On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Be rme I Lorca's Momentum The drama of Federico Garcia Lorca has made only a thin scratch on our theatrical consciousness; it is generally battered into grim English and...
...Yerma is voluptuous...
...Hirsch's discipline gets oppressive...
...Men and women collect at a hermitage to drink holy water and to pray for progeny, and a woman remarks, "There's a river of single men coming down from the mountain...
...Starting with Yerma, the example could prove instructive...
...Having registered these complaints, I must repeat that the production of Yerma does allow the play to exert most of its considerable fascination, perhaps because Hirsch and Miss Foster have seen its spiral pattern and imposed it fiercely, even if doing so has meant neglect of the peripheral characters...
...it is generally battered into grim English and flogged to a collapsing end, pursued all the way by the rhythms of tango and fandango...
...Hirsch has replaced the old...
...Maria Tucci makes the pregnant neighbor too sweet and refined to be interesting...
...Yerma feels herself to be a desert...
...Off-Broadway's independent entrepreneurs have sloped off into oblivion...
...In the final scene she murders him and cries, "I am barren forever...
...hampering translation by Graham-Luhan and O'Connell with a workable, effortlessly poetic version by W. S. Merwin...
...By way of contrast, Aline MacMahon's old peasant lady is bolstered into a grande dame interpretation...
...But she comes relentlessly up to her big moments with an authority that is outside the capacity of any other actress I can think of in this country...
...And, "We have to want men to give us their mouths and drink from them like water...
...only the Theatre 67 and the Circle in the Square companies are still in business...
...expired swiftly...
...Frank Langella, the embodiment of hardly-contained excitement in Benito Cereno and The White Devil, does not come to effectual stage life until the last few minutes...
...Yerma sings, "And if you hear a woman's voice, it's the broken voice of the water...
...His Yerma, however, is "tragic" not in the Greek sense of unknowingly bringing destruction on herself after thwarting what she most desires...
...In these predictable circumstances Lincoln Center and its noncommercial peers may at last become, not an opposition force to Broadway????they have never been that, only a supplement????dut a financial and artistic example...
...Tom Rosqui as Victor , a shepherd Yerma had loved, comes across as a gauche, weakly smiling victim...
...At any rate, a study by two economists, just published by the 20th Century Fund and called Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, concludes that "without constant vigilance and willingness [on the part of society] to bear the constantly rising costs of professional performance, amateur activity [in private clubs and some of the off-off-Broadway coffee houses, where actors are virtually unpaid] will tend to drive the trained performer from the field...
...The forces of imbalance obliterate each other...
...She presents a tense surface when she stands still...
...Nor is it an accident that Juan, a young man who is like an old man in expending his passion on his work, in wishing to own her but not possess her, is diligent and successful in making his land flourish, so that the more he grows the more the land becomes his wife's rival, draining away his love...
...and the next moment a stasimon of wives at their laundry form a dense, closed ring, or a candlelight procession dances to pay homage to the Saint of the Flowers, with a male and a female Mask in command, bacchanalian grotesques lifted out of one of Spain's old autos sacramentales...
...To counteract the play's slow march toward death, Lorca charges hs action with lyricism and vivacity...
...and Hail, Scrawdyke...
...Juan decides to stay with his crops all night, irrigating them, instead of going home with Yerma...
...the babies arrived like water...
...She is not always a pleasure to watch...
...The words wave and flowed mock her as she speaks them...
...This is by far the most accomplished production done by the Lincoln Center company under both the old and the new regimes...
...certain of her movements are untidy, certain locutions carry traces of affectation...
...At times, though, this is a curiously muted performance...
...And even her smaller activities distill one's attention: When she merely peels an apple over a bowl or embroiders a cloth, sets a bucket on the ground or drops her eyes and says tone-lessly to a pregnant neighbor, "How lucky you are...
...He has found a subtle meter for Lorca's word-music, with its elemental reverberations that awaken the worlds of "golden"' 17th-century Spanish drama and of ancient Greece...
...Miss Foster, luckily, has an operatic presence...
...An old lady who has raised a large family tells Yerma, "I lay on my back...
...Best of all, he has cast Gloria Foster as the heroine...
...The Investigation and Viet Rock, have posted closing notices...
...The only worthwhile productions that showed up on and off Broadway...
