On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Shaky Footholds Theater departments at the universities have long been a source of talent. It looks as if they will soon be the prime source. In the past couple of years...
...Broadway is haunted by the penniless spirits of producers who once read a story by Kafka, Thomas Mann, Poe, or Chekhov and said to their wives, "It would make a great musical...
...Yale has revamped its policies...
...she is pitied...
...Tens of thousands of trained directors, actors, designers, and playwrights fulfill graduate requirements each year and go off to apply for jobs that do not exist...
...As the play proceeds the set becomes decreasingly relevant...
...This isolation succeeds only insofar as it is an attempt to prove that she can dignify unimaginative blocking with her personal magnetism...
...Lowell has by and large accepted this version of him, the homme spirituel rather than the victim...
...Miller also discovers an analogy with "the Thirty Years War, Regicide, and the brief success of military theocracy...
...Never mind that Miller has allowed him to be dressed like Monte Cristo in the vaults taking a break after tunneling through dirt, nor that Miller has found a foolish conceit to suggest that Prometheus has been tortured in the worst way —a red stain that runs down the thighs of his pants from the groin...
...But I am unsure whether some of the humor is meant by Lowell or has been gratuitously fed in by the production...
...In vain does Prometheus cry, "I am burning in my own fire...
...Miller's efforts are not only at variance with the play...
...starring two first-rank actors...
...Io is a much harder part than Prometheus for an actor to bring character to...
...That is why many other people might want to see them...
...When you've seen one you've seen them all...
...Miller, however, has not followed his own logic and produced an ultramodern Prometheus...
...The name Prometheus means Forethinker...
...Yet the performers are left more or less to their own devices...
...Miss Worth needs all the help she can get...
...The atmosphere of tragedy has also evaporated...
...That is why they want to see the plays...
...Irene Worth, too, is kept stranded and motionless for unnecessarily lengthy spells...
...He seems to pace himself, but the effect is musical, not bleakly metronomic...
...In spite of the sculptures inspired apparently by Callot's engravings, the scene is reminiscent of the loading area at the back of a disused warehouse somewhere near Canal Street...
...Io's speech and Prometheus' later prediction of her hapless future stand like giant pillars on either side of the intermission...
...This is inevitable...
...he is astoundingly intelligible...
...and that risks of this sort have to be faced...
...You know that intelligence is suffering," one of the Seabirds tells him, and intelligence is what Haigh communicates...
...He has stood up to Zeus...
...Once the main departmental slots are filled, Broadway names, magazine bylines, people with a credit in Playbill and/or Showcard set in larger than six-point type get lured away from their regular activities for one half-day a week...
...in the Army, as parading the brass...
...As Hephaestus, Clayton Corbin bumps along on a crutch, dragging a dead leg around in semicircles...
...and that "realized quite literally, the play would be almost ludicrous and even a bit pansy," why in the name of good theater didn't he direct something else...
...The more distant this antiquity is the harder it becomes for an audience to find any footholds for their own attention...
...In the business world this is known as dressing up the letterhead...
...At times the play even swings into breezy comedy: "Why should I go on telling you about monsters...
...In a program note he remarks that if Greek plays are "set in some hypothetical antiquity, in a landscape littered with crags and broken columns," they lose spectators...
...The lines are spoken on a platform in front of the pit...
...Juilliard will move to Lincoln Center...
...He has equivocated by setting it in "the early part of the 17th century," which "represents a sort of cultural watershed halfway between antiquity and our own times...
...his environment takes on a mythical tinge...
...If they are Broadwayish snobs they patronize it because their "betters" are going?it's the thing to do—and they will expect more "footholds" than Miller can provide...
...He is the artist, craftsman, scholar and soothsayer in one, especially during that long monologue that spins a web of fantasticated prophecy from which Io will not escape...
...It might not be a hit with the foothold crowd, but at least it would not be—to use another foxy word—a compromise...
...Besides, "literally" is a foxy word...
...Heavy salaries are dangled on thin strings...
...The seasick-looking Seabirds pose in imitation of Sir Stanley Spencer's iconographic portrait of the Three Graces...
...The rest of the evening inches along inconclusively...
...Instead of the breadth of a rocky gorge on the Scythian plain, then, Annals has created a gray brick facade some 50 feet tall, licked and blackened by smoke, with its verti-cality heightened, so to speak, by two threatening chains suspended from the flies...
...This much is fairly certain: In tackling any demanding playwright, to find something that resembles the play you must start with something that resembles the play...
