Up from Idealism
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Up from Idealism As a social spectacle Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle ought to trump just about any Broadway trick. It has laughs, songs, chases,...
...Similarly Azdak is a bribesnatcher and a concupiscent...
...Actors, for instance...
...On this anarchy director Noel Willman imposes order...
...they will supply broad, fierce gestures for the sake of the desired "alienation...
...it ought to belong to those who can use it properly...
...So well that it distracts from the main business at hand, Grusha's marriage to a dying man, as a drunken monk sways undecided between conducting the marriage service and intoning a funeral speech...
...For The Lion in Winter is actually a domestic slanging bout circa Christmas 1183...
...and a coolly cheerful translation by Eric Bentley, which lets Brecht's comedy unwind clearly without exclamation-pointing the drama (Grove Black Cat, 95p...
...Eleanor is like a drawbridge...
...His Storyteller, who comments on the action, could, like several of the episodes, fit cleanly into one of Chikamatsu's 17th-century Japanese epic dramas...
...Broadway drama is by and large meretricious...
...and Azdak, the slob of a village recorder who is forced into becoming a judge and, in the final moments, decides that Grusha will keep the little boy...
...Anybody who attends the theater regularly must be both impressed and appalled by the prodigality of Broadway's know-how and human resources...
...Grusha does not let her peasant husband touch her because she is waiting for her boy friend to come home from the wars...
...He drew heavily on his admiration for Oriental theater, both in the writing of Chalk Circle and in the "model" production he prepared for his Berliner Ensemble...
...The dialogue is packed with "You love me You don't love me . . Don't leave me You still care what I do God...
...Perhaps Blau and Irving are the men to begin a rescue operation...
...Most of the time in this production Irving chooses naturalness over artifice...
...And a couple of directors...
...Life is like an avalanche...
...Similes leak all over the place...
...as a result, the unmasked actors seem to be featureless, the masked, cloaked ones in their pointed hats turn into obelisks...
...Nor does the director's blocking do much for the movement of the play...
...The two outstanding characters are Grusha, the kitchen maid who takes charge of her mistress' abandoned baby son, guards and feeds him, risks her life for him, and comes after two years of fostermotherhood to consider herself his mother...
...It is hard to imagine a Broadway musical in which the songs are inaudible...
...The art of good management is said to be in part the ability to pick trustworthy associates...
...The Lincoln Center production puts in a negligible claim...
...They are far from untouchable...
...It will be a pity if, persisting with a program of righteously culled plays next season, they are unable to do right by them...
...Brecht was aware of the rich playing that would be necessary to match-sometimes to overcome-the masks: theatrical to the point of grotesqueness, roughly on a par with Kabuki or Kathakali...
...If there is a way to make the difficult confrontation of masked with unmasked actors convincing, it is by heightening, not by damping down...
...Or: "I'll have your answer, yes or no.-You'll have it when I give it...
...With some judicious appointments, the Blau-Irving partnership could run rings around any other company in the country but the one in Minneapolis...
...Or what Rosemary Harris might have done as Grusha...
...By holding the actors under control without forgetting when to let them run loose, by keeping them darting before and behind arrases, on top of and under tables, by contriving to make a lot of shouting sound like cannonading wit and smell of brimstone and hyperbole, by casting two firebrands like Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris in the leads in the first place, Willman plumps out an otherwise vacant two hours...
...The masked roles are also understaffed...
...They put insights into one another's minds and snatch explanations from one another's mouths: "I know what you're thinking," etc...
...Mom gift-wraps her packages in colored paper and ribbons and puts them away in a hope chest with Romanesque arches, while Pop complains about "all my boys" and sleeps with the princess next door, and the boys (including the future Richard the Lion Heart and King John) tussle over which one of them is going to knife the old man...
...Grusha has to sustain two-thirds of the play...
...But charm and competence only begin to define these characters...
...People who have been employed in the commercial theater are not as a rule defiled by the experience...
...Or, come to that, what Zoe Caldwell, who played Grusha at the Guthrie Theater last year, might have done with the part here...
...and I believed you Can't we love one another just a little...
...They are, as a matter of fact, easily touched in a good cause...
...It has the levity of a fairy tale, and the gravity of history in a remote setting exposing an unexceptionable moral for our times...
