On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Deflected Aims Every scene of The Owl and the Pussycat (Anta Theater) begins with a line drawing of an owl and a cat projected on a scrim, together with a brief...
...he also quotes—once—from Gray's Elegy and later observes that he has lived his 30 years according to the principles of logic, which he demonstrates by straightening and aligning his furniture with anali if that's still the right term) precision...
...With her speeches she resorts to a divide-and-rule stratagem, shattering each sentence into its component words and hitting them against one another to make multiple pokes...
...Anouilh thus has provided himself with: a play within a play...
...Epigrams and nicely-honed insults glint here and there...
...But he isn't content with the cartoon and the things...
...The play comes over as a purportedly serious attempt to damn aristocrats and revolutionaries alike...
...As the equally stupid writer Alan Alda takes his moments less broadly...
...Instead of occupying himself with bad men, as he threatened to do, Anouilh manipulates bad ideas—bad because they are half-baked...
...Even Donald Pleasence, that bold and sinewy actor, can do little as Bitos-Robespierre to redeem the play's vulgar solemnities...
...they attest only to what might have been...
...On the pretexts of neat playmaking and "believability" he tosses in slabs of heavy motivation...
...As the stupid prostitute Diana Sands steals a laugh wherever she can...
...Alda is a youthful, whimsical, piping comedian with a gaunt frame, wrecked eyes and shoulders that sag, presumably under the load of all that logic in his life...
...Both characters explain that...
...He has to pretend that he's dealing with people...
...On Broadway a yell is as good as a wink: You know you're in for an evening of animated cartooning...
...Last season's "hottest ticket," Barefoot in the Park, consisted mostly of jokes about an apartment, its inaccessibility, its faulty props and plumbing: a sort of dramatized Consumer Reports...
...In a hiccuping scene that drags on for about 15 minutes she is racked by some of the finest hiccups of recent memory...
...The play is even called a pièce noire...
...At a number of points his writer emerges as an effective farcical type who seems ready to abandon the sinking script...
...The cartoon impression is reinforced when you meet the two characters, a prostitute and a writer, and listen to their dialogue which concerns things, rather than people—a television set and its aerial, a radio and its aerial, the first line of a story, orange juice, a stove, a bathroom, and Band-aids...
...It seems to me that Anouilh, in this play as in others, backs away from the comedy...
...Thus, the writer is supposed to be an intellectual...
...a historical portrait gallery to dip up from...
...The plot of Poor Bitos (Cort Theater) is a framework built to display a glittering comedy and blueprinted in deference to Aristotle's precept that comedy resides in "the imitation of bad men...
...If Manhoff refuses to stay with the cartooning for which he has an aptitude, Jean Anouilh in turn refuses to listen attentively to his comic muse...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Deflected Aims Every scene of The Owl and the Pussycat (Anta Theater) begins with a line drawing of an owl and a cat projected on a scrim, together with a brief dose of soundtrack music that sounds borrowed from a Tom and Jerry short...
...Thematic continuity...
...He has another misanthropic message to deliver and doesn't trust comedy to carry it...
...Manhofï may tell himself that his play exists for the sake of the characters, but he hasn't convinced the performers, who labor valiantly to fight off the invasion of the inanimate world...
...Bill Manhofï, the author, is evidently following the profitable fashion of diluted chosisme...
...The rest of the guests, each of whom holds a grudge against Bitos, will enact the roles of other historic figures out of the French Revolution, but Bitos is not told beforehand that they mean to humiliate him...
...Then how is it that, as John Harvey remarks in his new study, Anouilh, a Study in Theatrics, "Nothing too much happens during the entire three acts...
...and the painful (and therefore highly exploitable) situation of a lamb among wolves...
...a chance for the 18th and 20th centuries to comment upon each other...
...he brings them back for several bows each...
...Ten years after World War II André Bitos, a self-righteous public prosecutor and formerly a Resistance leader, is invited to a dinner party where he will play Robespierre...
...Most of the gags are funny and the playwright is proud of them...
...But the modern characters are trite and the representations of Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, Mirabeau and Desmoulins are travesties, neither historically true nor theatrically alive...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
