Mud in the Plumbing
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Mud in the Plumbing An acquaintance of mine was recently sounding off on the demerits of Bernard Shaw. He conceded that Shaw's plays are the best comedy we have since...
...Except for the profundity bits...
...He walks in, behaves like a damn leech, won't budge...
...Or are they refugees...
...prune the dialogue ruthlessly...
...And that baby son that Agnes and Tobias lost, Julia's sibling rival, is he a symbol of a lost intimacy...
...To say this with reference to the first act of A Delicate Balance is not to deny his abilities as an artificer in the second and third acts...
...he even sinks to drinking before breakfast...
...In Tiny Alice Albee was more deliberate than before in letting his plumbing show...
...Was he complaining about a lack of musical resonance in the language...
...Tobias stays up all one night blearily thinking about "the whole thing...
...No, what he resented in Shaw's comedy is its sheer apprehendability...
...For all the finicky constructions he draws out of his characters' mouths, for all his archaisms and mock-Anglicisms, his lines are rarely clinched...
...Was he suggesting that there are not several levels of meaning in Shaw's plays...
...The comers include a gentle couple, old friends of Agnes and Tobias, who prove their friendship by casually moving in for an indefinite time...
...Albee, in short, is a sloppy writer...
...And why did she once try to buy a topless swimsuit in a store that didn't sell topless swimsuits...
...And below that surface, in contrast with Shaw's limpid depths, are layer under layer of mud...
...He does so, after protracted goodbyes, in one of the few (three, I think) non-drinking sequences...
...On hearing this peculiar invitation, Harry sagely decides to leave...
...When Jessica Tandy spins off a length of orotundity and then says coyly, "I apologize for being articulate,' a spectator can only wonder whether, amid this self-congratulation, the author knows what the word articulate means...
...Later, they advance into the room and stand facing in different directions, as motionless as four figures on an amphora...
...He gives every role in turn at least one outburst and one set recital of an incident...
...In the center of the story is a late-middle-aged lady named Agnes (Miss Tandy), who resembles the Margaret Leighton part in The Chinese Prime Minister in her dread of reaching the end of a sentence...
...This must be the most besotted script since Virginia Woolf...
...Is their encroachment a testing point in the marriage of Agnes and Tobias...
...you'll approach something...
...They are overturning the household by occupying Julia's room...
...but I am curious to know what astonishes her least...
...I predict regretfully, incredulously, that he will prefer Albee to Shaw...
...Because there are...
...Busy people...
...He conceded that Shaw's plays are the best comedy we have since Moli??re's, then added...
...For now questions are arising...
...Do tests like this one afflict every marriage...
...They are required to drink as if they are used to it and immediately ready for the next one...
...And while we're broaching the topic, what is life all about, anyway...
...He resorts continually to sarcasm in place of wit...
...But during those disquisitions his ear keeps going tinny...
...Now, with A Delicate Balance (Martin Beck Theater), he does not so much send his pipelines further down as wrap them in weightier lagging...
...The demands on the actors tend to be conventionally thin...
...Meanwhile more liquor is being asked for, received gratefully, consumed, appraised at length...
...they have abandoned their own home because of some nameless terror there...
...she keeps leaping into Mommy's and Daddy's arms...
...Are Harry and his wife merely intruders, that is, parasites...
...Harry and his wife ought to go...
...We manufacture so much of our own despair...
...She is married to a rich, meek taxpayer named Tobias (Hume Cronyn) who passes most of his stage life either in being irresolute or in pouring seven-to-one cocktails for everybody in sight...
...even the slang with which he used to be adroit now sounds studied...
...One waits haplessly for the main verb to break through...
...Albee observes the tradition by not explaining the presence of Harry and his wife beyond having them insist that they were scared to remain in their own house...
...Is she fit for one...
...And Julia, the 36year-old daughter of Agnes and Tobias, shows up as a fugitive from her fourth marriage...
...Rosemary Murphy as Claire favors sweaters (which favor her) and explores the playing area as unobtrusively as a piece of furniture on oiled wheels...
...The unwelcome guest is a standard ploy in avant-garde drama...
...Harry and his wife (Henderson Forsythe and Carmen Mathews) are everybody's old friends melted down and sugared...
...Toss in a couple of facts about how Tobias earns a livins, where Agnes shops for her outfits, and what Claire eats between glasses of gin...
...Thus, in the confrontation between Tobias and Harry the director dignifies 10 monotonous minutes by framing the four ladies of the cast in an archway, like Greek libation-bearers holding cups of coffee...