...In the first scene she is babying her husband, Juan, trying to persuade him he is sickly, so that she can find excuses to govern him...
...Up to now they have simply hammered out the classics and traded on the academic reputations of their authors...
...He has situated the play on a simple, oval board, designed by David Hays out of blood-red...
...the remainder were evidently selected for no convincing reason at all...
...She knows that her aridity is irrevocable if she remains with Juan????and she will not leave him????yet she pretends to go on hoping, and uses the past tense...
...Her yearnings for an infant recall the fourth, "Messianic" Eclogue of Virgil, but Yerma, the daughter of a shepherd, is anything but a pastoral figure...
...Miss Foster is by no means a natural choice...
...as a sorceress, is better than she has been in her other recent roles), the cast does not show itself to advantage...
...At the same time, the 20th Century Fund has announced that it will try to raise monetary support for the commercial interests, New York's "vital core" of production...
...The result is occasional stiffness instead of ritual...
...her name means precisely this...
...Then there are the opposing images: "But, oh, the dry wife with the breasts of sand...
...The alternative is to go on with her bleak, ordered existence in a home she shares with a husband who wants to engross wealth, and her black-clad sisters-in-law who mindlessly wash and scrub and shine...
...A 20th-century woman, she is like Sartre's Kean when he says, "If I could live my life again, it would be to do deliberately what I have done in spite of myself...
...The cost is two human beings...
...whose directing of Yerma (Vivian Beaumont) moves us out of a Spanish-American nightclub and brings us close to Lorca's tale of sexual poverty in a hot climate...
...finally, it seems as if she wants the pain as much as she wants the child?????°Lord, open thy rose in my flesh, even though it have a thousand thorns...
...Dismal, prep-school comedies like How's the World Treating You...
...But the overall number of entries has declined sharply for the nth year in a row...
...during her brief appearances we seem to be swung off the soil of Andalusia and into the palace in Seville...
...At one moment Yerma is alone with her anguish or she and Juan face each other like pitiful shapes deposited on a crimson plateau...
...On stage there are only the actors and a few pieces of worn Spanish furniture...
...Water spurts and bubbles through the text in taunting image after image of fecundity...
...several others, equally impoverished, linger on...
...it should arouse the expectations one has at grand opera, expectations seldom fulfilled and then only by monumental performers such as Birgit Nilsson in, say, the current Elektra at the Met...
...Yerma commits her characteristically Spanish "honor" to upholding life against death, yet we see that if she had not been barren, she would have craved to be: Barrenness is her destiny, her role...
...All the more credit, then, to John Hirsch...
...She says, "A wave of fire flowed up through me...
...Theatergoers are getting to the point of desperation where they ask themselves if they shouldn't settle for Man of La Mancha or Cabaret...
...As in the great plays of Calderon, Lope de Vega and Alarcon, Yerma, as it moves forward to its resolution, moves back to its cause, Juan, to settle its account with him...
...rough-edged canvas shut off at the rear by two plaster walls and a doorway crowded with sunlight from the outside...
...Apart from Miss Foster and Nancy Mar-chand (who...
...Hirsch puts emphasis on the ceremonial aspects of the play, alternately bringing on to the stage as few and then as many people as it can accommodate...
...There's only a little water running," he pleads, "and it's mine...
...But can voluptuous girls act...
...In a dispirited season Yerma gleams all the more invitingly...
...A group of wives by a stream toy with the water as they wash their children's clothes...
...Miss Foster is not...
...It is no accident that she married Juan, the only son in a family of girls...
...There is no sense in commenting on this proposal until one has some idea of the plays the Fund intends to assist, although some people already question whether commercial theater has not been the bruised skin rather than the vital core of The Apple...
...Lorca calls his threnodic portrait a "tragic poem...
...The actors themselves seem afraid to let go...
...The part calls for concentration and fervor that mount to a disastrous ecstasy...
...Most of the women in the chorus must have been selected for their abilities to sing and dance...
...Yerma wants the pain of bearing a child...
...I've killed my son with my own hands," meaning, of course, the child that might have come out of their union but implying an identity between son and husband...
...I started singing...
...she is tightening the play's hold and issuing warnings about its gathering strength...
...Even the stagehands in pointless Basque berets sneak on and off with the props as though believing that if they hunch up and go on their toes they will be invisible, as though invisibility were a merit...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 1
