On Stage

...Men are not great poets because they fight with their wives, and to suggest, as Gibson seems to be doing, that anyone with these mundane problems shares with William Shakespeare something vital to the genesis of great literature, just won't do...

...Will is our old friend, the Poet at the Picnic, immersed in deep thoughts of life and death while the rest of the world goes on about its business and pleasure, heedless of the Meaning of It All...

...In fact, McNally is at his worst when he goes looking for something significant to say, as he does toward the end of Witness...

...Naturally, such a state of affairs causes the poet great pain, and he finds it difficult to get up in the morning and go to work at his old man's tannery...

...Will's wife, in particular, is given to such locutions as: "It's now what I'm wanting to say...

...There is a genuinely funny bit of business as the window washer tells the salesman his philosophy of life (this time admittedly banal) and the salesman by grunts, groans and gestures tries to explain that he wants to be untied...

...In Terence McNally's two one-act plays, Sweet Eros and Witness, currently ensconced at the Gramercy Arts Theater, the leading characters are also hugely distressed, but they turn to violence for relief from their misery...

...We want the play...

...They quarrel all evening long...

...ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Sensitivity and New York Actors When three poachers gamboled out on to the stage of Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater and one of them paused to address a few words to the moon, I thought I knew which one was the poet...

...His performance adds nothing to our knowledge of the world, yet it is thrilling in its mastery of a wide range of expression...

...Witness promises to be a genuinely entertaining romp before McNally's attempts at social generalization obtrude...

...Unfortunately, I was right on both counts...

...James Coco plays the window washer as a triumph of working-class condition and mental oblivion...

...At the curtain we find a middle-aged man again tied to a chair, loud opera music blaring on the hi-fi, and an engaging young fellow, portrayed by Joe Ponazecki, telling him that he didn't want to hurt him with that karate chop...

...Well, it's happy news and I'm grateful for it...

...no matter how sensitive, nor will I concede that the extremely explicit sex-talk between Will and Anne could have occurred between husband and wife in an England whose morality was still predominately medieval...

...These same good people at other times sound as if there had been a wholesale emigration of Irish to Stratford...

...The man in the chair (an encyclopedia salesman) and his attacker are soon joined by a window washer who clambers in off the ledge to use the John, and assumes the others are engaged in some sort of strange erotic byplay which it is against his principles to interfere with...

...And aside from a few unintelligible moans from Will concerning what we arc all doing here, and what it will all come to, they sound pretty much like other husbands and wives who perpetually disagree...

...In Gibson's A Cry of Players a character rather coyly named Will (who knows an actor named Kemp, is married to a girl named Anne, lives in the 16th century, hears some lines of Marlowe recited by a traveling troupe of actors, and thus seems to bear some slight resemblance to Shakespeare) is having domestic difficulties, to put it mildly...

...And when the lusty country folk are called upon to sing, they strike up something resembling an Israeli folk song to a few strums on the guitar...

...Nor is the idea of the poet as rebel exactly echt 16th century...

...Dressing the actors up in costumes (which come off rather well) does not disguise the fact that this is the same old turkey about the sensitive lad who leaves home to create Art in the big city because he is discouraged by the drab life of the surrounding rubes...

...This aura of light promotes a pastoral quality that suits Drivas' strange wooing of the girl...

...Coco projects an array of working-class attitudes and scores with every one of them...

...The pattern, while it fits Sherwood Anderson or Thomas Wolfe (and possibly Gibson), is simply not appropriate to Shakespeare...

...It is not surprising that Gibson should want to write about the artist misunderstood by his middle-class family, but it is annoying for him to assume that you have to be peculiarly sensitive to be bothered by the jars of domesticity and that this sensitivity somehow proves you a superior being, set apart and above the uncouth rabble who presumably don't mind those screaming kids and yelling wives...

...McNally's plays are largely empty twaddle, but he does have the knack of writing actable stuff...

...The hero of Sweet Eros is a boor who ties a girl to a chair and then proceeds to regale her with his banal philosophy and an account of his past amours...

