STAGE

...and The Day the Whores, etc...

...The closest one is his mother, a schizophrenic who alternates bewilderingly between stifling tenderness and enraged trances...

...All the same, Ribman's central scene is a brilliantly weird conversation between Archer, Harry's practical dullard of a brother, who has come 4,000 miles to escort Harry back to the family home, and Harry's roommate, Immanuel, a cripple in drag, bleating Teutonically from out of the fur collar of his dressing gown, sending his fingers roaming up into his nostrils, and anxiously trying to sell Archer holy water, beads, toenail clippings, and other religious commodities...

...flatulent giantesses...

...The play's three scenes are variations on the theme of Harry's unrest, but the theme itself is not dramatically articulated...

...First, Lieberman's directions for the setting specify "a cutaway, designed beehive fashion to permit the audience to look into a number of cell-like apartments," perhaps on the lines of a Dubuffet canvas with the compartmentalization but not the garish colors...

...the pitiless eyes and the disciplined mind...

...Arthur Kopit, another young playwright, has earned an evening to himself at the Players Theater, thanks to the longish run of Oh Dad, Poor Dad...

...he does not differentiate himself from the role, a common fault among actors in New York, whether under the guise of "Method" playing or "Brechtian" estrangement or simply to project an underlying image "with which people can identify...

...There is no other obvious reason for the offering of Sing to Me Through Open Windows, a vapid encounter between a boy, a clown, and a man named Ottoman, the whole business dressed in gilded furniture, thousands of square yards of scrim, and plaintiveness...

...are two of six dramatic bubbles by Kopit published as a Mermaid Dramabook (cloth, $3.95...

...The secondary characters who impinge on Matty-a rabbi, a schoolteacher, a classroom friend and a rival, a chippie in the apartment below, a war veteran whose face has been destroyed and badly repaired, a Spanish-speaking woman whom Matty calls the Madonna, and her moronic 19-year-old son-pass fleetingly through the day of the play, marking the boy's life...

...As Harry, Joel Grey is brash and athletic but hits one note and that more percussive than musical: our hero as pneumatic drill...

...It has something of the same anti-romantic fierceness...

...It is serious but does not end in uplift and charlatanism...

...Ronald Ribman, the author of Harry, Noon and Night (which opened at the American Place Theater and is transferring to the Pocket Theater), scorns straight satire, preferring to fantasticate...

...Lieberman's text (Spotlight Dramabook, cloth, $3.50...

...An older boy (another "dark planet," if this isn't pressing Lieberman's implications too far) twists Matty's arm, snatches his pocket money, and tries to lure him down to the cellar to be initiated into "the Crate Club...

...At the same time, the role of his mother, who is described in the text as "drab and fattish"-an important clue to the character and the relationship-has gone to Betty Miller, a slim and haggardly lovely young woman...

...The companion play, The Day the Whores Came Out to Ploy Tennis...

...It may want for Adler's literary virtuosity but it is not a novel...

...Is it too late to ask for humility on the part of Off-Broadway directors, a virtue that might be called creative obedience...

...If this were a novel it might be compared, not altogether favorably, with Edward Adler's Notes from a Dark Street...

...paper-back, $1.75) of which perhaps The Conquest of Everest is worth reading, but only because it is there...

...to kill off this memory she tries repeatedly to murder the boy...

...May they rest in peace...

...Matty and the Moron and Madonna is an unusual new play in its original form because it is full of risks, as well as skill...

...it seems to titillate the very people it intends to scandalize...

...It has a nine-year-old for the lead...

...One assumes he undertook the play because he liked what he read in the script...

...in the production they become garbled, intrusive, affected ballet, and blur even further Lieberman's distinction between the naturalistic scenes and the visions...

...Why then did he want to make it into something entirely different...

...One's final impression is not of a play but of glittering, incoherent parts...

...He forces the volume of his cast's speaking and drags the pace, substituting violence for mystery and replacing Matty's series of grotesque experiences with a series of chapters on neuroses...

...In the text their meaning is limpid...

...Sing to Me, etc...

...It spawns freaks that will not even sell...

...It has the advantages of Anthony Holland sipping fruit juice and uttering fruity lines from the back of a rocking horse, and a comic phone monologue delivered with ripe, Borscht-Belt chutzpah by Phil Foster, the President of the Club...

