On Stage

...The second, more serious, and confirmatory warning comes with Stoppard's one tactual departure from Shakespeare R & G get a look at the letter (planted on them by Hamlet) requesting the English king to execute them The effect here, as I take it, is to bring the tragedy to a high point The poor doomed fellows now know for sure that they will die, the tragedy is that they are trapped in the circumstances of the play, they will themselves deliver the letter that condemns them to death, worse, they are aware of its contents What was a comical kiss-off m Shakespeare is the tragic peripetera in Stoppard and, interestingly, a dry-eyed one Rosencrantz cries, "We're still young fit we've got years We've done nothing wrong' We didn't harm anyone " And then, uncertainly, "Did we7" To which Guildenstern replies...

...Jerry Orbach plays Harold Wonder, an advertising billboard sloganeer whose wife has walked out on him ("Jeanme, you bitch, m France you have to pull this on me9 Not m Queens, where I have defenses ") and their children and the chateau they have rented at enormous cost for a fraction of the summer He is distracted, in both senses, by the landlady, who recognizes a movie star in every face her eyes light on, by a burglar who struts in, grabs up a sackful of loose silverware, shouts, "We are all thieves," and runs back into the night, by a toothsome girl, half as old as Wonder, with flowers painted about her navel, and by a Cockney lady dressed m leather, except for her bare breasts, a friend of the analyst who goes into a bedroom with him for instruction in how to keep her climaxes down to five per night...

...Rita Kann as the landlady and Cleavon Little as the "scuba duba" of the title deliver first-rate cameos Levy has not been as fortunate or astute with his other casting, and he has introduced a few production excrescences During Orbach's phone monologues Levy sends onstage cardboard caricatures of the people at the other end of the line, these are visual trumpery without a comic payoff, and they irritate one's attention away from the speeches But he also switches on some snappy cool jazz during the same monologues, and it works, contributes, and is among the cleverest of his additions to the text His staging never seems rushed, its rococo development matches Friedman's verbal intricacies and is, in turn, matched by Peter Larkin's set This supremely invadable drawing room, all high doors and windows, looks onto a garden and leads up to an unsafe balcony, it constitutes a neat comment on the vulgarities of certain French architecture as it takes American amenities m its faltering embrace Yet a third good comedy??some week for the theater1??showed up at a modest house on East 20th Street, Thresholds, Inc Slawomir Mrozek's Out at Sea, a fable by one of Poland's best authors, must be undefeatable It survived a) a curtain raiser that seems about as long as the Bible but is merely an arthritic, Teutonic parable m one act by Tankred Dorst, b) a presentation that lacks the adroit and clinical acting the textual dialectics call for...

...Given his viewpoint, R & G are no longer the foppish, insidious spies of a conventional Hamlet, but two hapless souls One of them hopes occasionally for the best, the other occasionally fears the worst, neither understands what on earth or on stage is happening The show must go on, they must keep pace, they are in it but not of it Hamlet becomes a new character too, a bumptious, confident mouther of fine phrases who uses every encounter to outwit them As played by Noel Craig he is an adenoidal hero, a golden-haired, golden-tongued boy who keeps his chin up and his head well back as if to avoid bad smells...

...Fat, Medium and Thin, are on a raft They are about to elect one of themselves to be the food supply Fat and Meduim stare longingly at Thin The election is thus rigged, but they go through the motions of electioneering Thin makes a speech that is weak with promises and ends m the Chekhovian line, "I shall become someone " Medium describes how skillful a cook he is, a specialist in meat dishes Fat declares that he is indigestible, "bony, leathery, with two metal ribs If I am not elected I shall give away the rump and the sirloin ". As they collect the ballots Medium exults, 'This is certainly exciting Voting sharpens the appetite " But the election is voided Thin manages to slip in an extra ballot "When the normal forms of behavior fail, says Fat, "it is so often the volunteers who save the day " He and Medium thereupon press Thin to volunteer They one-up him by pretending to be orphans, so they can ask, "Isn't being an orphan enough without being eaten as well Isn't it time to pay your debt to the orphans of the world7" Thin's immolation is postponed by some ingenious complications Trying for one reprieve after another he finally suggests desperately that he ought to wash his feet The others agree Medium is laying out the tableware and Fat sharpens a knife as he says, "Personal cleanliness ensures a long and happy life " But while Thin is splashing between his toes, he suddenly sees the light and decides not to be compelled, but to volunteer after all "I'll be the first man to make the sacrifice " Fat tells him, "You will go down as a hero in our storn in our memories " Thin is still rattling on about his new virtue as a volunteer when Medium comes across an overlooked can of food Thin need not die But Fat waves it away before Thin sees it "Let him go on He's so happy ". Accept any of the terms or premises of coercion, Mrozek is saying, and you are forced to accept its conclusions, you persuade yourself into extinction To put the matter this baldly is to be unjust to the author's gifts as a fabulist and to skimp the ramifications of this one-act Despite the insufficiencies of the Thresholds treatment of Out at Sea, I am grateful to producer John Parkinson tor giving us the first glimpses into Mrozek's drama There is now more reason than ever to be impatient about the bickering over the American version of Mrozek's full-length Tango, which was staged m Poland and Germany more than two years ago...