...The trouble is that it seems more a way of getting off stage fast, and giving the audience the sensation that it has seen something very sad and very deep, than a valid comment...

...He's wanted for the teaching...

...I remember seeing, a few years back, a rendition of Danton's Death, Buchner's wonderfully poetic, yet solid, evocation of the French Revolution, and being so disgusted with the shambling dolt the leading actor made of Danton that I became quite impatient for Robespierre and St...

...Now I suppose there are people who revel in the sound of a couple arguing, making the same points over and over and over, but I am not one of them...

...I have difficulty, too, in accepting the quite arbitrary and inconsistent England that Gibson and his partner in crime, director Gene Frankel, summoned before our eyes through all the magic of the theater...

...Just to dispatch him...

...When the phone rings, a girl is on the other end taking a survey for a Presidential commission, asking whether everybody is happy...

...if you do not try to puzzle out what it all means (for it means little), the evening is a pleasant and at times exhilirating experience...

...I am reminded more of hippies outside a film festival than of the citizens of Elizabethan England...

...This is the kind of material New York actors know how to bring to life...

...These elements of standard farce, of people at cross-purposes refusing to understand each other, are very well done by Coco, and when the play becomes serious (the young man is trying to assassinate the President) he turns from playful boozi-ness to a harshly bitter portrait of a man who knows that life has given him nothing and never will...

...There he promotes an apocalypse that is undeniably a critique of our society...

...Coco's is only the brightest of an evening of fine performances, and the production proves, if nothing else, how much this ramshackle stuff benefits from disciplined actors under the firm control of a director like Larry Arrick...

...His real violence as he sweeps all of Western culture from the young man's bookshelves and finally decks him, contrasts nicely with the young man's merely philosophical despair...

...Hardly an ideal solution, yet it does lead to purposeful actvity...

...Now the bars are full of men who prove otherwise, and the welfare agencies deal with quantities of women whose husbands were not poets but who nevertheless left them for approximately the same reason that our Willie eventually trots off to London after the players...

...There are also people who regard a fellow like Will who flings marigolds around the kitchen and tells silly stories to his children instead of saying Yes or No to the prospect of gainful employment as a schoolmaster, as somehow superior to us working slobs, but I won't buy that proposition either...

...But Robert Drivas gives dimension and depth to his talkative rapist in the gently hesitant way he tells his tale of erotic woe, in the scorn that fills his voice as he spits out a letter from his victim to her boy friend, and in the stammers that betray his superficial calm as he tries to get the girl interested in him...

...A general slaughter is frequently merely a cheap tactic for resolving a situation the author might better have left unresolved...

...The play further gains by being set not in the cottage room the script calls for, but in a constantly alternating projection of light, tending toward muted golds, reds and blues, which plays over and is reflected by a sculptured shape placed behind the acting area...

...The extent to which any evening in the theater is in the hands of the actors is often frustrating to writers...

...Here, however, this iron rule of the theater works to our advantage...

...When Will protests a local magistrate's ruling driving the players from town, satirizes him in some atrocious doggerel, and then sets his fellow townsmen to chanting, "We want the play...

...In short, Gibson's play is more relevant to the early 20th century than to the English Renaissance...

...He provides opportunities for actors who can use a tone of voice to imply a certain view of life, make a gesture that defines an attitude, employ a controlled rhythm of speech to suggest a character's past and future, and relate to other actors and objects...

...And a few moments later, when the same gentleman urinated into an empty wine bottle and the contents ended up in someone else's face, I imagined I had some notion of William Gibson's taste in humor...

...Anne Bancroft copes with this dialogue with a muted stage-Irish when she is not giving her celebrated impression of a New York shrew...

...The situations in both plays are preposterous, and they fail to express any deeper truth about our condition...

...I do not think it probable that the Freudian business of Will treating his older wife as a mother-figure would have been given verbal expression by any poet of that era...

...This annoys his wife...

...they quarrel about it, and about Will's successful passes at the wench down at the local bar...