On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By A Ibert Bermel The Pity of It All The evocation of pity has led to so many playwriting sins and misdemeanors that I refuse to believe Aristotle ever put it on a par with terror, that...
...Exit the King brushes against tragedy only during one brief passage in which lonesco implies that the tragic hero reaches the nadir of disaster when he realizes the world will live on without him...
...Harold Gary, by digesting it with care and relish, steals the evening...
...Miller has given this trio of cardboard and string a character to react to, a Jewish furniture dealer of 89 with a ripe, fantastic sense of humor...
...In The Price (Morosco) Walter Franz, a rich surgeon, asks his brother Victor, "We don't understand each other, do we...
...Pity is hardly in order...
...I. for one...
...Victor, a cop for 28 years, has been "trying for so long to get started on something new, to feel some kind of push in my back...
...Victor's wife Esther hopes "some crazy kind of forgiveness will come, and lift up everyone...
...Yet Jay Allen's adaptation of the novel by Muriel Spark is full of creaky devices: flashbacks, mildly blue jokes put into schoolgirls' mouths, long-winded sentences to stand in for wit...
...During that time he plays the monarch of a shrinking realm, Prometheus...
...Or possibly Aristotle gave pity some special definition that has not filtered down with the defective manuscript of the Poetics...
...her Scottish dialect comes and goes...
...It may be more accurate to say that Miss Caldwell throws herself away...
...For the sake of "theatricality" he keeps an unnecessary four-piece band wedged into a corner of the stage and brings each actor forward to acknowledge it coyly and to hand the audience a lengthy soliloquy...
...The vicar huddles himself around his pipe...
...In the case of Eugene lonesco the answer evidently is Yes...
...A quiet terror begins to transmit itself...
...The implications of this word-sorting, and of this story of two fiftyish and?again—lonely homosexuals, are that we're all substantively the same person, only our hormones are a bit scrambled...
...Kate Reid (Esther), Pat Hingle (Victor), and Ulu Grosbard, the director, do not fail the play...
...At the end he deserts Sheila and the child after pretending to leave the house for a minute...
...When she steps forward she leads with one mock-seductive shoulder, swings the other after it, points her toes outward, and holds her body almost as bent as a wall bracket...
...Stockmann holding out against a hostile community, except that he lacked the comic flaws of Ibsen's character...
...Harry and Charlie fence lightly, nicking each other with insults...
...While Harry was saying, "It's a terrible thing not to be necessary," and Charlie was trying to cheer Harry up with a compliment?You're a beautiful old stick, love"—I kept hoping Monday morning would dawn and bring in a customer or two...
...Band-aids would be more useful...
...She turns a potentially false character into a grotesquely false exercise, wooing the auditorium with a caricatured walk, voice and pose...
...and a laboriously worked-out betrayal...
...If I revisited The Price, however, it would be to watch Arthur Kennedy as Walter...
...Charles Dyer, who wrote Staircase (Biltmore), has conferred his own name on the first of his two characters, and made an anagram of it, Harry C. Leeds, for the second...
...As a father, I went to A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Brooks Atkinson) tentatively prepared to cry my taps dry...
...Ellis Rabb's direction and Rouben Ter-Arutunian's set of black curtains behind sheets of saran wrap do not hamper him...
...No such contradiction inheres in most modern plays...
...The sketches are interspersed with entertaining jokes in bad taste, like the one about an ex-major whose wife could not have a baby...
...Their quasi-tragedies entreat us to show mushy sympathy for lonely, desperately misunderstood outcasts who are just like everybody else and have a mother to prove it...
...The Church of England is a swinging scene now," he explains...
...He reveals the character's affable exterior and selfish core with equally formidable power, and arouses a dread that is untainted by pity...
...By then, though, the character is reaching out for pity and it is too late...
...Lessing thought the pity and terror of tragedy were inseparable, parts of a single, mixed emotion...
...The action, one day (the last) in the death of a marriage, is suspended between two matching scenes...
...He would also like to win Sheila and Brian over as converts...
...Richard Easton...
...It's where the action is...
...Pity him...
...A pity...
...Arthur Miller specializes in pitiful figures...
...On learning that he was sub-fertile, he protested, "I was in the Normandy landings...
...The role of the old man is an acting plum...
...His vaguely autobiographical hero Berenger has been the occasion of this decline...
...After the betrayal Miss Brodie breaks down and Miss Caldwell's sincere instincts take over from her showing off...
...The two good actors involved...
...Since his early antiplavs, lonesco has slid down from the peaks of laughter and terror into the swamp of self-pity...
...Albert Finney as Brian is not at ease in some of his impersonations, but he puts his strength where it needs to be, in the rueful intimate dialogues with his wife and his monologues with the child...
