On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Beating the Boyg It is said that the late Mrs. Beaumont, for whom the Vivian Beaumont Theater is named, gave the originators of Lincoln Center a bad time before she...
...Beaumont's caprices look petty beside the hardships subsequently inflicted on directors by her monument...
...you reply, 'Better stained than empty,'" Brecht's Galileo shows himself no mercy, will permit no excuses...
...It's a great age," says Brecht's Galileo, "in which it's good to be alive...
...Two other productions I've seen failed to put the script across as either popular or highbrow theater...
...Estelle Parsons, as Galileo's daughter, is once again captivating to watch and listen to...
...But the regular members of the company, such as Robert Symonds and Ronald Weyand, show to better advantage than in previous appearances...
...Yet the audience clearly perceives that the spectacle clothes a good play, just as the ostentatious trappings are imposed on a sound, geometrical set...
...Later he is awed by the zeal of the Church in safeguarding the literate world's intellectual chastity...
...Modestly he allows the words to carry their own weight...
...The costume designer, James Hart Stearns, introduces animal masks, blindingly got-up clerical regalia, and gold lame dresses by the specie-ton...
...As the pontifical garments are placed on him and he becomes more and more the office of the Pope and less and less the man, he is gradually swayed by the Cardinal's arguments...
...One exercise in dramatic crescendo takes place in an apartment of the Vatican...
...For Brecht, as for Shaw, history was a contemporary matter...
...And yet, as Galileo said of the earth, it moves...
...Throughout the scene, in fact, he plays a glittering moon to Quayle's sun, always reflecting back the play's importance to its center...
...He has marched head-on into the obstacle and conquered it...
...He is the man of reason, meaning in our jargon, a "realist," meaning in anybody's language an equivocator...
...Most of the productions so far have slunk forward into the auditorium...
...He is discredited because "I betrayed my profession...
...Scientific progress elsewhere was retarded by Galileo's loss of nerve...
...The lives of Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes signify the birth pangs...
...Hirsch sometimes leans toward secondhand business ?washing, dressing, cleaning????to provide the text with an accompaniment of activity...
...Robin Wagner's scaffoldwork of 26 golden cages, into which footmen periodically ascend to pose with candelabra, meets the rest of the interior on its own terms by outshining its vulgarity...
...Hirsch must be a romantic...
...He saw that people don't change much, haven't changed much from what their ancestors were, and that is a cause for disappointment...
...Our pragmatic time, in which scholars contend for defense appropriations and artists announce, "I did it for money," forbids us to grudge Galileo his vindication by history...
...He will recant in order to survive...
...he must finish writing the Discorsi...
...the computerized machinery, enough to lift the Chase Manhattan Building off its dedication plaque...
...Urban is a liberal and a friend of the scientist...
...his eyeballs don't pop out...
...It wouldn't be so bad if they'd only grown worse...
...Astronomical equipment of fascinating complexity and (no doubt) antique worth keeps settling in view...
...He has a bit of a stoop, a bit of a shuffle, and a pleasantly nasal voice...
...Quayle's galileo is a professional success, not markedly different in character from his Tam-burlaine under Tyrone Guthrie, his several Shakespearean studies, or his parts in recent movies and television, but never uninteresting...
...and the seat upholstery that glows whorehouse-red even when the lights are down...
...The romantic notion of a past in which men were governed by ideals and principles is flayed in Galileo, as it is in Caesar and Cleopatra...
...That appeal happens to be one source of the play's softness...
...he turns it into distances, and this, perhaps, is all it can serve as????visibly empty space...
...It may be that he was less than sincere in his protestations about Galileo's shortcomings...
...Brecht's assertions sound wise almost to the pitch of epigrams when they are not laboriously inflected...
...the play reminds us that Descartes has put aside his work after hearing of Galileo's recantation before the Inquisition...
...Beaumont, for whom the Vivian Beaumont Theater is named, gave the originators of Lincoln Center a bad time before she coughed up all the necessary funds...
...Voskovec begins the scene bare from the waist up...
...the dangerously heavy black metal screens...
...his voice doesn't rise or sink dramatically...
...The production, if no masterpiece, is a coordinated, slap-up showpiece which lends the term "non-profit theater" a tantalizing new connotation...
...Galileo at first feels excited, even exalted, by the possibilities hinted at when the telescope opens up the heavens...
...In vain...
...The New Age...
...He moves his right hand about three inches...
...at least, we'd have something worthwhile to look back on, to model ourselves on...