...Scuba Duba is a sophisticated vaudeville Orbach holds the stage between solo acts, and does it confidently, dropping from seizures of elation into snarls of despair when he remembers his wife is shacking up with a Negro skin diver (The very words "skin diver" are a sexual threat ) As the flower girl, Brenda Smiley proves one of those rare comediennes who can be at once entertaining, delectable, and disquieting The director, Jacques Levy, discovered her a couple of years ago at the Judson Poets' Theater, it was a gilt-edged discovery...

...The questions do nothing to settle their apprehensions The coins come down heads up 90-odd times in a row, causing Guildenstern, the more worried of the pair, to conclude that "probability is not operating as a factor" and therefore that they "are now within un- sub- or supernatural forces " What they are doing is unstaging Hamlet From time to time a cue sucks them, baffled and unprepared, into his story, which has been proceeding fitfully behind them in mime We see the Prince gesticulating his way through a mute "To be or not to be" or, as Stoppard has it in a stage direction, "weighing up the pros and cons of making his quietus " Ophelia appears with her prayer book Hamlet says the last line of the soliloquy aloud, "Nymph, m thy orisons be all my sins remembered " They exchange pleasantries and move off into the wings...

...c) a translation that contains such unintentional absurdities as ' within me a new and better man is beginning to emerge " Three well-dressed gentlemen...

...I extract significance from melodrama," says Hecht with a flourish of his hands that has no meaning beyond itself, "a significance which it does not in fact contain, but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of ;light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality " The tragedians, under The Player's guidance, enact not only the murder of Gonzago but also the murder of R & G??for their benefit This is the first warning of their impending death, and it renews their fears...

...But that meeting of currents occurred to me again in the course of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Alvin Theater, published by Grove Press), a play that drifts coolly into the boiling waters of Hamlet The mixing of temperatures throws off a heavy mist and a drenching of semantic spray, and therein lies the play's charm It is at the same time gray and iridescent, an attempt to fashion comic elements into a tragedy Actually, it does not so much collide with Hamlet as keep bumping it gently The author takes his two protagonists on to a forestage, makes them speak their disappointments and foresee their own death, while they kill time??their lives??by spinning coins and questions at each other...

...Guildenstern's early claim, "We are entitled to some direction, one of the script's many theatrical doubles entendres, has its answer in Derek Goldby Making the most of a platform with three steps on either side, a few Gothicky arches designed by Desmond Heeley, and Richard Pilbrow's splendid, exceptionally complex lighting plot, Goldby lets his actors range through their games, pageants, gymnastics, dumb shows, impersonations, colloquies, jokes, monologues, one-Uners, heroics, gripes and griefs They are not a machine or a platoon, like the cast in After the Ram They take their time without dawdling, creating each event as it arises The stage appears hospitable to whatever will come next, it is their servant Unforced discipline is, of course, a contradiction in terms, and therefore a miracle of a kind But so is an artist IF Broadway producers had any common sense, let alone comic sense, they would have been battling for the rights to Scuba Duba (New Theater) As it was, a Broadway option lapsed on Bruce Jay Friedman's play, and it now looks like one of Off-Broadway's great strokes of fortune It resembles Friedman's Stern and A Mother's Kisses in having a neutral character at its center, practically a nebbish, who is exposed to a succession of kooks Friedman bounces the humor off his characters, rather than driving them into artfully constructed wisecracks It is difficult to imagine someone more helpless than an American in the south of France who wears a long-handled scythe over one shoulder, explaining, "It's just something I picked up and started carrying around " Or someone more intimidating than an aging French landlady who murmurs to the hero, "My petals still open??wider than ever " Or more unnerving than a psychoanalyst who advises his patients to look at their troubles sideways...

