The Sound of Vietnam
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Sound of Vietnam Megan Terry, who wrote and directed Viet Rock (Martinique), composes in sound. Her vaudeville, which declares all-out war on supporters of the...
...She "interprets" a line by breaking it in mid-breath, repeating a word or two, tossing in a "you know," and laughing for emphasis...
...Occasionally, Miss Terry herself overreacts-with yet another of those crucifixion bits...
...No wonder so many young men want to be women...
...Yet something is missing from the dialogue, a second layer of information or a tone that comments on the first...
...the ones he relates sound like deliria and he is right to keep them at a remove...
...I see little sense in an exposure of a new play for only about 10 days...
...to the accompaniment of a liturgical "Peace on earth" refrain in Latin...
...The wife of a chiropodist, taking a free vacation in a "swampy hotel" in Florida, remarks, "I stay here because my husband does all the feet for the management...
...Sure, they're small," his sergeant tells him, "but they got trigger fingers, don't they...
...she employs every extra-rational means she can come by to hit, disarm and deflate its proponents...
...a Buddhist service...
...The mother and daughter put on a show of respectable sorrow...
...The two of them work like demons all evening...
...The play falls mostly into longish anecdotal recitations and outbursts of rage...
...If he does not speak to us, he speaks to no one really useful to him...
...With this kind of script, the director's task is to let the comedy take care of itself and to choose actors who pitch their performances against the lines, or at least at an angle to them...
...Milner shows no actual meetings between white and black...
...Her vaudeville, which declares all-out war on supporters of the Vietnam war, consists of jagged, incomplete sentences, incantation, mountains of rhetorical slag, fierce ballads, foot-stamping, taped speeches that go in and out of synchronization with live voices, and wisps of poetry that float out into silences and lightly collide...
...Like Bummidge in The Last Analysis, the characters in Under the Weather are adept at volunteering amusing information about themselves...
...The plays of Congreve, Hebbel, Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw, among others, vigorously survive because the playwright in each case lets a character draw a public face for himself, make a surface evaluation, at the same time as the author's irony contends with that evaluation and allows a private face to show through, like a television ghost's...
...Patricia Routledge is good at propping up exhausted puns with farcical characterization...
...The staging uses no sets, rigidly simple costumes-blue denims for the men, solid colors for the women -and a guileless, unobtrusive lighting plot by Gil Wechsler...
...Such characters are more than they merely say they are...
...The three plays are essentially realistic, but they do not create the dual roles we have come to expect in realistic comedy and drama...
...Or in a hospital scene between a mother and a son whose face has been destroyed...
...They are great auto-analysts...
...As a physicist who passes up an international conference on arms control in order to get a repeat glimpse of a critically situated birthmark on his childhood girl friend, Towb manages to be at the same time effete and potent, the professorial scientist conjoined with the erotic poet...
...Murray Kempten once wrote about the Negro writer's practical need to talk to white men because "we own every means by which a man can be noticed...
...Harry Towb, her opposite number, is cautious and more effective...
...Tim feels a craving to unburden himself to a white man, but for emotional release, not for publicity reasons...
...The casting of Shelley Winters in three successive roles is an error...
...three girls striking matches to set themselves on fire, in mime...
...GIs lie about on a barrack-room floor wisecracking at the mellifluences of a Tokyo Rose called Hanoi Hannah, who explains in detail what their girls are doing Stateside in the back seats of other men's cars...
...Bellow's does one, and beautifully...
...Ronald Milner's Who's Got His Own made a brief appearance at the American Place Theatre...
...Certainly, she has talent in abundance, but she looked nervous...
...Because of his saving graciousness, A Wen, in which he has the largest of his roles, seems the most dramatic of the plays...
...partly to prove to himself that "they're not all the same,' partly because "if you go to another Negro, it's like offering a nickel and asking for five cents in exchange...
...Miss Terry's is a theater of onomatopoeia, not sound as sense, though...
...Women today are works of art...
...Lloyd Richards directs on an arena stage to emphasize the isolation, but inexpertly, because each actor spins about to share himself fairly with the four segments of the audience...
...Who's Got His Own (the title comes from a folksong) is about a mother, daughter and son grieving in their own ways on the day of the father's funeral...
