On Stage

...the captain will not allow him to re-enlist...

...This production, directed by Paul Sills, came down from Yale Drama School...

...But the play also turns on the character of the defending counsel, a young lieutenant and a lawyer in private life, who comes to see that justice is unattainable in wartime, despite the excessive niceties of the trial...

...we would call it romantic exaggeration or over-exploitation of the material...

...If a performance works well, he is automatically hooked...

...It is also a failure in another respect...

...While two characters are shouting simultaneously and firing off pistols, can it matter much what words are being uttered...

...She got around to it, finally...

...Or there was a soft-shoe number brayed with the apologetic huski-ness of a Ted Lewis by a soldier who explains that he will never again be able to enjoy the movies because he has no eyes...

...Two chickens are decapitated and the blood from their severed necks is rubbed over the prostrate body of an actor...

...One can understand why he was tempted by this formidable approach...

...By means of facial close-ups and cross shots the tube could squeeze dramatic seasoning into this script, which doesn't really use the stage...

...Broadway has striven for years to take out a franchise on that pornography sometimes purveyed by its less orthodox juniors in small theaters, and by the movie-houses three blocks away on Times Square with their posters of boudoir heroines seeking refuge behind narrow strips of toweling...

...The prisoner, asked why he joined up, replies "For King and country," and adds, "They did egg me on...

...The text seems to exist to fill a hole in the sound effects...

...The book and lyrics??mostly lyrics ??by Arnold Weinstein concern a captain, a sergeant, a private, and their foreign prisoner who are holed up in a supply bunker after 20 years of fighting...

...Of course, when you come right down to it, they're all the same...

...And the oregano...

...When it lingers reluctantly at one point it seems, as often as not, to aim in the direction of a dead end, a visible cul-de-sac or an avenue broad and long yet so familiar that any further exploration hardly seems fruitful...

...whether their son should wear a jockstrap and be warned against "playing with himself," if he is actually doing so...

...The double impoverishment is apparent...

...In La Turista the material is neither improved nor impaired...

...In the theater the unheard melodies of the spoken art are sweeter??to the peculiarly sensual ear of the poet, at any rate??and so he pipes on, if he dares, "to the spirit ditties of no tone...

...They have some distance to go...

...And apart from a couple of technical boners—in the British Army, for example, nobody salutes unless he is wearing a hat??seidelnian's realization matches the play's own qualities...

...Anderson indulges here in a two-way stretch...

...His face took on a glazed look...

...Anything for a quick frisson...

...There may be a horizon between the moods of satire and re-gretfulness, but Weinstein, a dramatist of skill and taste, has not yet found access to it...

...The musical Dynamite Tonite, which recently closed at the Martinique after its second New York try, also had a wartime setting...

...He has recruited a corps of dependable actors, including Robert Salvio (Hamp the deserter...

...When I noticed that Levy had situated a runway up the middle of the theater, I took a seat near the end of it...

...The four productions I have seen lately are not all clinkers, but none of them promises any issue of consequence...

...Pursuing him to his seat looks like an admission of failure...

...It has tried to shame them into a new awareness of their shortcomings as citizens, as members of a larger body...

...Ever since the scene in Genet's The Balcony when the young revolutionary Roger publicly castrated himself, directors have been longing to find an effect that would top this...

...When the words are unimportant, the theme unengaging, and act two has apparently just met act one for the first time and is not anxious to develop the relationship, only excessive noise and movement will in fact retain one's attention, though not necessarily throughout the entire play...

...Anderson's new work reminds me of one of the more obscene episodes from a thing called Enter Laughing several seasons ago, in which sex similarly raised its timid head...

...The idea is that the audience will see how ridiculous he looks and will thereby "recognize themselves...

...When audiences are lost and have grown disinterested, sending an actor out as an emissary does not recapture or strengthen their grudging attention...

...Beckett and Pinget have pulled it off time and again in drama...

...They're still trying...

...If Hamp had not been preceded by so many war plays and trial plays, it might have carried more of a wallop...

...It inveighs against the sterility of American material progress...

...Weinstein wanted his characters to declare and not to declare simultaneously, to be forceful but subtle...