...Is this the audience a university theater can possibly cater to...
...This restriction is all the more regrettable since Haigh, as we know from his Jimmy Porter and his Mac-Heath in the recent television offering of The Beggar's Opera, moves very well in a playing area...
...It happens that their devices are impressive...
...Haigh is by no means the ideal Titan, ancient or modern, not large in his rage at the injustices of Zeus, not intimidating in how he turns his agonies to poetic account, but rather knowing and amusing...
...her painful wanderings over a strange, unfriendly topography?seem almost like relief...
...That is no reason to deny her the chances of reciprocity with the other actors...
...He accompanies his voice with irregularly rhythmic hands and birdlike turnings of the head...
...I have just made them up...
...With the modernization of the language, some of the play's "Greekness" vanishes...
...And Lowell's most vivid contribution to Aeschylus is a sort of animal tale...
...Miller has crippled them into caricatures, much as he did in Lowell's play My Kinsman, Major Molineux...
...he has preferred to iterate (and phrase beautifully) his defiance of Zeus, a valid choice for a poet to make in reinterpreting this play so long as the suffering is not scamped...
...Miller lets her go it alone...
...also-starring Yale students...
...The poetry in Lowell's prose makes its own way across the auditorium without the aid of humming, crooning, throbbing, big chest tones or the other standard paraphernalia of "fine speech...
...It would take far less than a Prometheus to laugh him down...
...They might conceivably have some affinity with von Grimmelshausen's chronicle Simplicissimus, but what can be their bearing on Lowell, Aeschylus or the chaste academicism that closed in on the arts after the outbursts of the Revival of Learning...
...In short, he is active while she is passive: She has no tangible obstacles or enemies to play against...
...He has expanded Io's description of how Zeus took her in her father's meadow among the grazing cattle, while "the whole pasture lay like a panting body...
...He takes up a line, models it, throws away the spare words and hits the meaning right on center...
...The words do not go beyond assertion...
...He is a witty savant...
...He is hated or respected by the other people in the drama...
...So little ancient Greek theater is done, well or badly, that Miller has almost no grounds to stand on when he guesses what it would be like if it were "realized quite literally...
...At the same time, the New York theater appears more sluggish than ever and the regional companies, governed by their local chambers of commerce, more cautious than ever...
...Their skins are chalked over...
...It hints at work that is sure to be pedestrian...
...Cartoons, ghouls and grotesques —these are Miller's insignia of 17th-century neoclassicism...
...The fire Prometheus brought man will be man's ruin, "the first and last power to rule...
...that a university takes on a director in good faith and cannot dictate to him how the production must be handled...
...In place of active dramatic narration Lowell gives us flecks of astute observation misted over by similes, until the preposition like begins to sound interminable...
...Learn to live with the world you helped to make," he is utterly resistible...
...Hesiod described him, 300 years before Aeschylus lived, as "crafty beyond all...
...a period during which the classical forms were receiving the same sort of reprocessing that Robert Lowell is giving them today...
...He has the oratorical advantage of being able to conjure up her life to come and to make it suspenseful to hear...
...So do the subsidiary roles...
...During the next few months Yale will inaugurate such a group, and Columbia's summer school will mount plays with a cast of professionals and graduate students...
...In this sequence Lowell catches the ugly indolence of the rape so powerfully, with the cows staring on out of their great, proptosed, disinterested eyes, that Io's subsequent torments—the flies that swarm after her and bite her...
...I agree wholeheartedly with these arguments...
...By contrast, the two important figures of the play, Prometheus and Io, wear natural make-up...
...Not until this Prometheus is directed by somebody less determined than Miller to impose himself on it, will we have any idea of whether he was responsible for forcing the comedy and taking out the tragic flavor...
...Ostensibly they bestow on students blobs of wisdom, from a full insight down to an inkling...
...The audiences are right there, especially on campuses that are removed from the big cities...
...They have seen this opinion confirmed too many times...
...In some cases they have thought about attaching professional companies to the schools...
...Miller's casting of Kenneth Haigh and Irene Worth in these roles is the one aspect of his directing that is not open to serious question...
...But what is the point of such a test...
...People stay away from the theater today because it has a low opinion of them...
...Unfortunately, student directors will also be seeing Miller's arbitrary stage business, sanctioned by a favorable reception...
...As a diplomat-tempter David Hurst's Ocean is a hopeless failure as soon as he begins to speak in the cozy, fondling accents of a father-in-law...
...But why do people go to see a Greek play...