...He is also a visionary with mongrel loyalties: He will welcome a new, post-revolutionary age of reason, but grovel to whoever is currently in power...
...At the same time, in a play like The Caucasian Chalk Circle adequacy is not enough...
...Her almost perverse chastity can be demonstrated only by a toughness that Miss Huddle never hints at...
...Henry has little in common with the character in Anouilh's Becket or the one in Christopher Fry's Curtmantle...
...The characters do not exactly argue...
...One may respect their highmindedness, as well as their impeccable taste in drama and their affection for the old San Francisco team from the Actor's Workshop...
...Most really gifted actors in New York would jump at the chance of a place with Lincoln Center...
...each of them is marked and complicated by outrageous psychological figurings...
...This is a valuable property...
...I don't mean to suggest that Blau and Irving should give their productions a phony gloss to compete with Broadway's, but that they accept their new national status and take in the best talent available...
...Yet is it not time for them to see whether there may be a number of useful things worth stealing from Broadway...
...Isn't an encounter possible between the lofty theoretical standards at Lincoln Center and the sumptuous array of acting and directing expertise 20 blocks to the south...
...Somebody or other is like the rocks of Stonehenge...
...But if its drama were everything Broadway would be nothing...
...For Grusha, Irving has chosen Elizabeth Huddle, a pretty girl of undeniable charm who moves about attractively...
...The artistry of actors, directors and designers should be gauged not by the plays they work for, but what they make of those plays on stage...
...The husband is not very savory as Brecht's peasants go ("Woman weeds the fields and opens up her legs, that's what our calendar says"), but Grusha, is a young woman, after all, and his wife...
...Good beats out bad, and the evening leaves us comforted, practically uplifted, by the lesson that property properly belongs to those who can make proper use of it...
...the acreage of the Vivian Beaumont stage, which revolves every which way with push-button obedience...
...The play purports to be a portrait of Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine as they squabble over the succession to the English throne...
...The moments of straight dialogue often flag for lack of physical animation, whereas the crowd scenes jumble and obscure the lines...
...Under Jules Irving's command the company displays no serious gaffes, none of those performances so aberrant (Barbara Loden's Beatrice in The Changeling, Michael O'Sullivan's Tartuffe) that they could become collectors' swaps among Camp followers...
...The Lion in Winter (Ambassador Theater) will do for an illustration of how low-grade ore can be compelled to glitter...
...The presentation at Lincoln Center is further assisted by a wardrobe of blazingly-hued Azerbaijani robes, conical headpieces, nighthawk and barn-owl masks (bulbous eyelids around sloping eyes), all designed by James Hart Stearns and James F. Gohl...
...And when Grusha sings Morton Subotnick's one-tone music, while marching on the revolve, the hum of the machinery all but drowns her out...
...I wonder what he might do with a play worthy of him next year at Lincoln Center...
...Yes, a press release says there are 144 other parts of varying size, shape and weight (I stopped checking at around 68), but Grusha or Azdak lives at the center of almost every scene...
...It has laughs, songs, chases, excruciating melodrama, fights, mock trials, villainous aristocrats, venal soldiers, a baby in peril, an unsullied heroine, a decent, mindless hero, and a lovable rogue dispensing a Robin Hood brand of justice...
...But then Lincoln Center is not Broadway, and Blau and Irving are not too concerned with what goes on in the commercial arena, if Blau's book The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto remains their manifesto...
...One sequence that resembles the overpopulated cabin in Night at the Opera-guests cramming into a tiny room-works extremely well...
...Azdak, the last third...
...Hide an actor's face and you put a terrible responsibility on his limbs and throat, a responsibility that the Lincoln Center actors cannot, or at least do not, discharge...
...And such wordspinning exchanges as: "You're still a marvel of a man.-And you're my lady...
...Azdak is taken on by Robert Symonds, who looks unkempt enough to toss a dime to and whose competence never sags...
...Symonds' agreeable interpretation does not meet this ugly-funny personality even halfway...
...The actors will thus "show" the story, rather than simply enact it...
...But then there are the matters of acting and direction...
...he finds a girl who was raped in a stable guilty of provocation, and then hurries her back to the stable "so the Court can inspect the scene of the crime...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 8
