On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Chekhov By Design The apa's new, old-fashioned production of The Cherry Orchard (Lyceum) avoids the haw-haw-haw, landed-gentry excesses of the Cheltenham-English style,...
...These cameos, different from anything else the actors have done, prove that the apa company has plenty of talent...
...The effect is a pictorial synopsis of Chekhov's dramatic art...
...although he does all in his power to stop the war, we know that when it comes he will fight with loyal fervor and earn himself some good episodes in the Iliad...
...This is a workmanlike, lachrymose job, directed by Eva Le Gallienne...
...it enjoys the further distinction of wearing not a stitch of sentimentality...
...The detailing of light on trees and separate blades of grass contrasts with a wash of warm pastel hues that change imperceptibly on the backdrop of the sky...
...He ignores the pleas of Troy's old men, who have fallen for Helen's thighs...
...It "used to promise me many kinds of virtue: goodness, generosity, and a contempt for anything base and mean...
...Giraudoux does not steal from the myth...
...He browbeats Helen until she agrees to go back to Sparta...
...His arms hang straight...
...It is five of the company's regular actors and its designer, however, who lend the performance its zest and humor by puncturing Miss Le Gallienne's "Chekhovian moodiness...
...Here I must put in a few words of appreciation for James Tilton, whose sets are too often overlooked in the futile squabbles over whether the apa is "our best" repertory company (it is, literally, the only repertory company of consequence in and around New York...
...Miss Sands fits it magnificently, but finds it cool for prophesying in and soon adopts a bathrobe...
...It is an unforced portrait of the ridiculous chivalry Chekhov admired and twitted at the same time...
...its dance and festivity that intrude on the play's somber theme, the sale of the estate...
...He keeps clusters of actors standing about in elegant compositions...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Chekhov By Design The apa's new, old-fashioned production of The Cherry Orchard (Lyceum) avoids the haw-haw-haw, landed-gentry excesses of the Cheltenham-English style, but also, regrettably, turns away in embarrassment from the sardonic comedy Chekhov saw in "life as it is...
...He debates with Ulysses, and is defeated, though Ulysses is touched by seeing that Andromache's eyelashes bat the same way Penelope's do...
...from outside the shutters are pushed to...
...He overcomes Demokos, the local rabble-rousing poet, and finally kills him...
...The others have left him behind by accident...
...The room loses everybody...
...There will after all be a Trojan War for Homer to write about...
...Tilton has consummately rediscovered the look of it...
...its implication that anybody can (and probably will) spy on anybody else...
...In a play that spits out mouthfuls of epigrams and does not always respect the boundary between wit and euphuism, Bosco simply talks with utter conviction...
...The play ends with a variation on The King is dead...
...Philip Bosco does not make this task an excuse for brass rhetoric or histrionics...
...Firs edges in...
...Truscott: I can't allow that...
...Tilton hints at the spaciousness of the entire ground floor, yet copes with the difficult requirements of this act: its intimate colloquies...
...Moffat sets one conclusion against the other by making Lopahin beguiling and ambitious, an unintentional villain...
...He accepts a slap from Greece's Primo Camera, Ajax...
...After the play has run its course from a sunrise in May to an Indian summer in October, has he forced them out of their rut or thrown them into confusion...
...Sloane...
...The playwright was himself a professional diplomat for most of his working life...
...The plotline of Tiger at the Gates (Vivian Beaumont) is a forestalling of the Trojan War, made suspenseful by Hector's ingenuity in keeping the inevitable at bay-—for a couple of hours, Giraudoux's scenes amount to a series of increasingly frantic negotiations...
...After thus succeeding every precarious inch of the way, Hector fails...
...He bribes a neutral lawyer and gets a friendly construction put on the Greeks' insults to Troy...
...It would be spooky if they batted—or as Christopher Fry's translation has it, "danced"—differently, say from side to side...
...They also prove?if proof is still needed—that there is no such thing as ensemble acting, only good actors who know how to take as well as give, and bad actors who do not...
...For The Cherry Orchard he has created two interiors and an outdoor scene on the apron stage and lighted them cunningly, so as to draw from them a fund of environmental coloring and strength...
...Jennifer West as Helen looks like a refugee from Dinner at Eight...
...In the second act he shows us a strip of park land by a stream, under a declining midsummer sun...
...The most accomplished all-rounder of the troupe, Sydney Walker, gives the impoverished landowner Pishtchik more substance than I have seen in the part before...
...This is the ineffable ending of Chekhov's play and his life's work...
