An Escape from the Humdrum

...It is also, antique or no, a patently advanced play even for today...

...Their r's come over harshly so as to make for inaudibility, and they are not helped by Morton Subotnick's electronic music, which repeatedly yelps and sobs over the conversation...

...Vilar used a translation by Arthur Adamov which has an angular directness in French unmatched in any of the English versions...

...Peasant women stand in his way...

...Robespierre has already justified the murders, most plausibly in his own mind, by considering himself as a Christ-substitute and his enemies as apostates who "have put on the dead aristocracy's clothes and inherited its diseases...

...Biichner's point that the mob is an inert block which can be shoved in any direction by an orator who inflames its hatred of the "aristos'' is taken up in a subsequent scene that opens with the crowd shouting, "Long live Danton...

...you let it speak its evidence and hold its inevitable silences...

...A young aristocrat runs onstage and tries to escape down each of the alleys in turn...

...Blau's handling of the larger crowd movements is less secure, but the ballet episode neatly introduces the mood, time and place...

...His translation reproduces much of the poetry, but the play's broad line of development comes over flimsily, and 1 am not sure whether to blame Blau the translator or Blau the director for a number of foggy transitions...

...If antiques are prized because of their appreciation in value, then Georg Buchner's drama more than deserves its antiquary's seal...

...David J. Stewart as Lacroix, Roscoe Lee Browne as St...

...it documents the flux of passions and ideologies of the French Revolution and complements, in fictional terms, the great studies of the period by Carlyle, Albert Mathiez and Crane Brinton...

...Let me not pretend that Danton's Death is an easy play to take in...

...it goes beyond disputes between man and man, or faction and faction, to explore an aspect of the struggle between life and death...

...Bergmann, in particular, wants the vocal athleticism and variety needed to manage Danton's long speeches...

...Lincoln Center is rich enough, with its $50-a-gala-ticket occasions, not only to do better things, but to do things better...

...I see no distinction between "growth by error" and "growth through mistake" unless the first is involuntary and the second deliberate, but let that ride...

...That pitiful term, the right to fail, has too long been a clarion call to mediocrity...

...And Blau's realization, while uneven and possibly hampered by the newness of the Beaumont's intricate electronic machinery, yields many moments at which the play shows its strength...

...Its design is extremely serviceable, expressive but not weighty, and never clashing with the costumes...

...In the second half Robespierre does not appear...

...The beauty and fecundity of Buchner's language, the reciprocation he discerns between personal and political relationships, the quality of his characters' arguments and discourse, the interstitching of private colloquys and panoramic crowd scenes have not been rivalled, much less equalled, in the theater in these 130 post-antique years...

...it is, come to think of it, the precise age of an official antique...

...The people" will assure that its blade drops on the necks of Danton and his followers...

...A couple of days earlier Kerr and some of his newspaper colleagues gave the glad hand to The Right Honourable Gentleman, a. new, old-fashioned soap operetta creaking with entrances, exits, and such lines as, "You betrayed something deep in me and I had to walk through filth—I wanted love...

...But he has not found a satisfactory method of incorporating the scenes in the tribunal...

...Before trying to detail them, I must emohasize that the production, like the play, has already been dismissed by many people who resent complex theater...

...Blau's directing on the latter is impressive...

...Danton's Death does not have to be bullied into a general theory that governs such latter-day eruptions as the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, Nasser's ousting of Naguib or Boumedienne's superseding Ben Bella...

...he also employs the turntables well and sparingly...

...Danton's Death is rarely performed—I have seen it only once before, at the Theatre National Populaire, staged by Jean Vilar...

...THE STAGE of the Beaumont, designed by Jo Mielziner, is a vast circular instrument with an inner and outer turntable, trapdoors galore, and a forestage consisting of several tongues projecting into the auditorium at different levels...

...You don't prove that a play about 18th-Century France has modern pertinence...

...Some of the other speaking is weak, too...

...Just, James Earl Jones as Philippeau, and Paul Mann as Collot d'Herbois command the necessary glibness without arching their backs and killing their throats, but they each appear fleetingly...

...The voluptuary who tries to drown his remorse for the infamous September Massacres in a tide of physical pleasures is condemned by the ascetic who has never stolen, never drunk, never slept with a woman, and who is "repulsively moral" in his determination to extend the reign of terror as a weapon of justice and solidarity...

