alsemero to Barry Primus as De Flores...
...One actor, Harold Scott, holds out some compensation...
...In Benito Cereno, by contrast, the style is expansive...
...The play is implying that the ultimate degree of freedom is electing one's own master and choosing to play servant to him...
...Two girls even bounce together naughtily on a bed...
...Not that the story is hard to follow...
...he has the small, testing part of Alonzo, and can speak a line of poetry cleanly, without semaphoring its meaning...
...The latter is one of the most interesting villains in Jacobean literature...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 24