...Eli Wallach looks elegant as Charlie, but his small voice often gets lost and his accent is less that of a Londoner than of an American who visits England regularly, goes to a different spot each time, and comes back with a few more re-gionalisms in his collection...
...But the play does: it dies long before the King...
...we might, for example, feel compassion for a stage hero because he inspired terror in us...
...had become engrossed in the mechanics of Jo Mielziner's scenery—desks and tables that hydraulically rose and sank and muted paintings projected on a mysterious, neutrally colored cyclorama...
...Miller means him, I gather, to be a symbolic reincarnation of Walter's and Victor's father...
...An author who tries to draw on it has contempt for his characters...
...At the beginning Brian, who is a schoolteacher, tells his pupils to wait for him...
...Just as Victor sacrificed his future by staying at home to take care of dad while Walter heartlessly walked off to make a career for himself, so Victor accepts the old dealer, lets him sit in the father's chair, and sells him the family property at a "sacrifice" price, while Walter departs again...
...But pity is disgusting and patronizing...
...This is a contradiction...
...he leaves them sitting in the classroom indefinitely...
...it therefore seems plausible...
...No crazy kind of forgiveness comes...
...Some of these moments are all the more effective for being dissolved in laughter, for Joe Egg is, surprisingly, an excellent comedy...
...Her lines sound like a bull mastiff's barks...
...Kennedy's crispness of gesture and speech lends dignity to the pulp realism of his lines and makes the play seem greater than the sum of its parts...
...In The Killer Berenger attacked conformity and got knifed after the curtain fell...
...What could induce tears more naturally, more justifiably, than the plight of a young British couple whose only child is an inert spastic...
...Oedipus, all artists, all inventors, Everyman, and finally, nobody...
...But Peter Nichols, the author, and his director, Michael Blakemore, work like fury against this sentimental conception...
...they make up...
...Dyer has contrived some of the more amusing invective since John Osborne's heyday, but his writing consists of little else...
...In Rhinoceros he became a Dr...
...I demand a recount...
...Perhaps the word pitv was a mistranslation, or a sop to the Athenian censor, a way of slipping terror past him...
...Rather, they fail to free themselves from its sticky confines...
...One can picture Jean-Louis Bar-rault in the original production at the Odeon, unloosing all his acrobatic resources to totter, tumble, mumble, mime, agonize—to sketch a minutely graduated frieze of Death's progress...
...Sheila replies, "My husband believes in his own God, a sort of manic-depressive rugby footballer...
...In one sketch Brian plays a vicar who will make a stab at performing a miracle on the child...
...In ?.i7i' the King Berenger is pursued by Death and captured after 90 minutes of flaccid resistance...
...Finney at full strength for two-thirds of a performance means the finest acting in New York for years...
...He is stoutly encouraged by Eva Le Gallienne and Patricia Conolly as Berengcr's two queens...
...Well," he says bravely, "it's a start...
...The authors let terror go by the board...
...The three of them merely riffle through their memories for old mistakes...
...As exposition the soliloquies seem apologetic, particularly since Nichols handles his other expository material expertly by writing in sketches from the past for the husband and wife, Brian and Sheila, to re-enact and color with satire...
...The set is a barber shop, closed for the weekend...
...He dies unloved...
...Would he want spectators to pity him...
...As the Pedestrian in the Air he was the great author who sought to float away from oppressive fame...
...in the apa staging (Lyceum), goes at the role with a will...
...Fortunately for the play...
...But behind its games and banter the play has sinew...
...Nichols is not altogether confident of his gifts...
...Other names mentioned in the play 32 The New Leadet are shufflings of the same letters (Ed Chrysler, for instance, but what happened to the A here...
...they go into another bout of skin wounds and another reconciliation...
...That such a woman would make an hypnotic, lifelong impression on her pupils, as the play sets out to demonstrate, is unlikely...
...A contest between writer and theme inevitably kicks off big moments...
...Its triangular main plot is an ugly rivalry—as Brian imagines it—between himself and his helpless daughter for Sheila's love: At one point he carries the girl out into the winter night hoping to freeze her to death...
...At the Helen Hayes Theater The Prime of Miss Jean Broilie touches on a dramatic notion, that an ultra-romantic temperament is easily beguiled by fascism...
...Douglas Watson and Zoe Caldwell, are thrown away...
...they would probably be inclined to laugh at her even more than the audience does...
...ON STAGE By A Ibert Bermel The Pity of It All The evocation of pity has led to so many playwriting sins and misdemeanors that I refuse to believe Aristotle ever put it on a par with terror, that grand and ennobling sensation...
...Milo O'Shea as Harry, the "wife," is continually, delightfully, in character...
Vol. 51 • February 1968 • No. 5