...The first half opposes the corrupt Danton, who loves life, to the "incorruptible'' Robespierre, who metes out death...

...Finally they close in on him and attack...

...This drop is an abstract perspective, steeply drawn in black and white by Mielziner and reminiscent of Scamozzi's 16th-Century retreating alleys for the sets in the Teatro Olimpico...

...5, Anchor...

...If there is a single "way of growth in art" it is more likely than an accretion of errors to be a striving for the right things, however far short of them one comes...

...He played Robespierre himself and put Georges Wilson into the role of Danton...

...Blau enjoys none of these advantages...

...Jt is therefore a sound choice for a repertory company that seeks to escape from the humdrum old favorites...

...Blau draws attention to it only once while it is fresh in the audience's eyes...

...From Browne's mouth, St...

...that storms our brains and senses...

...So far, not so bad...

...This is the impersonal death, the penalty dispensed in the name of the Revolution, that Danton resists, until he at last comes to regard life as a whore because it gives itself to every man, and to regard death as a form of birth...

...It is curious that the directors of the Beaumont, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, found it necessary to pass out an article at previews that talked up the play in a vintage New York Times drama gossip style, referring to nuclear explosions and Lyndon Johnson and Mao Tsetung...

...A platform loaded with people slides forward at express speed as if a Presidential whistle-stop train had gone into unexpected reverse...

...Even given the best translation possible, this is unabashedly a declamatory work much of the time...

...As each of these scenes ends and the platformtrain rushes away into the night the semi-permanent backdrop blessedly comes down to efface it...

...As the curtain rises there is a concise balletic prelude...

...This opening production has made for some speculation about the troupe's future standards...

...Buchner's play is modern because, among other reasons, it is timeless...

...Danton's Death is not only a Bastille Day of the theater, an event * There are agreeable English translations in print by James Maxwell ("Chandler Editions in Drama) and John Holmstrom (The Modem Theater...

...They cut one another's lines short...

...When a director's ambitions rise to Danton's Death, or to the other plays lined up for the season at Lincoln Center (Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle), he needs a few actors of real size to help him to bring them off, and to serve as examples for the junior members of the company...

...Just's famous defense of bloodshed as a law of nature, like volcanoes, floods and epidemics, becomes the play's high point...

...It is a fair bet that Tom Rosqui, who is understudying him and giving a great deal to the small role of Barbere, could come closer to Danton's selfdisdain and carnal rhetoric...

...And if "it is difficult to see force in the play" that may be the result of defective vision on the part of the viewer...

...There is no need for him to...

...In a somniferous program filler entitled "On the Meaning of Repertory Theater" Mark Harris envisages repertory as a process of "growth by error, growth through mistake —these are the way of growth in art, even as they are the way of life for individuals or for peoples...

...I hope that Harris's words do not constitute a manifesto for Blau and Irving but are simply a mistake, or rather an error...

...In a large cast most of the actors sound grandiose when they should be persuasive...

...The new company is hardly in the clear but it is out of the rut...

...If actors are to stand and spout, let us have the very best standersand- spouters available...

...His audiences were familiar with the historical figures and circumstances...

...He has set the guillotine...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel An Escape from the Humdrum In a fretful review of Dantons Death (Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center) Walter Kerr remarked: "It is difficult to see force in the play, although it has been off and on admired during the 130 years since it was written...

...After they have been briefly harangued by a citizen who says that Danton lives like an aristocrat their cry changes to, "Down with Danton...

...The production inside the Beaumont is as scarred by natural flaws as the travertine used for facing the outside wall...

...But what is missing is the big acting...

...Perhaps out of loyalty to his San Francisco years, Blau has cast two of the Actor's Workshop leads as Danton (Alan Bergmann) and Robespierre (Robert Symonds), both of them good enough players, and maybe better than that in the right parts, which these are not...

...I would urge anybody who intends to go to a performance to acquaint himself with the text beforehand,* if he expects to keep up with the rapidity of the action and the torrent of Buchner's poetry, much as he should read Julius Caesar—that other extraordinary drama about the quarrels and disillusionment that succeed a revolutionary coup—if he were about to watch it for the first time...