On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel A Round of Polo Marco Millions, Eugene O'Neill's scenic route to ridicule, is a thematic joke that keeps proposing the same variation. Marco Polo, his father and...
...Certainly, Marco himself is a long way from being a fully observed character...
...Because the part is written on one plane without any deepening of the role, without any insights into the profit motive, monotony intrudes early on and accompanies Holbrook through the script...
...David Wayne plays Kublai Kaan in white silk, immense sleeves, gray chin wisps and elegantly applied wrinkles...
...during the Court scenes he has figures squatting incidentally about like gargoyles and he decrees a fine balance between stasis and movement...
...Unhappily for the message, O'Neill's East is made up of wooden, priggish philosophers who are far less sufferable than the go-getting Polo family...
...He mocks Marco's attempt to write a love poem, brushing aside the possibility that there might be a kind of poetry in the very life of a merchant adventurer...
...For Marco Millions, the building blocks that served as levels of consciousness in After the Fall have been removed and the spectator now faces a spacious pit with a multi-colored floor of floral wheels and whirls planned by David Hays to represent Venice (with an obbligato of fluttering lights), a royal junk (to considerable oh-look-atthatting from the audience as masts rear up and take the weight of shredded-wheat sails), a Mohammedan mosque, the throne room in Cathay and other visions of Hokumland, Asian circuit...
...In the new production at the ANTA Theater, the second offering of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, Marco's more engaging qualities issue accidentally from Hal Holbrook's performance...
...Marco Polo, his father and his uncle are 13th-Century Venetian businessmen, genus Americanus, who strike out on a 20-year quest to unloosen all the gold in the Orient...
...Now that we have seen him master the kind of lines that pour out of Oriental potentates on film, as well as teahouse Okinawans, we have a right to expect his swift promotion to Shaw, Congreve and Shakespeare, in which he can display the presence and exercise the voice of one of the most noble actors in our theater...
...The other actors address their parts with all the warmth, energy and selflessness called for, but there is one clear miscasting among them...
...the author hates businessmen too rabidly to take a careful look at them and reconstruct their drives with any plausibility...
...As commentary it fails to illuminate the East or the West, in spite of its quasi-religious guff and the heavy research wadded into the speeches...
...The play dates back to the middle 1920s and starts off rousingly enough looking like a skit on all the M.G.M...
...In the end, though, the faults of Marco Millions are O'Neill's...
...easterns" and "biblicals" to come, with language to match—sometimes formal to the point of pomposity, when spoken by Kublai Kaan and his entourage...
...Joseph Wiseman as Kublai's sage-in-residence reveals a similar dignity and wears a knowing smile but occasionally tends to take on the gulping inflections of a Gielgud...
...Zohra Lampert as the Princess Kukachin who is hopelessly if unaccountably infatuated with Marco shakes her head, opens her arms, swallows words and aims for a slightly kooky, tender-hearted interpretation that speaks of The Village rather than Cathay...
...The play thus offers a field day of effects and spectacle to Hays, to the costume designer Beni Montresor, to the composer Doris Schwerin, who has written some pretty stretches of Egyptian sandman music, and to the director José Quintero...
...But he has surrendered to the sluggish pacing of the text and has not been able to allay the thankless nature of most of the roles...
...sometimes slangy to the point of no return, when uttered by the principals of Polo Brothers and Son...
...From the chilly fastnesses of The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night and Desire Under the Elms with their single, realistic sets he has branched out into color, stereophonic sound and stereo-visual illusions—from bread, in fact, to circuses...
...Quintero is becoming the high priest of O'Neill...
...As satire it does not develop ruthlessly...
...But it becomes progressively less of a skit, except on itself, for O'Neill has a case to make and it runs roughly as follows: I'll take the contemplative East over the mercenary West any time...
...His modeling and composition are admirable...
...All the same, Marco comes across as a pleasant young man who at least has a weakness for gold, whereas the Easterners have no weaknesses at all other than their confounded moralizing...
...For him they are anti-art, and that's about it...
...As a play, for all its ambition and size, it wants passion...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 5
