An Eye for Style
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel An Eye for Style Since its early days, Off-Broadway has had a weakness for revivals, and I mean a weakness. Modern dramatists like Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw,...
...the audience must feel something of the misery of the paupers imprisoned in their flophouse and despair...
...I have not seen The Tavern...
...Once again the APA director (this time Ellis Rabb) spots the comedy and coaxes it out...
...Right You Are, written in 1916 and brought into a cleanly colloquial English by Eric Bentley, is part-comedy, part-mystery and, in its best moments, a not unworthy trial run for Six Characters (1921) and Henry IV (1922...
...and both the violent conclusion of the third act and the brooding, confessional mood of the fourth seem out of place, if not tacked on...
...while David Margulies enunciates the servant with a precise wit and flavor...
...The APA is still a fairly cautious organization and understandably so, for repertory is a precarious enterprise and the company may feel that it has done enough in staking its future on a traveling career...
...The translation by Roy Cambell, although less than great poetry, admirably serves Broad's purposes, as when a character cries, "Take here your burnished steel...
...the production plays up the bursts of relief from sordidness without evoking the sordidness itself...
...An altogether more professional company of revivalists has moved into the Phoenix Theatre on East 74th Street, and will be lodged there until Labor Day, with Pirandello's Right You Are, Gorki's The Lower Depths, George M. Cohan's The Tavern and Molière's Scapin...
...When his father, as a test, has him drugged and conveyed to the court to become king for a day, Higgins gives Segismund all the fervor that Camus attempted to write into his Caligula, another stage ruler determined to try his power to the limit...
...The company has no actress who can halfway replace her, but it does have four persuasive players (Sydney Walker, Clayton Corzatte, Jan Farrand and Christine Pickles) with the multiple abilities that keep repertory from growing repetitious...
...asks jesting Laudisi and will not provide an answer as Pirandello lays out scene after scene, each in outright contradiction to the one before...
...First, it is presenting Calderón's Life is a Dream, at the Astor Place Playhouse, in alternating Spanish and English performances...
...The penalty of staging Calderón with a unit set like this one is that the shock of moving across acts from court halls to mountainside and back is lost...
...the reward is the discovery of the play's force and integrity...
...It has little to do with hand-flapping, mannered accents or tricked-up costumes...
...Language of this caliber would have given pause to Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean...
...Right You Are scathes an assembly of busybodies for their morbid interest in the plight of a certain Ponza and his mother-inlaw, one of whom is sane and the other mad...
...Revivals are convenient for producers and directors...
...Of the other productions the only one in which the company truly comes to terms with a style is Scapin, serviceably translated by Stephen Porter, who also directs...
...Suffocation and rebellion: these are the twin themes of Little Eyolj...
...and holds out a wooden toy sword...
...Modern dramatists like Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Wedekind, Chekhov, Lorca and Brecht are favorites, with the occasional intrusion of a big name out of a distant age...
...In a word, its style...
...and later when a servant locked in a tower proclaims, "O that a man so hungry as myself/Should live to die of hunger while alive...
...But he misses the misery...
...As the Prince, Segismund, Michael Higgins is a roaring, neurotic creature, an authentic "beast among the race of men...
...But the general level of competence with which the old warhorses are saddled is low...
...Among them, Richard Waring has a stance, mustache and characterization taken bodily from Basil Rathbone in black Hollywood armor, and his villainy is in no way inferior to Rathbone's...
...Or are they both sane...
...The play is farce with a vengeance, and contains almost all the choice ingredients of Molière's lighter work: baffled lovers, a soubrette, scoundrelly servants and dense masters, old-crock fathers (two), a plot from Terence (Phormion), seasoning from commedia dell'arte, and breakneck action...
...This lets the comedy show through effectively, but blocks the seriousness...
...What is truth...
...It involves the detection of clues in the writing that will serve as the director's master plan for what Charles Morgan usefully called "some underlying unity" in the performance...
