On Stage
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Feiffer's Little Apocalypse The dramatic hero cannot be simply an individual; he must have contained within him hints of scores of other men, for he somehow represents...
...Yet Ibsen assumed that the middle-class drawing room was the center of human existence where all crucial battles were waged, and eventually audiences agreed...
...Outside the house the violence picks up in tempo, bullets start careening through the Newquist apartment, and by the end of the play all America is embarked on an orgy of mutual murder...
...The principal action has the daughter trying to get her fiance—who is so much of a blob that he seems a caricature of indifference—to commit himself and feel something...
...and Linda Lavin as the daughter all seem to have lived together, to have battled and manipulated one another from time immemorial...
...We are told, for instance, that he gets beaten up at regular intervals but doesn't care enough about anything to defend himself...
...Everyman is a fine play, but we enjoy the differences separating men as much as their common denominators...
...When the bourgeoisie were brought on stage, it was objected that they were too insignificant to incarnate mankind...
...It is hard to have very much happen to such a man, and without a strong central line to drive the play on, Feiffer finds himself showing us people we are already a little weary of...
...The horror is not that we murder strangers...
...Anyone familiar with Jules Feif-fer's cartoons knows that he can portray the particulars of our existence: The small agonies, the strained relationships, the compulsions enslaving the sexually enlightened, the continual bringdowns are facts that he can play on endlessly and each time draw blood and laughter...
...Feiffer seems to sense that another play about a family is not what the world is crying for, and so from the very beginning we notice that in the midst of his city things are a little askew...
...Accurate details such as this abound...
...Although in the same room, all the members of the family stare blankly, too accustomed yet too estranged to notice each other...
...Smack-dab in the middle of her efforts to reform her detached boy friend, the daughter is suddenly picked off by a sniper...
...enjoyable or not, we emerge from the theater with the attitude, "Well, that was all right, but so what...
...Stripping men down to essentials is all very well, yet man is not just composed of essentials...
...We have all heard the sound of guns recently, yet Feiffer must know that nothing like this is ever going to happen...
...In the past, there was some agreement as to who was important and what stories were representative...
...Similarly, when we say that a play is trivial we mean that it offers no reverberations of a larger world, that the characters and situations are not representative...
...Now human behavior does not grow out of any such frustrations...
...Possibly in an attempt to keep things moving, he interrupts his story for two very funny cartoons...
...Feiffer tells us something of the little murders we all commit daily...
...The Attic myths, for example,' proved convenient for the Greek tragedians...
...The violent impulses induced by the tensions of our lives are normally stifled...
...In his effort to make something grandiose out of the small things he knows, Feiffer, like many before him, becomes as absurd as his plot...
...One problem for the playwright now is to find another locale and other people who will successfully embody the world...
...Feiffer gets it all down faithfully and the actors have made it their own...
...someone tries to crack nuts, someone else sips gloomily at a drink...
...Windy rhetoric and implausible situations do, and that is what we get from Feiffer in his apocalyptic vein...
...he must have contained within him hints of scores of other men, for he somehow represents everything that is not there on the stage...
...they provided a large body of conventional lore that everyone felt contained the basic elements of man's nature...
...He writes that his play, "grows out of the frustrations of a previously isolationist nation having to go internationalist in an immense way, feeling unappreciated, unloved, and finally unwanted for all its good works and, in reaction, turning nar-cissistically violent toward the outside world (Santo Domingo, Vietnam) and paranoically violent toward its own internal world (race violence, random violence, motiveless murders...
...While conventional writers continue to make Ibsen's assumptions, we are becoming increasingly aware that the important struggles of our time do not take place in somebody's living room...
...Our fate is not crime in the streets but death of the soul...
...We are born in one place, not in every place...
...In Little Murders, currently at the Circle in the Square, we spend the evening with the Newquists, a typically tense Feiffer melange...
...society as a whole is composed of additional forces he does not comprehend...
...They constantly emanate the curious mixture of absent-minded neglect and exasperated pride that binds them together...
...it cannot be hustled on stage in the form of a little rifle fire and a few tired references to our sick society...
...when they stop listening, he expresses his annoyance by saying they made him very late...
...Kings and their courts seemed to embody Man in a satisfactory manner for the dramatists of Elizabethan England and Baroque France...
...The family and its hang-ups are finely etched by Feiffer and cleverly filled out by the actors...
...The other is of a hip minister who, at the young couple's marriage ceremony, dwells oa the sordid aspects of existence, exposes everyone's secret vices, then forgives them by saying it is all "part of life" and he "won't put it down...
...At the same time, we do not really yearn for universals...
...Shimin Ruskin as Judge Stern and Paul Benedict as the Reverend Du-pas roll handsomely through their monologues, utterly oblivious of the effect their words might have on anyone who happens to be listening...
...The lights keep going off, but the family treats this as an everyday occurence...
...Birth, and copulation, and death./That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks," claims Eliot's Sweeney, but this is a half-truth...
...While Feiffer claims an English production of Little Murders amused him, it is hard to imagine it played successfully by performers who do not know the particular ambience he has drawn upon...
...Fortunately, Vincent Gardenia as the father, Elizabeth Wilson as the mother, Jon Korkes as their son...
...Shots are frequently heard outside the apartment along with the wail of sirens...
...The proud mother continually embarrasses her family...
...The father, who dislikes his daughter's boy friend but wants to be hospitable, offers him a drink with a progressively hostile, "Well, what'll it be, young fellow...
...From then on we are into Feiffer's version of what everything is coming to—a general slaughter...
...Nevertheless, a big statement has to be earned, has to grow organically from the material...
...In a sense, he is right: A great playwright does compose all the details into an encompassing vision...
...The effectiveness of their silence is a tribute to the skill with which Feiffer has modeled their existence...
...But Feiffer has trouble getting his scenes of upper West Side life to add up to anything...
...it is that we harm those closest to us...
...The family pattern persists even with a stranger in the house, excused by a limp, "Did you ever see anything like it...
...A previous Broadway production (which I did not see) failed, and I could see the place becoming intolerable if the actors here had neglected the shared past of the family and punched the gags...
...It is good that he realizes there is more to writing for the theater than supplying the dialogue of his friends and neighbors...
...we have particular parents who shape us...
...This frequently involves some fumbling, for no commonly accepted view of man and society exists today...
...Farces frequently face this accusation...
...His truth is summed up by an archetypal middle-class moment in the first act: Dinner over, the family slumps in front of the television set...
...and though poets and peasants may be the same in bed, whom they get in with and the location of the bed usually differs considerably...
...As this aspect of the play becomes more prominent, we take our leave of Jules Feiffer, genial entertainer, and are gradually introduced to Feiffer the mordant, yet flabby, prophet of onrushing doom...
...When he turns to the theater Feiffer apparently feels that this is not enough, that the trivia he habitually treats must be transmogrified into something grander...
...Feiffer's ambitions here are those of a major playwright...
...It is, of course, not entirely fair to throw a writer's intentions back in his face, but since Feiffer goes to the trouble of inserting a letter to his London director in the published version of the script, explaining what he was trying to do, he is fairly asking for it...
...his workmanship is that of a clever sketch writer...
...Anyone who thinks that someone as passive as the boy friend could possibly succeed as a commercial photographer, just does not understand the energy needed merely to survive in New York...
...One is of a bustling judge who pauses long enough to tell the boy and girl about God on the lower East Side when he was a child...
...The problem for the dramatist is to find the correct milieu and hero...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 3
