The Cultural Con Game

...The meanness...

...Finally, there is Twelfth Night...

...Culture centers proliferate, foundations eagerly search out the latest trend-setters to reward with large checks, and festivals of various sorts festoon the spring and summer landscape...

...All of Chekov's characters repeat certain sentiments, almost in the manner of Wagnerian leitmotivs...

...Great theater, on the other hand, proceeds from artists who have gathered fellow creators and fused them for a common purpose...

...The casting was generally inane, resulting in many difficulties...

...These productions, with their empty pretense, their exploitation of lavish resources to so little purpose, have had a similar effect on what little remains of my soul...

...Yet director Michael Kahn somehow failed to recognize that the pattern of the drama must be regulated by the contrasting emotion with which almost identical speeches are uttered—an effusion of hope at one point, blank indifference at another, the nadir of despair toward the end...

...Today, we have lived to see the triumph of the means of production: The buildings are there, the actors are engaged, the publicity churns away—and what we get are sausages, one after the other, filled with sawdust...

...The perils faced by those wishing a relatively solid financial base for their dreams should not be lightly dismissed...

...Miss Collins is obviously not an actress, and since there are at least 10,000 unknown girls in New York who could have outshined her, it is difficult to regard her appearance as anything but a patent bid to cash in on her popularity...

...The last resource of uninspired Shakespearean direction is to transfer the whole kit and caboodle into another century, preferably one with quaint manners and colorful dress...

...The banality of it...

...But none of these are absolutely necessary...

...Ralp Waite waded into Orsino as if this Duke of Illyria were one of tv's second guns, and Sasha von Scherler, whom I praised earlier this year in the role of an urbane bitch (NL, April 14), unfortunately chose to repeat this performance as Olivia...

...Pinafore...

...Stacy Keach got along fairly well in the title role as a caricature businessman and burlesque prophet...

...but I looked as if I had read them...

...Banal music by Gait MacDermot, set to some of Shakespeare's most fragrant lyrics and sung out of tune by Charles Durning, do little to improve the occasion...

...All that could be forgiven if Dexter offered some fresh insight into the tragedy or treated us to marvels of fluent expression by the actors...

...Still, philanthropy does exist, the tax structure is what it is...

...A special word must be said about casting Judy Collins, the prominent folk singer, as Solveig...

...And the others did too, just as I did...

...If he is fortunate, his first ventures may be deemed at least "interesting" by the critical guardians of our civilization...

...In the triple role of Ingrid, Anitra, and the troll king's daughter, Olympia Dukasis made the astounding discovery that all these characters in a play by a 19th-century Norwegian are really from the Bronx...

...This very difficult task—the only one worth undertaking—is of course made easier and more gracious by sufficient financing, good organization, and a functionally designed setting...

...After we have portrayed it, you will return to the daylight with your lives changed, if ever so slightly, for we have made you see things you never dared imagine...

...What is essential is a man whose vision and underlying purpose can be transmitted on the stage with endlessly fertile variation...

...While Hamlet's speech in which Shakespeare took umbrage at the child actors rivaling his own company was explained to me in college...

...At its rarely achieved moments of glory, drama summons the community and proclaims: "Here is the mirror of the world in action...

...In other words, the money is there—and anyone who thinks up a likely con can walk away with his share of the swag...

...I never expected to hear it recited in the theater almost three centuries after the object of its wrath had disappeared...

...Miss Barrie, knowing that poetry must be anchored in reality, provides appropriate, controlled feeling to her lines...

...These black thoughts are prompted by four productions at the New York and Stratford, Connecticut, summer theater festivals that seemed to exist only because there was a blank in the schedule...

...in our perfectly designed society, organizations generally go to the organizers...

...one is often tiresome enough, but to have yet another mediocre comedian lavish a few half-understood puns on a weary audience reaches new heights of pedantry...

...There had already been two Hamlet's in New York during the regular season, and perhaps director John Dexter reasoned that his version would gain some distinction by having the actors enunciate every syllable to be scraped from the variorum edition...

