STAGE
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel A Hole in the Center This much may be said for New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts: It has been a topic of conversation. And there the compliments must...
...Ball has tried to straighten out the relationship between Orgon and Elmire by refusing to make Orgon the comic butt he clearly is...
...Since they were the only novelties in the agglomeration, and since the other organizations would continue to function under their own administrators, one thing was obvious: the Center should be run by a man of the theater, preferably an extraordinary one...
...Some press reports suggest that they were forced out by a team of bloodless bankers because they were not making enough profit...
...The Center was then said to be looking for a new man or men for its theater group...
...Rather than acknowledging that this bonanza was due to Miller's popularity as a playwright, Whitehead claimed: "I believe the ticket sale tells us something of immense importance —that the public wants a permanent repertory theater attempted on the highest possible professional level...
...To cap everything else the plays have not strictly been done in repertory...
...Ball had seemed to be an uncommonly sensitive director, to judge by his Pirandello and his earlier staging of Chekhov's Ivanov...
...If Lincoln Center were not to go down in history as Hoguet's Folly (or maybe Follies), it would have to seek out someone able to offer and impose on it a personal vision, someone prepared to lead...
...As long ago as 1960 my colleague Robert Brustein was boldly predicting in Harper's what other people privately feared, that the new theater group would become virtually an offshoot of Broadway...
...As it happens, the Repertory Company has neither presented a meaningful program nor stuck to its repertory ideal...
...and David Wayne could have had a chance to show his mettle as Tartuffe, with Philip Bosco or Paul Mann to counterbalance him as Orgon...
...In addition, neither Kazan, Jose Quintero, Harold Clurman, nor William Ball has directed at the Center's Anta Theater on Washington Square with anything like the spirit and originality displayed in their earlier, non-repertory work...
...As for the repertory ideal, it has turned into a fiasco...
...As a reviewer inadvertently remarked of a book recently, it filled a much-needed gap...
...the translation by Richard Wilbur marries verve to accuracy...
...for the direction there was William Ball whose Six Characters in Search of an Author a couple of seasons ago searched out that play's broad lines without flattening its subtlety of texture...
...It may seem brutal of me to throw yet another handful of mud at Lincoln Center...
...On the one hand, Orgon is so infatuated with Tartuffe and his blandishments that he looks to be blindly credulous, verging at moments on rank imbecility...
...The trouble with the Center has been that it lacked a center...
...the best principals, David Wayne and Hal Holbrook, have been almost vindictively misused...
...Presumably, the Met, the New York Ballet, the Philharmonic, the Library, and the Juilliard would not radically alter in their glassy new surroundings...
...the culture came later...
...By turning his Tartuffe into a craven, bedraggled creature Ball has extracted Moliere's sting and robbed the comedy of any application it might have today to fasttalking vendors of cant And so we have the abysmal culmination of a bathetic record...
...one can only wonder whether the finished culture-clusters will be as satisfactorily filled as the contractors' pockets...
...Having choked off the comedy at its sources, he proceeds to invent, replace, and fling the ornamental plaster about...
...There is an apparent inconsistency in the play that may have misled him...
...And wrecked the play...
...From its selection of two Broadway figures to take charge of the theater, and of Arthur Miller as its first playwright, to its three-page tabulation in every theater program of its officers, directors, trustees, council, and benefactors, plus the officers and etceteras down to third and fourth vice-presidents of the American National Theater and Academy which built the temporary playhouse, plus the board of trustees of New York University which put up the land for that playhouse—the whole business reeked of playing safe and wheedling for easy acceptance...
...This in spite of Schuman's statement that the Center exists for the sake of experiment...
...Nevertheless, when Whitehead secured the script of After the Fail from Arthur Miller the public oversubscribed for the first season...
...The characters who are silent keep stealing attention from those who are speaking as they busily scan unnecessary letters, drink needless wine, jiggle with other uncalled-for props, cross and recross the stage aimlessly, creep or parade through the fake choreography of matching movements, and act out a religious service and other mime sequences that are not in the play...
...What counts with an audience is the program and the skill with which it is brought to a stage...
...with Sir Tyrone himself...
...Only in the other two creations, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and the Experimental Theater (so experimental that it has remained an inscrutable secret in every respect) was there any promise of innovation...