...The nature of the performance does not allow the actors any bravura opportunities, but they labor with an incensed fidelity that helps to make Viet Rock as much their province and property as it is Megan Terry's...
...The parricidal impulses of the younger generation appear as hysterical as they do in a number of early Expressionist plays, notably in Arnolt Bronnen's Vatermord...
...In Act Three the no-pants business gets another try...
...Yet even then, Miss Terry does not linger over the pathos but pushes brusquely on to the next incident...
...We've produced women the way the Middle Ages produced cathedrals...
...As a result, the warmongers will stay away, the war-haters will pick up no fresh ammunition and theaterlovers will find a great deal to admire...
...The plays' humor and wisdom bear down sharply on our time and general behavior, but remain external to the characters and their situations...
...But -and here is the quality that distinguishes Milner's work from say, Leroi Jones'-the hysteria is real, not forced...
...The best realistic dialogue, then, does two jobs...
...The son will not let them forget that the father was a despot in his home, beating his children savagely and on one occasion almost killing the mother, while a coward outside who never gave back a retort to insults from the white world...
...Peter Bayliss has a fine, wet rumble of a voice...
...In Act Two a girl is pregnant up to her eyebrows and her parents don't notice...
...Music Box) a lieutenant stands about with no pants on, and nobody notices...
...She regards the war as a merciless, totally irrational series of acts...
...An American soldier teaches "our cute little Vietnam buddies-they look just like girls"-to handle a rifle...
...For the most part, her 13 actors work at the tops of their voices and frequently make volume serve for passion, whether they are countermarching on the stage as they chant "Kill for freedom!," or singing America the Beautiful in imitation of a skidding needle on a phonograph record, or ripping off hawkish sentiments ("D'y'ever see them bleedin' hearts [the protesters] flghtin' cancer...
...The Church?], what is your position on Vietnam...
...Yet this is one of the few plays I have seen in recent years that the author has "felt," as well as constructed...
...The actors hardly have time to settle in...
...The directors of the American Place seemed to be counting on an off-Broadway extension run, which didn't happen in either case...
...The visual effects may be secondary to the sound, but they include some striking tableaux in movement: a group of soldiers swaying, their arms raised, to denote a parachute landing...
...Miss Winters is a walloper...
...rather, sound as impressionism, an auditory pointilliste palette...
...In Act One of How's The World Treating You...
...Milner's hero, Tim, is weighed down with Negro resentment-"the black thing," his sister calls it...
...Barbara Ann Teer, as his sister, has a magnificent voice but bumps up the dramatic contrasts in her soliloquies in an effort to put across a surprising personality...
...a crawl through wet jungle...
...an unflappable oriental goddess making like a Lady Krishna with her hands as she evades an answer to the question, "Madonna [the Pope...
...As Tim the son, Glynn Turman is a one-man stampede and unstoppable, a resourceful actor with a knifelike sense of humor that he can turn against himself as pitilessly as against his family...
...This is another reason to regret that Who's Got His Own, like Journey of the Fifth Horse last season, was snatched out of production too fast...
...During a Senate inquiry, an Administration figure says wearily, "If the sensational press would only stop overreacting, we could really get a job of hope done around this world...
...The number that opens both acts and closes the show, a Vietnam rock-and-roll, makes it plain that Miss Terry doesn't mean to dramatize both sides of the argument gravely...
...A prostitute with culinary ambitions tells of all the married women who "turn a trick or two" while their husbands sit at home and mind the kids and know what is going on: "If wives can hustle," she concludes, "whores can bake...
...she tries to hit every witticism for a home run...
...Quotable lines stream out of Saul Bellow's three one-acts collected as Under the Weather (Cort...
...In addition, the plotting is so manufactured that the interesting revelations at the end of each of the three acts are predictable...
...Some of the latter will be reminded of Joan Littlewood's staging techniques, better organized...
...He lets Miss Winters knock herself cold while he underplays, adding dimension to his voice with the gentlest of inflections and the most reticent twitches of hands, feet, mouth and brow...
...And then there are some wholly funny moments...
...However high the salaries of these two valiant comedians, they are being underpaid...
...But Miss Terry has an altogether more driving imagination than Miss Littlewood, both as director and as author...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 23
