A New Year's Package

...She also has to wear the ugliest costume in several seasons...

...Vittoria: " Thy sins / Do run before thee to fetch fire from hell, / To light thee thither...

...and the audience applauds, possibly grateful at the sound of another voice...

...she can, ridiculously, even act with her ankles...

...At the Pocket Theater there is a long one-act by John White called Veronica...

...You can simulate the doubts in real-life speech with accuracy...

...But Mainland, recharged-although he wasn't listening, anyway-continues...

...Is it conceivable that the Moorish servant girl could fall distractedly in love with the Duke of Florence when all she can see of him is an enveloping Franciscan friar's robe and a facesized pair of glasses...

...William Wycherley's The Country Wife (Vivian Beaumont) has little of the glitter of Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh or the other Restoration playwrights...

...if the grace before meals that begins, "Well, Sir blunts a spectator's appetite for the play, the cast and audience does have a pretty good time, thanks to the slick staging by Ellis Rabb and Norris Houghton...

...There are, to be realistic, no other people in the play...

...Throwing away lines skillfully may seem like the be-all and end-all of New York dramatic art...

...Third, Webster's poetry is on a level with any man's...

...Miss Huddle has a mess of an accent but she is a delightfully unselfconscious actress and the most amusing scene in the production has her carving out a letter as she wields a feather pen like an artist a palette knife...

...Like Luther, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, and Epitaph for George Dillon, Inadmissible Evidence is about one character at odds with himself, but in this case Osborne unabashedly gives the entire play over to this one character's struggle for self-approval...

...it is positive, contributory, harmonic...

...It is a wearying play to read, let alone sit through...

...You can maunder to your heart's content...

...Some years ago I wrote that the insignia of the Phoenix had two heads, the visible one gazing out proudly in the direction of art, the invisible one sneaking a furtive look toward popularity...

...But that central part...

...Miss Foster demonstrates that it is a mere apprenticeship to acting...

...But even bad verse and worse dress cannot defeat a woman who acts with every bone in her body, every sound in her vocal box, every fiber in her brain...

...What is surprising is that Williamson and Osborne and his director, Anthony Page, manage to keep so much of Maitland's talk interesting...

...But he is marvelously endowed for this part, with his untidy, thin hair, his stridulous voice, and his clumsy grace in looping himself into a phone wire or bowling over a glass of water or shambling toward another actor or simply finding that his hands keep getting in his way...

...this is not merely a matter of avoiding competition, as well he might...

...His court duel with Vittoria (well sustained by Carrie Nye, despite her inexplicable gasps for air between sentences) displays this extremely capable actor at his verbal best...

...Several of the reviews I have seen came from embarrassed gentlemen who felt that Miss Foster was rather overdoing it...

...During the play's run in London and New York Williamson must, with all that induced self-loathing, have frequently felt like cutting his throat or-more likely for Maitland because less final-his wrists...

...It has a number of good lines but they are all the same joke: impending cuckoldry when a middle-aged man takes a young wife...

...Whenever Maitland is gassing about himself he has something to reveal...

...After six years off Broadway and around the university circuits, sometimes in less than distinguished productions, the APA company deserves a hit and no doubt hopes to put the money to better use...

...Sydney Walker plays Father with muted charm, always giving his words to the other actors, not pouring them into the auditorium with the zestful bonhomie that passes too often for bravura interpretation...

...Miss Foster has to contend periodically with such lines of bathos-in-reverse as, "They [some gifts] are not without value...

...There is even one scene that doesn't allow the other character, Maitland's daughter, to get in a single word...

...He says nasty things to his relatives and employes but immediately regrets them and dives back into the acid bath of his conscience for another tormented dip...

...First, melodrama or no, The White Devil is a play with enormous wit so long as it is not guyed...

...And the melody line by Teo Macero for one of the numbers sounds impudently like a standard left-hand bass accompaniment...

...Medea commits the most horrifying crime in the drama, the murder of her two sons, and at the moment when the plot kindles her love for them to its brightest heat...

...there is nothing like them in the world...