...The prim French found this solution a little too queer to stomach and the bones of Moliere probably emitted a hoquet of disgust as they rattled frantically in their resting place...
...the outstanding secondary players, such as Mariclare Costello, Paul Mann and Haroid Scott, have not had a single worthwhile break...
...Jason Robards Jr...
...Pernelle have been grotesquely miscast...
...Blau and Irving, founder-directors of The Actor's Workshop, and each a rare combination in himself of idealist and practical man of the theater, have been carrying out for 12 years the sort of policy Lincoln Center has only talked about...
...Tartuffe is an especially bitter disappointment for it seemed to have so much in its favor...
...and accomplished outsiders, including Sada Thompson, Michael O'Sullivan and Laurence Luckinbill, were roped in for ad hoc stints...
...with Herbert Blau of the San Francisco Actor's Workshop...
...But Ball does not stop there...
...This near-reversal of the two parts, working against the sense of scene after scene, amounts to a systematic massacre in five acts...
...The Center has found itself a heart...
...and three new institutions would be created...
...It arose as part of an urban-renewal project in the vicinity of 66th Street and Broadway and swiftly proved itself a worthy adjunct of Lincoln Towers and the other new 30-story tombstones rented out by the Alcoa corporation...
...Repertory acting, which is no different from any other kind of acting...
...The inconsistency is no inconsistency at all, in fact, if Tartuffe is played as a thoroughly persuasive character...
...But we had better realize what Lincoln Center has given birth to...
...The cultural ferment is generating the construction of theaters and multipurpose arts buildings...
...He was right, but at that time he could not have foreseen the equivocation, the squabbling and namecalling that would break out subsequently among the Center's ozganizers, ending in the resignation of Whitehead and Kazan...
...A batch of trained actors were chosen to train for a year before the opening...
...No clear policy was ever pronounced for the Repertory Company, only a flourish of superlatives and some vague references to two American and two European plays...
...Nor is repertory per se of any value except in guaranteeing employment to a given group of actors...
...This was an astute move...
...While Tartuffe, that grisly, unctuous, clerical con man, incarnated to the hilt for our era by the foxily dignified presence of Louis Jouvet, is in the drooping hands of Michael O'SulIivan, as broad a clown as they come, with his face a torn rag, his hanging gash of a mouth crammed with Fernandel-like teeth, his string legs and tiny, tottering steps...
...The moneymakershave been retained, the others retired...
...In doing so he has wrecked the other relationship, between Orgon and Tartuffe...
...The rumors multiplied and often grew weird...
...The Center's public relations director, Barry Hyams, one of the most effective press agents in New York, has repeatedly been kept in the dark, according to a piece in Variety...
...the Metropolitan Opera would move uptown from its home off Times Square...
...has floated in and out of the company...
...It has run scared all the way...
...And Joseph Vemer Reed recently resigned from the board of directors because he felt that he was not kept informed over developments and casualties...
...Hoguet has now announced the appointment of Herbert Blau and Jules Irving to take charge of the repertory operation...
...The fatuous Orgon is, unbelievably, so solemn in Larry Gates' interpretation that his marvelous, lengthy tribute to Tartuffe gets a more grudging laugh than Cleante's two-word reply, "Good God...
...If there is one noun that hasn't summed up Lincoln Center's operations it is "experiment...
...After the cultural explosion, what...
...And as its latest contribution, the company is now distorting Moliere's Tartuffe out of recognition...
...About 1,000 will be built in the United States in the next decade at a cost of $4 billion...
...The Center's planners chose General Maxwell D. Taylor, later called to the White House (later still shuttled off to South Vietnam) and replaced by William Schuman, composer and head of Juilliard...
...There was more logic, to please those edified by theatrical logic, in Roger Planchon's "new wave Tartuffe" last year in France, in which Orgon was literally in love with Tartuffe in a fully adult and consenting fashion...
...If they did resign...
...The only two classics so far attempted, The Changeling and Tartuffe, have been riddled with egregious stage malarkey which continually underrates the intelligence of the audiences...
...The company then crippled The Changeling, announced—and drew back from—Ghelderode's Pantagleize and Giraudoux's The Mad Woman of Chaillot...
...The public's response has said to us, 'We accept your idea, we believe you, go ahead.' " Anybody who has had any experience with repertory (or merely observed it from the sidelines) knows that it doesn't sell tickets worth a damn...