...William Bolcom's music is first-rate, from his sighing ballads punctuated by notes of acidic comedy to his raucous mock-marches and witty excursions into jazz rhythms...

...Because Shepard's play was precisely about her as a prototype, and because her monologues were more entertaining and revealing than his, I was easily distracted from the stage and listened for the moment when she would have her say about him...

...Or somebody talks about something "submerging below the surface...

...It then becomes equally simple to defend it on the grounds that it is...

...John Wilson has written a straightforward study of the military prosecution of a deserter during World War I. The soldier is a Billy Budd-like innocent who does not stand a chance against the juggernaut of Army law...

...A man is killed by a bullet...

...Here is her quite adept summary of the evening, reported in full: "You can safely say these kind of things are different...

...the dead man's comrade pleads, "Give him another chance...

...As it is...

...An actor storms up the runway into the center of the auditorium, followed by a screaming actress who pretends she is trying to sell him at auction, while he invites people around him to feel his biceps...

...Michael Lipton (the lieutenant) and Jess Osuna...

...This sort of thing has become almost a standardized game...

...Obviously, when the business they introduce improves the material dramatically...

...Weinstein's are...

...Weinstein attempts to define the personal impact of war...

...Somebody pretends to scramble over roofs and threatens to drop from them, rather as in the movie Panique...

...Is this dead end of infantile sadism, verging on theatrical fascism, the only alternative to the commercial dead ends...

...The second sketch takes place in the bedding department of a store and thus calls for Broadway's favorite prop in triplicate...

...Make the stupid bourgeois blush, turn their queasv stomachs...

...An arched scaffolding of lights remains in place throughout the performance as a reminder that this is not Life...

...Too often the scenes of Dynamite Tonite stood in front of the audience, swaying, wondering which foot to put down next, while normally resourceful actors??alvin Epstein, Gene Troobnick, Bill Alton ??were unable to help out...

...So the production comes across as a big, busy din...

...Sex even tiptoes into the final script, about a couple in their 80s who have both been married several times and now cannot identify each other, much less recall if they have slept together...

...It really came down...

...He fled to another, less cooperative subject...

...Hamp (Renata) is a problem play, a workmanlike, earnest, modernized version of a tract by Eugene Brieux or Francois de Curel, though without the latter's psychological counterpoint...

...Just when he was ready to roll he noticed the names and dates of a deceased couple on a headstone, and decided it might be dishonorable to go any farther under the eyes of ghosts who were contemporaries of his grandparents...

...One catches the words here and there...

...For the firing-squad ceremony the Commanding Officer orders "the smartest turnout possible...

...He was fired not long afterward, but for another reason: His program in Philadelphia had proved to be insolvent...

...The director's contributions make virtually no difference...

...A few weeks back the director of the Living Arts Theatre in Philadelphia said on television that he would like to force the audience to crawl through mud at the end of each performance...

...at the same time he makes use of his "dirty" idea...

...In the first of Anderson's scripts a playwright is trying to induce his producer to let a naked man appear on stage facing front...

...It made a change from listening to the lady in the row behind...

...To embarrass them...

...Alan Schneider's euphonic directing {e.g., keeping the old folks' rocking chairs going in harmony or disharmony) and the sincere acting of two of the principals, Martin Balsam and George Grizzard, almost convince us for whole moments at a time that the evening is not a mere boulevard tease...

...I didn't see the Yale staging, but the Dean of the School, Robert Brustein, played me some extracts from the tape made there...

...He uses a super-casual type of satire that is often amusing but cannot, by its nature, commit itself too passionately...

...What, then, is it...

...In the commercial theater we wouldn't tolerate falsely cracked-up excitement...

...God help us...

...La Turista is full of such momentary diversions or little, unearned shocks...

...it only diverts it momentarily...

...It is simple to dismiss a play like La Turista ("It's not true...

...A witness says of the prisoner, who may have been suffering from temporary insanity caused by shell-shock, "He hasn't the bloody sense to go off his head...

...When an actor seeks to make private contact with a spectator the reality and the artificiality of theater are equally destroyed...

...they are descriptive and full of redundancies: "I could hear all four doors slam like the gunshots of a rifle" (which are, admittedly, louder than the gunshots of a bow and arrow...

...This inequality of forces is deliberate and at the heart of the plot...