...and you have a sturdy one-act that Marcel Aym?© or Andr?© Roussin would not be ashamed to acknowledge...
...she has screeched and crumpled bedspreads...
...Claire, the younger sister of Agnes, seems to be on the premises all the time...
...Julia has gone into tantrums to get her room back...
...Not unjustifiably we expect some enlightening, or possibly devastating, conclusions about marriage as a state of wellor ill-being...
...Many of the reviews that fell for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...Or a pair of paranoiacs...
...His characters secrete dependent clauses, the subjunctive mood ("It would serve you right, were I to go away"), and pseudo-Jamesian daintiness with tenses ("Not that she didn't like me but that she hadn't liked me for some time...
...He can contrive suspenseful scenes, and they are made more full and taut by Alan Schneider's direction...
...Are parents responsible for a daughter's weaknesses, not to say manic spells...
...The overall result is a lethargic bout of counterpunching between Enid Bagnold and William Inge...
...Will Julia find happiness and a fifth husband...
...These overtones, even if present, did little to "deepen" a play that was mostly a booze-up and wring-out, heavy on sentimental hints that hatred in marriage is a disguise for love...
...They hold their prosy sessions in a large living room expansively designed by William Ritman, with arches, pillars, a conservatory (real-estate ads today would call it a ferny nook), and shelves densely packed with what looks like Reader's Digest Condensed Books...
...Yet the various antagonisms on stage- all of them once again concealing love behind hatred-are admirable examples of boulevard theater...
...The surface of A Delicate Balance is hard and slippery-not with critical intelligence but with a syntactical glaze, a traffic jam of words, frozen over...
...the surface is not difficult to penetrate...
...The night, she observes, is full of misgivings and fright but the day is something else again...
...Or: "Do we dislike happiness...
...But in line-or in depth-with the rest of its profundity, A Delicate Balance only molts general statements that are something less than metaphysical aper?§us: "Time happens to people, I suppose, finally...
...And Claire-please note these names and listen for the overtones -is she more clear-sighted than her sister and brother-in-law because she never got married...
...These and other matters are obliquely raised in the play and discreetly dropped...
...But are they profound...
...Her functions are to express her intense dislike for Agnes, to empty glasses as fast as Tobias can fill them, and to swap invective with all comers...
...obligingly discerned Greek and other mythical allusions, as well as borrowings from Strindberg...
...give everybody surnames...
...Will he tell Harry and his wife to move the hell out again...
...The provocations are plain enough...
...When this acquaintance of mine used the word I told him that I wasn't sure what it meant...
...And once you've come close to it, somebody else will dream up ways to elaborate on it...
...He has worked up a basic situation that holds out promises whenever the people involved in it stop their disquisitions and get down to business...
...He adopts a ragged 45th Street Freudianism in treating sex relationships as The Ultimate Cause and an excuse for The Big Dirty Yock...
...Marian Seldes (Julia) becomes a pawky, 36-yearold teenager and knows how to turn on a decent conniption...
...Because the plays have that resonance...
...Tobias belts down a straight whisky and tells his old friend right out that he doesn't wish him to stay-but by God he must stay, all the same, on account of their 40-year friendship...
...I would guess that when Edward Albee writes a play his first care is to rebut by anticipation the charge of non-profundity...
...She is right, of course, dead right...
...she has pointed a pistol downstage left...
...like its opposite, it has gone colorless from overexposure...
...But profound...
...they appear to be merely unedited...
...Must we be tolerant to refugees...
...From A Delicate Balance a favorite standby principle of playwriting emerges: When you have nothing in particular to say, keep talking...
...Virginia Woolf is actually Strindberg in reverse...
...Very nice...
...The obligatory scene really does come along at last...
...He scrabbles about in search of literary importance...
...Miss Tandy wears powder blue and other "dry" colors beautifully matched by Theoni V Aldredge to her arid loquacity and very good looks...
...And Hume Cronyn's Tobias has a steady wrist with the bottles and an unsteady voice...
...He has already enhanced the atmosphere of avant-garde abstraction by providing only measly information about the characters...
...she also orates in a succession of gong tones and lung-defying respirations...
...But Tobias is an indecisive guy...
...By the end of the second act the plot is drifting toward an obligatory scene between Tobias and his old friend, Harry...
...The sun comes up and Agnes points out in italics that what astonishes her most is the fact that day follows night much as night follows day...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 20