...It was the most famous fistful in a huge land-grab...
...Orgon may be anything from a gull to an imbecile, but Tartuffe must be an efficacious wheeler-and-dealer, or the play collapses...
...The play is one of the sharpest comic thrusts of all time...
...Stories and rumors soon began skidding about: There have (or have not) been desperate consultations with Oliver Rae, one of the founders of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis...
...In what...
...But Schuman has stated that he was dissatisfied with the standard of the repertory productions and did not, in any event, expect them to make money: "It is recognized that dramatic repertory of prime quality must be a deficit-financing operation...
...It may be unfair to assume that the Center has had an unsettling effect on its directors, as well as its actors, but the general uncertainty, the bickering among the governors, the absence of a guiding mind, and the fact that the Center had a hole in place of a heart, can hardly have led to an atmosphere in which any theatrical endeavor would thrive...
...So much for fidelity to the repertory system...
...On the other hand, how can a sweet and obtrusively normal lady like Elmire be married to— and worse, in love with—an imbecile...
...Indeed, up to now Lincoln Center has made so many mistakes precisely because it was afraid of making mistakes, and then afraid of admitting they were mistakes and taking corrective measures...
...And perhaps a new beginning...
...This has been equally true of the productions...
...But what would the two new theaters do...
...The New York Times pointed out in its "National Economic Review" that "by the early 1970s the arts market is expected to amount to $7 billion a year...
...The Center acquired respectability and publicity by recruiting bankers and industrialists for its board of directors and trustees and used them to help in its drive for $160 million to finance a thicket of Space-Age Romanesque architecture...
...The first of these was the New York State Theater...
...Here old musicals like The King and I could be warmed over...
...There were to be eight loosely affiliated constituents: The New York Philharmonic Orchestra would abandon Carnegie Hall with the loss of some 100 seats and considerable acoustical quality...
...It has been difficult to discover exactly what happened to those two gentlemen...
...some 4,000 people received refunds on their applications for tickets...
...the New York City Ballet, under George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstem, would leave City Center, which has always been a defective house for sight and sound...
...with Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival...
...As this "arts market" expands, untold billions will continue to spill into construction...
...with Joan Littlewood...
...The Theater, designed as an equivalent of sorts to the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, with its Theatre des Nations, might also serve as a stamping ground for troupes from abroad, although the first such troupe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, was inaudible in King Lear and The Comedy of Errors, to the chagrin of the director, producer, cast and audience...
...O'Sullivan's performance has no wholeness and no purpose other than to snatch quick, cheap responses by means of abrupt switches in rhythm...
...And there the compliments must end...
...The President of the Repertory Theater division was, and is, Robert L. Hoguet Jr., a banker...
...the New York Public Library would be another tenant...
...Is this the mood of Tartuffe or The Dream of Gerontius...
...In the background a dismal cello saws away, interrupted now and then by the groaning of an electric organ...
...The latter was dropped on the nonsensical ground that Maureen Stapleton had withdrawn from the cast (in sympathy with Whitehead), as though there are not half a dozen other American actresses as capable of taking that role as Miss Stapleton, who has never been a member of the company, anyway...
...Instead, these two roles and that of Mme...
...At the end of the 12 months about half of them were let go...
...the Juilliard School of Music would acquire its own building or buildings...
...As with Lincoln Center, the arts programs are led by the building programs, the most costly being the one now rising on the bank of the Potomac, named after John F. Kennedy and spiritually conducted by Roger L. Stevens, one of Broadway's most active producers and one of New York's leading realestate entrepreneurs...
...Its program opened with three inferior plays by American dramatists, then did a turnabout for the second season, supposedly trading in European masterpieces but actually revisiting Miller with Incident at Vichy in the hope of another sellout, and hedging even further by keeping After the Fall on the bill...
...Has anybody in Washington been appointed to pick up the bits and pieces...
...Taylor and/or Schuman and/or Hoguet and/or John D. Rockefeller III (whose title is "chairman of the board") in collaboration with, or independently of, the other officers, trustees, directors, council members and sundry officials then placed the Repertory Company under the supervision of Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead...
...Of the ones whose names appeared in print as "The Repertory Theater Company," the most celebrated actress, Mildred Dunnock, has not had a part in the repertory to this day...
...Unless the conditions of Lincoln Center have unnerved him, what is he getting at...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 3