...But their objectives are not primarily satirical...

...It, too, belongs in another medium, television...

...He makes fun of the playwright...

...You can keep the rosemary...

...I ought to mention that La Turista also promotes a social message...

...A boy had taken his girl friend into a graveyard to make her...

...What is this Life...

...A given performance is both an act of reality (the performance itself) and an artificial construct (the unraveling of its content...

...It is "a tragedy played by comedians...

...I have never sympathized with the current obsession on the part of directors to get the spectator into the act...

...The playwright in this play, who compares himself at one point with Ibsen, has turned down two movie offers to compose this work of truth...

...In transition to commercial management it lost its orchestra, for which percussion and a piano were substituted, and also some movie clips that had been interpolated between scenes...

...During Sam Shepard's La Turista (American Place) a lady in the row behind me talked through the intermission and performance about department-store shopping, cruises, furniture, jewelry, and her niece...

...Sometimes it's the actor who gets embarrassed...

...It is competent, suspense-ful, and old-fashioned...

...I answered him back dutifully, and countered with another question...

...As another culinary joke the soldiers sing that "War is rough enough without eating in bad restaurants...

...The plays are a hit, so evidently the matrons who predominantly buy Broadway tickets for themselves and their mates are not yet bored by the respectability of prudish men...

...But the melancholy that served Keats miraculously and was pressed into the service of war poetry with exquisite diction by Wilfred Owens, Isaac Rosenberg and, occasionally, Robert Graves, somehow drained this play of its energy...

...One of the performers inevitably charged up the runway and established contact with me by asking a question...

...The director, Arthur Seidelman, brought off a clever, short-lived staging of that difficult tragedy Spring's Awakening some years back and has not been significantly heard from since...

...A middle-aged man and wife bicker over the merits of twin beds as against a double, in view of how they "do it...

...My own impression is that the play is sufficiently absent to allow a director to step in and enjoy free rein...

...In the third sketch another middle-aged pair flirt with racy topics: Whether their daughter should be taught about male erogenous zones and fitted with a contraceptive device before going to college...

...Even the title is adaptable??say, to "You Know I Can't See You When the Shower Curtain's Drawn...

...So we watch a hungry actor eager to get his first lead as he begins to strip down in order to demonstrate his qualifications as an even more ridiculous man when naked...

...A man going on to the battlefield says, "Hand me the bully beef...

...The modern theater has consistently attacked the values of its audiences...

...A good question...

...This does not mean that Weinstein could never have succeeded with his chosen method...

...They are intended primarily to bring about audience involvement or contact...

...To sit through it is about as rewarding as sitting through a sustained drum roll...

...Wilson's dialogue is spare and hard-centered...

...It's hardly necessary to add that he completes his undressing out of sight...

...Real feelings thus had to be reined in, muffled but not suppressed...

...If it's true, it's not new . . . It's boring, disorganized, inorganic, the writing and ideas are arbitrary . . . The psychic automatism of the '20s...

...The slightest is Robert Anderson's You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running (Ambassador), four unrelated playlets that illustrate how to be dirty while staying clean...

...If the operators who turn out those quick nudies could only get one of Anderson's female characters to disrobe, they would have a property to hand...

...To make them uncomfortable...

...Isn't it an extension of this aim when an actor comes off the stage, goes up the aisle, squeezes along the rows of seats and makes a spectator squirm by addressing him directly in front of all those strangers...

...The man also lies down on one bed with a strange girl to help her test its resilience...

...in the meantime, the director, Jacques Levy, gets up various pranks...

...When should we give experimenters like Shepard and Levy the benefit of the doubt...

...the production oppressed me as a waste of theatrical talent...

...He argues that women in Broadway audiences "are bored by this respectability that's been forced on them by prudish men," and that people should go to the theater as they go to "European art movies, to see Life...

...A director can afford to do this only if he already has a lot going for him, if he has earned the contact and can therefore get the performance back on track without going to a great deal of bother...

...What happens is that contact with the audience is not established but broken off, on two levels...

...We all agree with the message by now, have agreed for years, but have done nothing positive, and so deserve to be inflicted with La Turis-tas until we finally do something— less to check sterile progress than to check the recurrence of La Turista...