Irish and Indians
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
On Stage IRISH AND INDIANS BY HENRY A. ZEIGER A A. JLctors are the lifeblood of the theater. We occasionally see an "interesting" new play or a revered masterpiece, but the memorable...
...No matter how you look at it, I'm just not a Comanche...
...She is so intense, however, so determined to wring the full measure of passion from every portion of the drama, that she often made me uncomfortable...
...Playing the father, he is waiting with Michael's wife for the outcome of the Carney brothers' battle with another fighting clan...
...For instance, one scene finds Buffalo Bill, after shooting 100 buffalo for a Russian Grand Duke, first discussing the matter with an Indian, then standing by while the Duke takes a pot shot into the dark and kills the brave...
...That would not excuse any crimes, but would make them the acts of men, not the grotesque charades of puppets...
...Yet the absence of structure is not the sole merit Barnes finds in Indians, although its other qualities must be inferred from his discourse, for aside from adjectives like "beautiful," they are never defined...
...my mother, part Cherokee, part Crow...
...There is enough incident along the way to keep the battle brewing, and I would only quarrel with the conclusion, which seems intended more as a big curtain than an illuminating resolution of the strife...
...In an unsteady vehicle like Saunders' play, she should not rush quite this hard at some of his fey lines, and instead strive for variety and a sense of architecture that would allow her to work at a less demanding level...
...The strong blood ties that are the vital emotional network of the family drama have been so mitigated in this country that only a hack or a country boy would pursue the genre...
...but because Michael's conflict is more blatantly stated by the dramatist, there is not the same opportunity here for subtle analysis that is available to Elliott and Cioffi...
...Elliott glowers and his tones become harsh as he asks her whether she thinks her husband is "great," declaring that he himself does not...
...He knows we done them Injuns wrong, and who are you to argue with history...
...Of course, actresses with as much potential as Miss Houghton appears to possess have frequently been devoured by those twin monsters, television and movies, and it is probably foolish to hope she will avoid this fate...
...Murphy, an Irishman, still has in his bones a culture in which the family is all-important, although it feels the pull of urban civilization...
...Such cohesion is seldom attained in the theater...
...It's the old guilt game...
...Nevertheless, a director can only establish the conditions necessary for the actor's art to flourish...
...Kopit's play diminishes a tragic event...
...Kopit's play explains why...
...The author has provided the proper instrument for unleashing this energy...
...And for this, they alone are responsible (although Brown must certainly have helped them achieve a creative state that could allow the release of their feelings...
...But his rambling conversation has a point...
...and Tom Atkins is properly befuddled and hesitant as the youngest member of the family...
...An American would have great difficulty working along these lines...
...We occasionally see an "interesting" new play or a revered masterpiece, but the memorable accomplishments of the past decade have been a dozen or so masterful performances...
...Just when I am ready to concede that the theater has had its day, that some form of electronic manipulation is the art of the future, an actor takes the stage and recaptures my faith...
...Ultimately, I felt that the cheap showman was not Buffalo Bill but Arthur Kopit, who, with director Gene Frankel, saw the history of the American Indian as merely a convenient legend to manipulate for quick tears and easy laughter...
...This gimmicky toying with profundity, a la Thornton Wilder, occurs mainly in the first and third acts, while the middle section concerns the events that led to the young lady's suicide...
...The author quickly sounds his themes, then deepens them in the course of the action, bringing out with humor and compassion the multifold meanings the conflict evokes in various members of the family...
...My father was a Sioux...
...for he gives us an ensemble with no loose ends, something far rarer than a superlative performance from one member of a company...
...Kopit has realized in greasepaint what we have all been saying in print, that nowadays a play does not have to have those linear guidelines of a beginning, a middle and an end...
...Yet I doubt that Murphy was conscious of trodding a well-worn path...
...I think I see what Barnes is driving at when he compares General Custer to Hermann Goering and declares: "Mr...
...The lights change color, grow vague...
...She might also strive to lose her finishing-school drawl and a habitual smirk -both decided limitations...
...The implication of Kopit's dumb show is that the Indians were slaughtered for our sport, as a gratuitous act of cruelty...