...you either laugh or you don't, and on this occasion you abundantly do...
...For style is underlying, not overlaid, and it touches all aspects of the staging, from speech to speed, from lighting to footwork...
...Such a style was realized almost perfectly by Kurosawa in his movie version of The Lower Depths...
...Khigh Diegh, who played a "Malayan from Yokohama" in Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, is here posing as a Spanish king in old Poland who banishes his son to a life on a mountain...
...or when one character tells a story and the others stand frozen with their disbelief and lower lips suspended...
...By way of contrast, though, another company calling itself Teatro Español of New York has taken a double risk...
...You don't argue about Scapin-its style is its wit and its action...
...He might start by going back to William Archer's translation, which, for all its Victorian locutions, is less bombastic than Forslund's, and does suggest a style by conjuring up the 19thcentury oppressiveness of Allmers' household and the passion of Rita Allmers to change her husband or overturn her marriage...
...There is no style to knit the comedy into the mystery, that is, no underlying unity...
...The set is attractive rather than squalid...
...The author appears in the guise of Lamberto Laudisi, a cynical narrator and explainer...
...Few are the productions that come up to last season's Six Characters in Search of an Author, probably because few directors have an eye for genuine style-a style that comes out of a play's own dramatic and historical implications...
...Second, the director of the English version, Jay Broad, has understood the conflicting bravado and self-mockery of the text and modulated his style accordingly...
...They bring them prestige, group bookings from schools, and respectful-to-rapturous notices from the New York dailies...
...Suffocation of a different kind pervades Mason's production of it...
...Mark Lenard as her husband responds with a three-act smirk...
...otherwise the joy of it is lost...
...For this very reason it copes less successfully with Pirandello and Gorki...
...The Lower Depths also has its elements of mystery, but it is primarily a realistic protest against the conditions of the poor in pre-Revolutionary Russia, leavened in places by character comedy...
...But to stress the latter would be a danger, not a risk, and Broad avoids doing so...
...Theatrical style has to do with coherence...
...The APA'S strengths are comedy and embroidery and it plays from those strengths most of the way through its programs...
...Or both mad...
...They address the audience equally boldly during the asides, the dialogue and the soliloquies...
...The play takes place in a parlor and the director, Stephen Porter again, treats it like a parlor game of truth or consequences...
...Instead, his rousing corps of actors belts out their lines and succeeds in swaggering across a stage platform which is about the size of a junior executive's desktop...
...In the case of Little Eyolf at the Actors Playhouse what style there is seems to have been borrowed from those disastrous evenings of Ibsen (Hedda Gabler and Ghosts) that David Ross once contrived...
...The supporting actors rise wholeheartedly to the standards of the principals...
...The APA (Association of Producing Artists) repertory troupe has lost its jewel, Rosemary Harris, who is now on loan to Britain's National Theatre...
...So does the audience...
...The play, seeped in the artificialities of Spain's golden age of drama, has ample contemporary meanings...
...Developing a style means taking a risk...
...How should the director, in this case Marshall W. Mason, face up to the challenge of an 1894 Ibsen 70 years later...
...If a style had arisen from the opening scenes -if it had been found at all-the production would have been of a piece, rather than a series of disparate set pieces...
...Savannah Bentley as Rita Allmers tries to meet it mouth-on by aspirating as if every word deserved the whole of her breath...
...The translation by R. V. Forslund sets the tone with line upon line of soap aria: "He's tired, he's weary, absolutely worn out I can help to enrich the possibilities that he within his soul We could throw ourselves into something that would deaden our senses and make us numb Happiness has to be shared...
...For mystery Porter has substituted tension, the sort of tightness that supervenes when 10 people stand still and stare at a newcomer and the lights dip slightly and the newcomer stares back...
...The play cannot make its points unless this realism is firmly established...
...the actors exude refinement instead of suffering...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 8