...Anna Sokolow the choreographer directs superbly, from the opening tableau of two lighted cigar ends pursuing each other through the dark to the final, abandoned dance...

...Apart from Miss Huddle and the scenery, the most attractive item is the program designed by Herb Lubalin, in elegant black type on a coffee-brown card stock...

...The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the other actors...

...Flamineo, after being knifed: "I have caught / An everlasting cold ") Second, the melodrama itself is so outrageous that, far from making one question the characters' motives, it makes motivation itself suspect...

...Wycherley probably adapted The Country Wife loosely from Molière's The School for Wives...

...Veronica forgoes any pretensions to being modern...

...Eric Berry, who was a cardinal last year in Tiny Alice is now another cardinal...

...He constantly wishes he were not so inconstant...

...One can only hope the invisible head has now been appeased...

...Miss Foster goes out to the boundaries of the role, rather as Olivier does in the London production of Othello...

...It's everybody's memory of summer stock, You Can't Take It With You, Kaufman's and Hart's assortment of oddballs that respectable folks can love and feel safe with, and kin to the consumer version of Maxwell Bodenheim prepared by the late Ben Hecht in Winkelberg...

...Such playing is uncomfortable to watch, and is meant to be...

...Williamson's nervous super-naturalism at least matches Osborne's vigorous monologizing...

...from Albee to Webster-a fat promotion...

...As soon as he begins to unleash opinionsdiatribes, rather-about segments of society such as teenagers, the middle classes, lawyers or the press, the play thrashes about inconsequentially because those diatribes, although rabidly flung out, are devoid of startling ideas...

...Now, as anybody who has written a play knows, monologues are the easiest type of talk to put on paper...

...He is not particularly intelligent and not even genuinely unpleasant...

...There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts...

...Several of its characterizations are authentic originals, especially those of Ralph Bell as the composer and Jess Osuna as a bandit who loves his mother...

...It might be rescued by the kind of inventive fooling that the French practice on Marivaux, or that Cyril Ritchard used to indulge in before he came down to earth in Visit to a Small Planet...

...From the early destruction of Isabella to the triple-stabbing at the end, The White Devil is a banquet of blood and extravagance, the fullest evening in the current theater...

...the columns around the doors in one set have satyrs' heads for capitals...

...So you're happy," snarls the composer, "where's the songs...

...There are sequences in which Maitland has another character around to keep him company but doesn't let him or her utter much more than a quick question or exclamation that winds Maitland up for another harangue...

...Grandfather refuses to work or pay income tax and-but why identify further...

...But no...

...But a Broadway success can threaten the existence of a group as a group...

...He is conventionally compassionate to people in trouble...

...In contrast with the APA'S teamwork, Nicol Williamson's acting in Inadmissible Evidence by John Osborne does not impinge at all on that of the other actors at the Belasco...

...And if no stockbrokers race out of the theater after the last curtain to follow Grandfather's advice to give up Wall Street...

...There are disguised soliloquies in which the hero, a seedy lawyer named Bill Maitland-a deliberately ironic reference to the great British jurist?talks at a telephone on an empty stage...

...Landau proves several points about Webster that had to be established sooner or later...

...Symonds, however, has dated and must be read with distrust...

...Fourth, as John Addington Symonds points out in an introduction to Webster and Tourneur (Mermaid Dramabook), the poet "touches the depths of human nature in ways that need the subtlest analysis for their proper explanation...

...She gives Jeffers' words a rhetorical dignity they do not merit and Euripides' character its full dimension of rage...

...Flamineo: "O, I smell soot, / Most stinking soot...

...A totally different performance again, another solo, is offered by Gloria Foster in Robinson Jeffers' obese version of Medea by Euripides, who gets no program credit at the Martinique...

...Corzatte plays continuously up to her...

...it is worth staying for through White's preceding one-act, Bugs, a half-hearted stab at an Absurdist play, with the dialogue going in circles and a theme of congenital paranoia in the typical American family...

...The lyricist has dried up since he started to worry about The Bomb, but he has found happiness with an intellectual wife...

