Watching Closely
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Watching Closely IN the first scene of Jack Gelber's Square in the Eye (Theater de Lys) movies and slides in black-and-white and Kodacolor fly up on to not one, not two,...
...And then he adds that Mrs...
...We follow a merchant and his mistreated coolie carrier across an Asian desert in a race against competitors...
...A doctor comes in and coolly describes how she died of a brain hemorrhage, until Stone realizes that the doctor is addressing him as "Mr...
...But then comes scene two...
...But who can blame the merchant for behaving in an emergency as though the coolie were not the exception...
...Stein.' He explains the mistake...
...And as a whole this play, in Eric Bentley's translation, tells more about human relationships than all the conscience-ridden social protests on and off Broadway this season, largely because it has a fine, dramatic construction...
...The coolie should, according to the rule, have hated his master...
...Sheffer has now taken it to the Greenwich Mews Theater (where it is teamed up with Langston's Hughes' The Prodigal Son), retained the superb music by Brecht's contemporary, Stefan Wolpe, and brought in several outstanding performers...
...The doctor stammers, discards the Stein case history, and finds the Stone file...
...It was, of course, Mrs...
...When they are lost and thirsty, the coolie offers his master a drink from his water bottle...
...Stone and his parents-in-law are in a hospital where his wife Sandy, with whom he has continually bickered, is a patient...
...The play's logic—if it needs political validation—can be applied to, say, the Dominican situation...
...The merchant, thinking he is being attacked, shoots the coolie...
...Brecht was 32 when he wrote it...
...When Isaiah Sheffer first staged the play at Columbia University I thought it the best American production of Brecht I had seen...
...There is a trial, and the merchant is exonerated on the grounds that, even though the coolie was making a brotherly gesture, the merchant was justified in interpreting it as an attack and so defending himself...
...Stone's personality is not very winsome (woe betide the disagreeable type in today's theater of bleeding hearts and repressed flowers...
...So does The Exception and the Rule...
...It does bog down in places, true...
...If they are not, that only makes this particular rebellion an exception, and in a crisis it is safer to observe the rule...
...That he did not only means that he was an exception...
...This scene alone makes it difficult to see why most daily reviewers snottily dismissed the play...
...The hero, Ed Stone, cuddles a cigarette in his lips and talks directly to the audience, a theatrical manie that used to seem "liberating" and now makes one wish for a bricklayer to close up that fourth wall...
...And the story has a cryptic surface with the time sequence wrenched into disarray, so that it ends in the hospital, shortly before Sandy's death, when she and Stone reached a moment of understanding...
...This is assertively a Lehrstiick, a morality, but its hard edges gradually melt...
...Stone has also died, but of ileitis...
...Square in the Eye is actually two plays, the story of a sliding marriage that very briefly recovers its balance, and a general skit on the times...
...It slackens whenever the playwright tries to land it in two different eyes at once...
...It is that moment of harmony in an otherwise turbulent marriage at which he is driving...
...Brecht instructs the audience at the beginning to "observe the smallest action, seeming simple, with mistrust...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Watching Closely IN the first scene of Jack Gelber's Square in the Eye (Theater de Lys) movies and slides in black-and-white and Kodacolor fly up on to not one, not two, but three screens at the back of the stage...
...As Paul E. Richards, the merchant, and Joseph Chaiken, the coolie, advance very slowly on collapsing legs from the cyclorama to the bare forestage, one is told more about men crossing a desert than in all the widescreen, rolling, sandy shots of Lawrence of Arabia...
...The Administration has virtually argued that we were right to intervene in the Bosch rebellion because, according to the rule, Communists should have been a sizable part of the Bosch forces...
...But thanks to his harsh, nicely whetted dialogue, his compressed satire, and the cast's enthusiasm (Philip Bruns as Stone, Carol Rossen as Sandy, and Gene Rupert as Stone's friend who is said to be impotent but lunges at Sandy as often as he can), the play moves rapidly along its double track and asks to be watched closely all the way...
...Stein who died of the brain trouble...
...But there is order behind Gelber's pro-gression...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 12