...Clive Barnes, that crafty prophet of the new, has candidly informed us in his Times review that we would not be "intelligent New York theater-goerfs]" if we do not see Kopit's epic and then wander shaken into the night...
...Not everyone will welcome the explanation...
...Elliott and Cioffi (and, to a lesser degree, others), far more than simply delivering cues and going where they are told, have given us the inner dynamics of their parts, the rumbles of emotion that supply a continual tension in their every accent and gesture...
...Brown has sustained a common style...
...And that, I guess, is a little coarse...
...And Barnes reinforces his point by stating: "The protagonist is Buffalo Bill-whom Mr...
...nowhere else can she satisfy whatever demons have driven her to her present state of development...
...McGuire gives sufficient body to Michael Carney to turn a seemingly wishy-washy character into a tormented one...
...We suddenly understand that a character we have been led to view as smugly cynical uses his tough talk to conceal an aborted compassion for all things scorned and rejected...
...wonder, though, if Kopit does not achieve far too little in the creation of dramatic images (whether consistent or inconsistent) to effect a successful purgation...
...Kopit's purpose is to tell us about our Indians...
...And Miss Houghton, in her agony, cries real tears, an ability I always marvel at...
...Elliott enhances our respect for humanity by convincing us that there is much stuff in a rather ordinary specimen...
...c ^^^ioffi's finest moment comes later in the act...
...When he finishes, Elliott (who, you will remember, had been vocalizing earlier) starts singing an Irish ballad of abandonment and exile, abruptly transforming the resentment of a despised people into poetry...
...for an actor the maxim might be reversed...
...Still, for what it is worth, I should like to insist that her gifts can only be brought to fruition on the stage...
...All movement arrested...
...A play does not have to present a consistent mood, or even a consistent viewpoint...
...Take, for example, Elliott's superb scene at the start of the third act...
...Again, the actor persuades us of depths beneath a surface he previously established...
...his brothers, in turn, consider him a "jibber" (coward) and the gentry he emulates "smiling shams" (hypocrites...
...The stages of this mutation are beautifully rendered...
...Buffoonery and pathos can be mixed, but only if first properly created...
...The situations glanced over are predictable, but the fact that she is able to convincingly transform herself from a radiantly happy girl in the first transports of young love, to someone quite miserable, confronting "the dark night of th~ soul," is very much to her credit...
...There's a tragic image for you...
...Throughout the play he has been a blunt strongarm man, yet hinting all the while that something else smoldered inside...
...The play itself is a sticky affair, the capricious, philosophical musings of some characters directed at a girl who is attending her own funeral, filled with a superfluity of cute remarks about death...
...Kopit, instead of making this vivid, simply skitters along the surface, reiterating that we were wrong, while they were magnificent-and planting juvenile gags among the corpses...
...The conflict in A Whistle in the Dark occurs in a divided household, and if that sounds familiar, so is the play's technique...
...Suddenly, Elliott snarls against those who are "smart, smart" (we are not sure whether this means his son or the whole of respectable society) and growls " I hate...
...In fact, this is the very situation of his pivotal character, Michael Carney, the eldest son in a clan of blackguards using their muscle to snatch a living from others even less fortunate...
...The father, who keeps repeating throughout the play "I am a proud man," knows he is an abject clown...
...Barnes presumably finds in this and s'milar incidents "the freedoms of dramatic forms [the play] grandiloquently permits itself, [which] extend our theater...
...Art is long and life is short," the old saw has it...
...he may be doing something, but it is unrelated to the dominant mood...
...Anthony Palmer and Don Plumley are convincing as the plainly brutal brothers...
...then, filled with self-pity, whimpers "I wish I were out of all this...
...To have drawn a picture so deeply felt, he must have imagined himself revealing his truth for the first time?and in a sense he has, for if his structure is ordinary, the play contains enough color and variation to resuscitate an old formula...
...On this foundation, the actors produce unexpectedly deep art...
...Miss Houghton has one monologue where she runs quickly through the course of an unhappy love affair, speaking to her unseen lover...
...If this is a "multilinear epic," I'll take pistachio...
...That scene is the climax of Elliott's performance, but one other should be mentioned too...