...Lowell's poetry, "imitations," and plays show him to be a Romantic pursued by classical themes...
...The universities may thus have to make jobs...
...he is at the same time conductor and executant...
...New theater arts programs have begun at Brandeis, NYU and Columbia...
...As a further coincidence, in Shelley's Oedipus Tyrannus the poet lampoons contemporary politicians by portraying them as hogs, and the chorus as "a swinish multitude...
...Miss Worth is one of the few tragediennes of stature in English...
...In Lowell's adaptation there are correspondingly fabulous scenes...
...she can only respond to his visions with terror or look back on her past with bewilderment...
...dress and characterizations...
...Lowell might have dramatized Prometheus' experience of his suffering...
...One of them tells Prometheus, "You changed man from the highest of the animals to the lowest of the gods...
...It is to these characterizations that the director's inventiveness might well have applied itself...
...They recite their words from scrolls and busily scribble down Prometheus' apocalyptic utterances with those special writing implements favored by 17th-century Seabirds...
...As a consequence the set by Michael Annals depicts, according to Miller, "a shattered 17th-century castle-keep with characters from one of Callot's more atrocious pictures...
...All the same, if there is to be more university theater of quality its directors ought to be discouraged from aiming at a vast, lazy, supposititious public...
...and supported at the technical and design end by a collaboration of people from Yale and outside...
...Poetic hints from the original become fully extended symbols...
...In the theater it is called the star system...
...The result is a mixed bag of accomplishment...
...I can only hope that they realize how incoherent his ideas are, and that they take note of the opportunities he has missed...
...at her best she makes such French veterans of Racine and Corneille as Marie Bell and Maria Casares look like whatever is the feminine for ham...
...The antagonists of Prometheus?Hephaestus, Ocean and Hermes?are equally ridiculed by their makeup (powdered quicklime...
...Ron Leib-man's Hermes announces himself as a "light and sunny god," but Miller has to forge the irony with a pile-driver and make him come across as a skinny Andy Devine wearing plus-fours and a baggy Sancho Panza hat...
...that there is even more risk in a university's undertaking a play of this caliber without profit motives than there is in commercial theater because the expectations are higher and the working habits of outside professionals are unpredictable...
...The daughters of Ocean, an abbreviated chorus of three, are Seabirds...
...Both she and Haigh have to play continually to the audience, a favorite mannerism of recent avant-garde directors who picked it up, after everybody else had exhausted its possibilities, and turned it into the theatrical platitude of our time...
...Nor do I wish to play down the courage and enterprise called for by Yale in taking the initiative...
...Yale, in fact, is already in business, pulling theatergoers out of the metropolis to see a Prometheus Bound strenuously adapted by Robert Lowell...
...But it is...
...assembled by Jonathan Miller...
...In this universe he acts out the life of an anachronism through his writing, much as Byron, Shelley and Hugo did...
...if, that is, they have any business studying theater in the first place...
...they put it out of focus, if not out of alignment...
...It can be argued that the Drama School at Yale is not to blame for Miller's undoing of Prometheus...
...A truly literal production might be exceedingly difficult to bring off...
...she, a simple girl who became innocently entangled in the designs of the gods...
...She even managed to be interesting in Tiny Alice...
...In this production, for example, Prometheus is unbound, but Miller leaves him standing on one midstage spot for 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch, so that he seems not so much confined as paralyzed in the lower limbs...
...Hundreds of theater students will see this performance and it will do them at least a semester of good if they are capable of judging its worth...
...In the past couple of years they have swollen in size and ambition...
...But before these companies can come into being, money and foundation promises will need to be diverted away from the polarization of stars and into production expenses...
...Haigh is not only intelligence embodied...
...sub-starring resident actors from the Drama School faculty...
...He looks at himself and sees a universe of the past...
...she has been discarded...
...actually they draw larger enrollments...
...As the university theater expands, its practitioners will do the theater at large a service if they remind themselves that the audiences they are likely to talk most effectively to—students—do not know the original plays in any staged form, definitive or otherwise...
...that its "personalities are little more than talking vapors," as he says in the program...
...It is a coincidence that Shelley wrote a sequel to Prometheus Bound, an imagined replacement for the two lost plays of Aeschylus' trilogy...
...When he says, "Know yourself—and change...
...The as-yet-incomplete Westchester School of the Performing Arts is talking big...
...If Miller really believes they need "footholds" for their attention when they are watching Prometheus...
...Naturally, the competition for teachers grows fiercer...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 13
