On Stage
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Instant Art Aformula for instant art: Take one author, not too well known, but having a certain remote literary standing, mix together some of his bons mots in a...
...Around these statements are interwoven themes bearing on the men she takes to her Harlem hotel room, her intense interest in literary culture, and her mother who worked in somebody's kitchen...
...Still, McCowen fits in well with this production...
...ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Instant Art Aformula for instant art: Take one author, not too well known, but having a certain remote literary standing, mix together some of his bons mots in a little syrup of sentimentality, add exquisite costumes and distinguished actors (English accents preferred), and produce in London...
...The drama shows us Rolfe hounded by bailiffs, landladies and Protestant bigots, yearning to become a Catholic priest...
...It is good technical acting...
...Miss Kennedy's structures are more akin to musical forms than to anything previously seen on the stage...
...And no spontaneity is possible under these circumstances, no flow between the big moments, no simplicity...
...She states at one point that her father ("the richest white man in town") was kind to her, that they went to England together, drank tea, and talked of Chaucer and Shakespeare...
...In the first play, The Owl Answers, a young black girl's relation to her father is very important to her...
...Her dialogue abounds in images that are a little too stark, a little too brutal to carry on the printed page...
...But that cannot change the net effect...
...Acting of this kind is bound to be fussy, to consist of a number of details, without the broad line necessary to compose them into a grand design...
...You have to admire the result...
...We are never sure of exactly what has happened in these plays, which examine the pasts of somewhat deranged individuals, conveying the possibilities implicit in certain events and relationships haunting the minds of the protagonists...
...I am not saying that anything so cold-blooded was attempted in the case of Hadrian VII...
...To develop this aspect of the material, the play would have to be written and produced in a more extravagant style...
...Intoned by actors, they become more vibrant and clearer than they would be unheard...
...When he gazes at some art and says, "Oh, look at those frescoes," nothing could be more mellifluous than his "Oh...
...Given a little luck and careful management, you should arrive in New York with reputation, literature and schmaltz all baked together into one gorgeously sticky mess...
...This is the old routine (which the English seem to adore) of the faithful servant rewarded by the magnanimous master...
...narrative almost does not exist...
...Miss Kennedy thus appears to be what everyone has been talking about for most of this century—a poet of the theater...
...Adrienne Kennedy is more a lyric than a dramatic writer, yet her statements could only be made on the stage...
...You can run a coffeehouse on it or an underground newspaper, but for the big rewards, love and human warmth are sounder bets...
...She now has something wholly her own, and that is very rare in this world...
...She must now continue on her own road, sure to be a lonely one, with no guarantee of either financial or artistic success...
...When he reads a letter, his lips move (quickly, of course: he is not playing a dummy...
...McCowen seems to have carefully studied every detail of the play and figured out how to get each of his points across clearly and cleanly...
...We have had plays filtered through the mind of a protagonist before, but here it is the color and quality of events that are important...
...People connected with a concoction this successful usually believe in it, and the show has Art and good intentions written all over it...
...She uses the stage in unusual, provocative ways, at the same time depriving herself of much of the richness of the actor's art by not relating the history of an individual in a straightforward narrative...
...Two of her one-act plays are now on display at the Public Theater under the collective title, Cities in Bezique...
...She is not one of the Pop geniuses floating around the far-out theater circuit, but a much rarer and harder phenomenon to comprehend—a genuinely original talent who conforms to neither commercial nor currently hip models...
...That's the glory of Hadrian VII?there is no mistaking that this is Literature, this is Acting, these are Noble Sentiments...
...It is hard to know what to make of the resulting potpourri...
...I enjoy what an actor's personality can add to a writer's words, and actors have no chance here...
...In the second act he wanders around, disposing of enemies, rewarding friends, and reforming the Church...
...She successfully conveys the awe and majesty of sex in a world where it has become a matter of personal hygiene, a cute game, rather than a primal mystery...
...You can see immediately that he is an actor, that he is doing things, just as you can tell from the dialogue that Rolfe was a literary gent...
...I know of no constructions similar to hers, yet she retains a traditional interest in language difficult to find in today's playwrights...