...Another neglected chap, The Player, who utters a total of 25 words as himself in Hamlet, has been expanded into a single personification of all actors at all times This is the meatiest role in Stoppard's play, a show-stopping demonstration, handled with a marvelously engaging bravura by Paul Hecht The part in a sense stands for the whole drama It observes itself and simultaneously reports back, it is a display of acting and commenting on that acting as it comes to life The Player is also Stoppard's instrument for expounding the play's theme that an artificial death on stage looks more real, is easier to believe in, than a death in real life...

...I can't remember ". But that peripetera is a bit too wearily prepared for Guildenstern's opening line, 'There is an art to the building up of suspense," sounds in retrospect like an apology For the sake of suspense, R & G tend to dwell on their ultimate fate, but dcath-to-come in the abstract is a conversation topic of limited ex-ploitability True, there is no reason why Hamlet should be the only character in Hamlet allowed to give himself advance condolence notices Even insensitive folk like Polomus and Hoiatio would have feared death if they were actual people Then why not R & G? But Hamlet's speculations on death are far from being the only suspense factor m Shakespeare's play And in Samuel Beckett, that other source book for Stoppard, suspense as a storytelling device is ??well, suspended Stoppard never finds one of those lines of chilling conclusiveness that would justify any amount of divagation, that would convince us no other author ever stared at death so hard and saw its bleakness so distinctly??as happens, for instance, when Polonius asks, "Will you walk out of the air, my lord7" and Hamlet responds, "Into my grave", or when Hamlet talks of the "noble dust of Alexander stopping a bunghole", or when Pozzo says, 'They give birth astride of a grave ". Perhaps if R & G had been divided more dramatically into two personalities, the play might have had some evil at its heart, some damage at its command, it could have got by with more friction and less suspense, it might have seemed less like Dr Jekyll and Mr Jekyll These quibbles stated, I must say that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead consists of some of the bravest, most vivacious writing the theater has tendered in recent years It is replete with funny situations, pointed and offhand witticisms and formally developed informalities that reveal the born??as against the manufactured??playwright To see a literary play on Broadway is an inspiring relief, maybe a precedent The performance sets precedents of its own as well The acting and reacting of the two leads, Brian Murray (Rosencrantz) and John Wood (Guildenstern) are of a varied but always firmly denotative quality They help Stoppard to establish differences between those two bland ever-presences, yet they never give away more than they should, and never fall into behavior patterns The warmest tribute I can think of is that they play the two actors as if they were people...

...Stoppard does not add material facts to Shakespeare At the end we know only that R & G were sent for, that they whiled away the intervals between calls with neo-medieval exercises in rhetoric, that they died, and that they lived in the circumscribed, pre-ordained boundaries of a play, Hamlet, each performance of which died with them We realize also that as characters they are incidental, if not irrelevant, to Shakespeare's plot Stoppard makes them relevant simply by looking at the play from a fresh angle...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Unstaging of Hamlet Shortly before the first-act curtain of Aften the Ram (John Golden Theater), the characters gaze out from the deck of their latter-day ark and are terrified to find themselves approaching a mysterious fog They have reached a place m the ocean where a cold current runs into a hot one...

...Rosencrantz exclaims to Guildenstern, "It's like living in a public park1" Later, while they are standing about on the empty boards, without even a tree like the one m Waiting for Godot to keep them company, Guildenstern impatiently shouts, "All right, then, keep out, everyone1" And the stage cussedly fills up with a court scene that envelops them...

...John Bowen's play is a school-marmish work, neither especially good nor bad, an updating of such repertory reliables on the Samuel French backlist as Outward Bound A medium-sized cast represents eight or 10 assorted types, humanity writ small, who confront their future with vary mg degrees of prolixity Vivian Matalon's staging has people marching about in step and m top gear and sitting down, so to speak, in bottom It includes a very neat interpretation by Alec McCowen of a shuffling little London clerk who would play God, and some insufferable flirting with the audience on the part of Paul Sparer, who brought the same disruptive mannerism to early productions by the APA...