...Colored backdrops, a glorious old map of Florence, and ornate insignia glide down from the flies...
...Hirsch's interpretation catches the irony, the sorrow, and many of the rueful ambiguities in that classic statement of evasion, the advice given to Peer by the formless creature called the Boyg: When you are confronted with an obstacle, go around it...
...The pro tern acquisitions, Fred Stewart and Anthony Quayle, come off more than creditably...
...He knows how to wear a scruffy purple-gray cloak with a certain grandeur, how to draw attention to himself by standing still and doing nothing????and how to retain the attention...
...As it is, he enacts one of those phony "moments for all time" as if it is really happening...
...John Hirsch, on his second try here (the first was Yerma), uses it in Brecht's Galileo to show actors disappearing...
...Several actors ham insufferably, and Edgar Daniels as a splenetic cardinal agitates his false eyebrows so athletically that he seems to be talking through them...
...The directors have despairingly closed off that acreage to the rear...
...He resolves to trim his outward behavior, his scientific aspect, to the Church's requirements...
...George Voskovec as Pope Urban VIII is being prevailed upon by the Cardinal Inquisitor to let Galileo be tried for heresy...
...stained...
...the clump of forestages...
...With imperial contempt for regular banking hours, she would call to be driven to, and conducted around, the muddy site on a Sunday when the top names of the organization were reposing at their weekend retreats without any overshoes handy, or counting checks, or whatever else bankers do for a pastime...
...He peers into a telescope and sees that the moon is not giving out light but reflecting the sun's rays...
...And when Andrea Sarti remarks in the play, "We say, 'Your hands are...
...A third is the occasional lapse into that Hollywood shorthand, dignified but brusque, that Paul Muni used to toss out glibly: "Nothing from Descartes in Paris...
...Who could fail to love a genius who fears pain and looks out for himself...
...And as the present was in Peer Gynt...
...Exactly enough...
...The display-conscious audience applauds a procession that features a bronze head of Galileo on poles, masked figures, a dummy of the Duke of Florence seated on a chamber pot, a six-foot papier-mache nose (with a wart) supporting a pair of glasses, a dead goose, and a banner proclaiming "The New Age...
...Or, "This day, June 11, 1633, will go down in . . ." I don't want to imply that Galileo automatically succeeds????plays itself ????because it is crammed with the right ingredients and because its hero is a Very Decent Guy Under It All...
...Through his three versions of the play (Lincoln Center is using the second) Brecht strove increasingly to condemn Galileo for his cowardice...
...When he munches at a piece of dry poultry his Up sounds and facial demeanor seem, not copied from Charles Laughton's playing of the very ancient Henry VIII (older by a couple of decades than Henry lived to be) so much as a tribute to Laughton for having incarnated the first Galileo in English...
...All the architecture that money could buy went into the battlefield-sized, circular proscenium, much of it inaccessible without periscopes to spectators on the side aisles...
...In the Short Organum, too, Brecht wrote of Galileo's "charlatanism," repeated that he stole ideas from others...
...The fact remains that this play is built on a big, fallible human being who has cried out such unexceptionable sentiments as, "I must know the truth," and "Only as much of the truth gets through as we push through," and "I despise the man who doesn't use his brains to fill his stomach...
...For the playing area is fundamentally a slab of marble divided into squares and the cages hung behind it become at subdued moments a fretwork of functional, open platforms...
...His body doesn't stiffen...
...But by casting astutely and maintaining the situations vividly through each of the 13 scenes, Hirsch has struck two more blows at the Beaumont jinx...
...For the third time this season the outstanding performance is by Philip Bosco, although for the third time he has a part of limited scope...
...Either way, a director can anticipate and trade on popular appeal...
...And "Where belief has prevailed for a thousand years, now doubt prevails...
...Galileo, he tells us, would not have been tortured, only "shown the instruments...
...Like Bertolt Brecht himself, his Galileo grows steadily into a culture hero...
...Bosco might well have done a finer Galileo than Quayle's...
...The Revival of Learning gives difficult birth to Reason and Discovery which will eventually supplant their parent...
...It may be that Brecht a son insu created one of those stage types?Falstaff, Henry Higgins, Volpone?whose very defects gladden an audience's heart...
...A second source is its habit of putting on scientific demonstrations that resemble the documentaries on educational television, if not the lab bench in elementary school...
...But Mrs...
...his contemporaries shrank from publicizing their advances, while his own disciples deserted him...
Vol. 50 • April 1967 • No. 9