...Veronica presents a songwriting partnership going broke...

...but of behaving selflessly...

...Even the presence of hired inspiration in the form of a voluptuous blonde doesn't help, at least, not expectedly...

...Hill & Wang) that this dream is the play's unifying symbol...

...the chimney is a-fire: / My liver's parboiled, like Scotch holly-bread...

...A detailed comparison of the two would be a waste of time...

...if the 1936 topicalities about Kay Francis and Pearl Buck fail to break up the younger set...

...Robert Symonds, the director at Lincoln Center, has only one performer who outplays the material, Elizabeth Huddle as the young bumpkin of a wife...

...As a bad character he is traduced by his good qualities...

...A recent performance of the Molière I saw given by Montreal's Théâtre du Nouveau Monde reinforced my impression that it is thoroughly up to date-it was done in modern dress not long ago in Paris by Jean Meyer-whereas the Wycherley is further away from us than "The First Shepherds' Play...

...Today it is fashionable to underplay, to suggest...

...You can drop a clue here and there in the middle of an anecdote or tirade or whatnot and pick it up later, any time later...

...It is an old-time, laugh-a-line sketch with a sweetand-sour ending...

...As the decent, wispy young lovers, the prerequisite of every Broadway cast, Rosemary Harris and Clayton Corzatte absolutely defy the gutlessness of their lines...

...There are soliloquies...

...The reason, I suspect, is that Rabb has craftily put his three best actors in the three least substantial roles...

...Does it matter...

...One looks disbelievingly about at the faded upholstery and trappings of the Lyceum, expecting to see white clapboard walls and to hear tourists braking their cars outside to ask whether this is a motel...

...White's lyrics are painfully true to the top-pops tradition...

...The decor by James Hart Stearns includes many imaginative touches...

...They don't have to be structured...

...But measure him against Lermontov's Pechorin, or Bellow's Herzog, come to that, and he seems tame...

...How much exactly...

...True, Maitland pauses to think at one point, and a client of his deftly inserts a longish speech, a corny how-I-got-that-way recital by a homosexual who rushes out of the office before Maitland has a chance to reply...

...the French critic Henri Fluchère has shown (Shakespeare and the Elizabethans...

...Maitland is clearly intended to be a hero of our time, angrily impotent...

...The others in the cast look like a sorry lot on the same boards as Miss Foster...

...He talks about Vittoria's dream as a "conceit...

...This is the winter stock season of the APA-Phoenix...

...There are no characters in the Wycherley to take the effective place of Arnolphe and Agnès...

...Every movement, every phrase that proceeds from Miss Harris is beautifully calculated...

...It is good to see tribute being paid to John Webster at the Circle in the Square, where Jack Landau has revived and tremendously improved his production of The White Devil...

...It is a pity that the director, Cyril Simon, apparently did most of his work on the central part...

...Eyes wide, head cocked to one side, legs pumping gawkily as he crosses the stage at a half-run, Langella has the ominous presence of a Robert Newton, without that fine actor's tendency later in his career to overproduce himself...

...This is not Williamson's fault...

...The cast consists of beardless men in suits, raincoats, and evening dress, and women in 1920-ish gowns that make neatly sardonic comments on the post-Garrick English stage: Christine Pickles doing a mad scene with imaginary herbs looks uncannily like those prints of Lady Mary Catherine Thurlow as an 1813 Ophelia...

...She writes the play's emotions not large but gigantic...

...Miss Foster does not spare her, Jason, or the audience...

...After all, if you watch her attentively you discover as the curtain falls that you are trembling, an experience the modem theater has not accustomed you to...

...Frank Langella, last seen as the passive but eloquent Benito Cereno, gives another sterling lesson in diction, this time as the malevolent Flamineo who knows about more things in hell than are dreamed of in Bill Maitland's philosophy...

...Invitations swarm in from Hollywood and from those theater producers who specialize in buying up and burying talent in machine-made plays and musicals, trading on what must be called the actor's death instinct...

...only Helen Craig as the Nurse and, fitfully, Michael Higgins as Jason can stand up to her...