...He does this insidiously...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Young Playwrights The three assemblages of one-act plays by seven "new play-wrights" at the Cherry Lane Theater demonstrated once more that festivals, like anthologies, succeed only in putting the participants into itchy competition...

...Its cruelty never sinks into sensationalism...

...Directors have a stranglehold on new American drama, especially if they have reputations-of whatever kind...

...Secondly, the play has a number of mime scenes that represent the hallucinations of Matty's mother...

...During the trances (when, so to speak, her dark face is turned toward her son) she becomes possessed by the memory of her own mother, who had tyrannized her...

...He may have absorbed some of Kazan's frenzied techniques or, after his bouts with The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey and Desire Under the Elms, he may now be unconsciously trying to bring every play he works on under O'Neill's mantle...

...The producers have also taken heavy risks: there are 22 actors in the cast...

...I missed the third program (it was snapped off fearfully on the second night), but the two earlier bundles of unrelated, exiguous item" most of them reprised from "showcase presentations" at the Caffe Cino in the Village, had a certain impudence, a limited novelty, and a painful share of beginners' bad luck...

...Jean Vilar, in a rare lapse, once smudged together Strindberg's epically structured Erik XIV in much the same way...

...Hear those minked-up women gasp with pleasure during Le Roi Jones' The Toilet...

...imprisons five committee men and a waiter in a club-house which is stormed by 18 racquet-wielding, ace-serving, giggling, "bareassed...

...The orpheum theater is advertising Herbert Lieberman's Matty and the Moron and Madonna as the best play of the year, which is less of a boast than it sounds...

...but all we see of the giantesses, who never do a whorish thing, is their tennis balls...

...Its tableaux are disparate...

...even so, it is less sticky than the dialogue...

...Hays has raised a square catwalk onto four tall stairways, with the action assigned quite arbitrarily to the stairways and the stage level...

...Ribman has too much going for him to need these easy retreats...

...Matty's father, a longer distance off, is a feckless individual, devoted to his child in a gruff way, but afraid and resentful of the mother's hold on him...

...Lieberman's precise sense of location is immediately lost, so is the autonomy of his scenes, which are now loosely soldered by means of blackouts into a false continuity...

...Kopit rummages among old satirical props...

...George Morrison's direction conforms to the darting quality of Ribman's style, so does Gerald S. O'Loughlin's Archer...

...It is neither good art nor logical business...

...This sort of shock material has become routine in today's theater...

...Dustin Hoffman, a newcomer with varied resources, including a hypnotic presence, takes on the character of Immanuel without trying to explain away its snake-like obnoxiousness...

...paperback, $1.50) is American drama with most of its strengths in evidencehard, dry dialogue, economical character delineation, eventfulness, speed-and almost none of its weaknesses...

...Finally, the nine-year-old IS played by a boy of about 13, Glenn Scimonelli, an accomplished actor but one not young enough to do justice to Matty's transition from questioning innocence into acceptance of a sleazy world's standards...

...The singing through the open windows in question rings out like an ill-taped rehearsal of the Vienna Boys' Choir recorded in a tank of molasses...

...On Broadway one expects promise to turn into compromise...

...the anger tamed and put resolutely at the service of art so that it never declines into a tract...

...Still, the American Place Theater is to be congratulated on realizing a work that commercial producers would probably shun without the sanction of a try-out...

...Matty is a nine-year-old New Yorker raised in a slum and seeking a point of anchor in an uncaring world...

...In directing the script Jose Quintero has made three substantial changes and they all work to the play's detriment...

...Why did Quintero compromise on these risks...

...What we seem to have operating is not the law of the marketplace, as is often asserted, but the rule of past success, which is death to new work...

...But Quintero and David Hays, who is responsible for sets and lighting, have fallen under the spell of West Side Story and all those photographers of fire escapes...

...He has a passion for astronomy that takes him beyond that world and, indeed, the play is composed almost as though Matty were at the center of a small solar system with the other characters in planetary motion about him...

...Ribman's concession to realism consists of some expletives, references to defecation and wiping of rear ends...

...the bones of the plot seem moved...

...It is restrained...

...His story of a young American artist living in Munich and trying to resist going home ("Things die in Ohio"), floats beautifully in one's imagination but never descends to touch ground in Germany or America...

...Last year Quintero was directing at Lincoln Center...