...Considering the climate of our times, it must be nice for an audience to know there is something absolutely safe for it to admire...
...Her only reward may be in knowing she is doing what no one else could possibly do...
...The plays of Adrienne Kennedy offer no such security...
...She seems more concerned with the texture of experience than with plot, character or ideas...
...Being unfamiliar with the life and works of Frederick Rolfe, the subject of the play, I can only judge from the available evidence that he seems to have had a certain epigrammatic gift and a vast store of resentment for a world he felt treated him badly...
...After the Pope dies, there is a cloudy transition to the main story, in which he is called to the priesthood and soon elected Pope...
...Miss Kennedy is an eccentric writer, and although her themes are contemporary, her style is not of the moment...
...Alec McCowen as Rolfe-Hadrian presents a thoroughly accomplished model of elocution and choreography...
...Her work does not wear a neon sign proclaiming that it is the latest style, something to get with quickly...
...Themes weave in and out, build in a certain direction, then are contradicted and drift off on another track...
...I am usually bored by psychologizing, and Miss Kennedy's plays deal wholly with an inner world...
...The meaning that evolves from this is at once terribly specific (about one girl in a little Southern town thinking of all the white men who might have cohabited with her black mother) and abstract (relating to black identity in a white culture, for the girl is "filled with dreams" derived from books, and figures like Ann Boleyn and William the Conqueror are more real to her than the men she picks up on the subway...
...Her plays often lack clarity, her images and compulsions are not always satisfactorily focused, but the fact that what she has created is related to the dramatic art of the past, neither mindlessly rejecting it nor idiotically reproducing it, is a minor miracle...
...I should make it clear that I am not naturally sympathetic to this kind of drama, that I was impressed in spite of my prejudices...
...There is a healthy vulgarity to the best theater, and these works are remote and a trifle thin...
...Particular situations are repeated, each time with significant variations...
...There is a distinctly limited public for malice and ill will, however...
...I would like to see someone with Miss Kennedy's concern for form and language toss all the contradictory elements of theater into the sky and juggle them into richer conceits, but I doubt if Miss Kennedy will listen to my advice, and I would hesitate to give any...
...It resembles a thousand similar revelations where an isolated individual, never having known the warmth of a kindred spirit, reaches out, touches another life and feels the stirrings of that great emotion he feared he never would experience...
...so that we finally know, not a story, but all that the characters feel about what is deeply important to them...
...I have no theological objections to showing the College of Cardinals as a gang of cutthroat politicians, but surely the Vatican Secretary of State should not sound and act quite so much like a not overly bright pushcart vendor...
...At other times, he is her "goddamned father" who never acknowledged her existence, and there is even a hint that she has got the wrong party altogether, that a white man had nothing to do with her conception, that she is addled from reading too many books...
...Rolfe evidently settled many old scores in his novel, yet Peter Luke, the adapter, presents the daydreams of a paranoid as a model of justice and Christian charity...
...Ideally, the girl should become both a neurotic case history and an image of all black people instilled with alien ambitions, then mocked for pursuing them...
...so that we could see the spite lurking behind the pious speeches and fine gestures...
...Similarly, while our native actors are fine for scenes of domestic life, they are simply not the stuff for anything so grand as the Vatican...
...For that we need the English actor with his diction, his effects—all his technical apparatus...
...When he is received as a priest and does a jig of triumph, his are the very nicest little dance steps...
...Another moment has Hadrian receiving a simply English charwoman who had previously been kind to him...
...A rather horrendous scene—reeking of that special kind of stagy sentiment, all self-indulgence and pure goo at the core—depicts Pope Hadrian, previously presented as a cold fish, suddenly finding love...
...She states themes, images (a constantly recurring line in one play is: "All images return"), and explores them until she feels she has exhausted their nuances...
...I submit that all this is quite impossible as serious drama, but that the idea of a down-at-the-heels esthete like Rolfe fantasizing about what he would do with great power has comic possibilities...
...Yet I could always detect wheels turning and gears meshing, despite McCowen's judicious avoidance of drastic contrasts in voice or energy levels...
...She brings him a jar of pickled onions, and he is so good as to eat them right in front of her, smacking his lips all t^e while...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 2