...In act three the drawing room, a narrow forestage partly curtained off, gives on to the ballroom and hallway...
...Then he laughs to find himself still alive...
...Hector has been an outstanding soldier...
...a nurse who has killed off her seven husbands in as many years...
...As the 87-year-old retainer Firs, Clayton Corzatte comes on and goes off so slowly that, rather than moving, he seems to be resisting movement...
...All the sounds of war combined to make me think it was something noble...
...In act one he has the best moment of the evening...
...bands of light poke through and paint the walls and floor with an irregular pattern of transparent yellow, lowering the visual temperature even further and making the nursery into an abandoned cell...
...Keene Curtis (Epihodov) stumbles after her, stools entangling themselves in his ankles, passion spurting from his heart, and six strands of hair flattened across his bald head like feeble messages spaced out on a sheet of paper...
...He understood that negotiations take place between personalities, not between relative power positions...
...long live the King: "The Trojan poet is dead...
...He stands still...
...One notices now the cold blue tiling of the fireplace and the pale blue and white stripes of the wallpaper, warning of the onset of winter...
...the Greek poet has the word...
...There is a touch of mischief in Iilt acting that becomes the part and would have enhanced her Saint Joan...
...But Loot is a funnier play than Orton's Entertaining Mr...
...Tilton's designs for Pantagleize and Exit the King earlier in the season added to the evidence of his growth as a modeler of space...
...At times Loot, like the current rash of "wild" Hollywood movies, could use a whiff of fantasy to make it something more than a series of gags and realistic mishaps...
...He lies on the sofa in front of a packing case and, as he falls asleep, or dies, his stick drops to the floor...
...Previously Hector was susceptible to war's seductiveness...
...he stays clear of the usual shorthand for senility—quavering speech and hand oscillations—and finds a dignified, piping form of address that travels in circles about his head and disappears again inside him...
...The late Joe Orton's Loot (Bilt-more) is more or less that: a sprinkle of barbs filched from 19th-century farce...
...Uta Hagen has been recruited for the role of Mme...
...And his Hector is a big, resourceful personality...
...Ranevskaya and Nancy Walker for the governess, Charlotta Ivanovna...
...McLeavy: I'll take the consequences...
...The weight of the play, like that of the war, falls on Hector...
...His head hardly moves...
...Lopahin is a mixed blessing to the family he evicts...
...and the corpse of Mrs...
...By the tenth time around, who cares...
...But even in this sequence we may give Hector credit for picking a wife with Penelope-like eyelashes...
...As Dunyasha, the chambermaid with aristocratic aspirations, Patricia Conolly murmurs, "I've become so refined," and twirls about the stage giddy with self-love as she gazes at her white hand...
...McLeavy with its entrails removed and its artificial eyeballs insecurely socketed—this homey parlor is invaded by a police detective, Truscott by name, a travesty on those masterminds of pulp fiction who know absolutely everything but the outcome of the plot...
...Anthony Quayle's direction has a weak hold on the Lincoln Center troupe...
...It is impossible not to listen to him...
...The nursery of act four is the set of act one stripped of its furniture...
...Outside, the axes begin their destruction of the orchard, as though Firs' stick had been the first stricken tree...
...He snatches a box of pills from Ranevskaya to save her from medicinal harm, bolts the lot down, tips a glass of kvass down his gullet, and waits...
...He plays off it...
...His cast of popeyed, open-throated comedians, led by George Rose (Truscott) and Liam Redmond (McLeavy) expertly handle the corpse, its casket, the stolen cash and one another...
...Cassandra (Diana Sands) appears in a bikini...
...A British household consisting of a Catholic gentleman named McLeavy who has seen Paradise, but only in a photograph...
...Derek Goldby has orchestrated, maybe computerized, the thousands upon thousands of entrances and exits...
...Their tips are envenomed but not too dangerous as they glance off such resistant targets as greed, religious ceremony, police venality and the all-time favorite, hypocrisy...
...But it is hard to resist a script in which exchanges like the following one take place: Truscott: Do as you're told or take the consequences...
...Donald Moffat plays the peasant-born tycoon Lopahin in GBS whiskers, and with a warmth and flourish that do not explain the man away...
...his son who is a bank robber and hopes some day to run a three-star brothel called The Kingdom Come...
...Orton slips in and out of melodrama, mostly to kid it, yet the melodrama remains, and remains trite...
...He also dwells at length on matters that hardly need emphasis, whether for example, Truscott is or is not an official of the Metropolitan Water Board...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