...A large new building must be constructed, a permanent staff hired, actors engaged by the season, and expensive contracts signed with the unions...

...In a moment of despair, the doctor in The Three Sisters bursts out: 'Three days ago there was a conversation at the club, they were talking about Shakespeare, Voltaire . . .1 hadn't read them at all...

...There is no inner purpose—nothing to express, no soul?to all these endeavors...

...His actors, particularly Kate Reid as Masha, ran through their lines at one level of feeling, giving the impression that these people, far from being filled with all the colors of life, are simply repetitious bores...

...She performed so lethargically, with such flat, uninflected speech, that she could have been auditioning for a remake of / Walked with a Zombie...

...Papp obtains little but dim-witted tomfoolery from this switch, but he had a happier notion in casting Barbara Barrie as Viola...

...It weighed on my soul, crooked, foul, disgusting...

...and bureaucrats and politicians are eager to see their names ranked among the public-spirited...

...In addition, Robert Ronan as Malvolio found an amusing note to sound in the scene where the gloomy Puritan swells with expectation upon finding what he supposes is a declaration of love...

...ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger The Cultural Con Game While Republicans in Washington and patrons deflated by the current stock market are less generously inclined toward the arts than in the palmy days of LBJ, we have nonetheless reached an era of relatively munificent spending designed to encourage Uncle Sam's creative creatures...

...At this point, however, the would-be producer's troubles have only just begun...

...From the very first, it appeared that this question had been squarely avoided by Gerald Freedman, who seemed mainly concerned with various coups d'oeil and provoking the maximum number of cheap laughs...

...To be sure, all is not as easily done as said...

...I have to admit, though, that I didn't remember the second gravedigger...

...For having obtained the cash and called together his creative friends (along with a few cousins and pleasant-looking young things to help out in the office I. the cultural entrepreneur discovers that he must now produce...

...the staging plunked down one scene after another, with little flow...

...and the entire production was marked by inflated rhetoric instead of effective style...

...The resulting simplicity and accuracy of her playing is a continual delight...

...But we were subjected instead to Brian Bedford repeating Nicol Williamson's flattened diction without any of the inward fire, and to a lightweight Laertes partnering a baritone Ophelia in a monstrous mad scene...

...Although I did not anticipate any new delights in this third Hamlet, I did rather look forward to the New York festival's production of Ibsen's rarely staged Peer Cynt...

...now on view at the Delacorte Theater, which Joseph Papp has costumed and staged as if it were H.M.S...

...In reality, few of those afflicted by these cares seem to mind...

...Yet this is merely likely to compound his problems, since even modest success, while attracting additional resources, demands expanded facilities and ever greater activity...

...As long as such men have papers to shuffle, appointments to make and press conferences to call, they are rarely perturbed that the end product of all their endeavors is the tawdriest, fly-specked gimcrack...

...The principal riddle a director confronted with this fantasy must fathom is how to pull it into shape...

...She succeeded in wringing some laughter from the cloddish multitude, but there soon came a point when I wanted to wring her neck...

...For years we heard voices crying, "Give us the money and miracles will follow...

...There was a very good piece in the August 10 Sunday New York Times on the subtler flaws of Stratford's The Three Sisters...

...Yet too often even Miss Barrie's charm is obliterated by the generally insensitive performances of her partners...

...Soon, our wistful dreamer is the proprietor of a monster chewing up a steady diet of theatrical fare, which he cannot restrain for fear of falling behind in the frantic race for a further share of the public purse...

...The peasants specialized in skipping and jumping...

...His voice became choked and false, however, each time he stumbled on the lyricism Ibsen abundantly provided for Peer, and he never expounded the ordinary village loafer at the root of the character...

...I will therefore only remark upon the blatant fact that the sisters never seemed to belong to the same family, that they were all obviously older than Chekov intended, and that once again an American production of a classic play was given no shape...

...First, in point of time, was the Stratford Hamlet—all four hours of it...