...I, for one, find a substitution of weird music and changing lights for dramatic substance, and an overreliance on our prior knowledge that great wrongs were done the Indians...
...Moody...
...After the sons return victorious, a hanger-on recites a bit of doggerel in honor of the occasion...
...And the full effect of his art can only be witnessed in the theater, where so much spirit can be made to pour out of one man in a mere few minutes...
...As for Clive Barnes, his endless effort to be the first man over the wall into the camp of the future is becoming something of a public menace...
...He appears at first to be the typical boozy Irishman: Drinking heavily, he sings "I hear you calling me" and discourses whimsically on the benefits of whisky...
...So much for what a play does not have to be...
...The dead Indian therefore pops up to inform the audience: "My name is Spotted Tail...
...In one scene in James Saunders' The Scent of Flowers, now at the Martinique Theater, Katherine Houghton achieves this level of art...
...But it is nice to know that we are dealing with a thoroughly modern Arthur, because we would not want to waste our time with someone still fooling around with linear guidelines...
...Structurally, the play is interesting if only because it is one of the least structured plays ever to hit Broadway...
...The mood then fades into the usual Irish blarney as the sons join in the chorus...
...the actors form a unit, every one of them encompassed by the author's dramatic vision...
...Of course, director Arvin Brown has also done very good work...
...Go expiate yourself at Kopit's light show...
...They are supported by the father, who states the Carney motto: "In the words of Gene Tunney, a man must fight back...
...There has been a considerable amount of slosh written about Arthur Kopit's Indians, presently at the Brooks Atkinson Theater...
...Now it happens that the Grand Duke imagines he has shot a Comanche...
...And we all knew that the Cowboys won in the end...
...Now it breaks forth, and he demonstrates a sensitive nature, albeit withered and hardened by the treatment he has received...
...He is quickly his old self again-Smiling, genial, but still cursing Michael: "He's a bastard, a bastard...
...The latest to do this is Stephen Elliott, who together with his colleagues is serving up the most vital theater in Manhattan-a vibrant, pulsating production of Thomas Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, now at the Mercury Theater...
...Elliott, Charles Cioffi and Michael McGuire have seemed competent in the past, yet they did little to prepare me for a performance where they prove themselves expressive, spirited masters of their craft...
...it becomes evident that he is trying to find out from the wife what his eldest son really thinks of him...
...Every child in Western civilization has played Cowboys and Indians...
...The actors' art flits only briefly across the footlights before vanishing, and is all the more precious for being so compounded of dust...
...The actors are all attuned to one another's rhythms and, seizing every dramatic moment, play off each other with the precision and relentless drive of a carefully drilled basketball team tearing down the court as a unit...
...Elliott has a jovial gleam in his eye, intersperses his comments with fussily precise puffs on a cigarette, and croons with the delight of a man well pleased by the sound of his own voice...
...Dermot McNamara makes a furtive, sly Mush O'Reilly...
...A play can be a group of images, some tragic, some even coarse...
...The stage directions read: "Weird music heard...
...Feeling out of sorts...
...Careers composed of commercials, situation comedies and lounging before a camera afford few opportunities for dramatic success...
...Immediately following this, we discover another quality in him-Shame-that we might have suspected from the start, since only a man who doubts himself cares deeply what others think of him...
...So credit Murphy with solid workmanship and the forceful statement of a strong theme...
...Michael is repelled by their violence, and wants them to become respectable...
...At this stage of her career, she has a raw emotional power, suggesting she might become an actress of some stature...
...Too frequently, one or more actors seems to have wandered into the world of the play by mistake...
...The facts aside, it is surely more interesting to suppose that the white men who relentlessly encroached on the Indians were not the dudes, cocky senators and silly Presidents Kopit shows us, but hard-pressed men, driven to carve out a meager living from a barren land...
...Kopit is content to juggle stock responses...
...During the course of this speech, Cioffi roars in a fury that explains his earlier scornful manner...
...On the merits of Kopit's drama, Barnes wrote...
...Kopit with the acuity of the artist, apparently sees as the first white liberal...
...A dry, academic account of what happened to the Indians, read from the stage of the Brooks Atkinson, would have more force than this hoary vaudeville and folksy body movement...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
