Facing the Darkness
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Facing the Darkness Plays are written for any number of reasons — to make money, to gratify an author's ego, to entertain an audience, to give actors an opportunity to...
...Such a work need not be highly original...
...His characters are not outwardly respectable...
...and their son scarred by his parents' battles...
...Aline Mac-Mahon as a sympathetic landlady, and Leta Bonynge as an amorous one also deserve to be commended...
...Hanley knows life is not that simple...
...The end of the play arrives during one of these duologues, and again I felt Hanley had contrived more of a potential coup de theatre then a profoundly demonstrated truth...
...Neither father nor son will admit how strong their emotional ties are...
...We know it cannot go on this way forever, but in most plays of this kind no one ever gives up and leaves...
...The son, for example, visits the mother after her separation...
...Sasha von Sherler slides into her points so deliciously that we believe equally in her tears upon hearing someone sing a show tune from an East Village fire escape, and her iciness in refusing to lend someone else the $35 needed to stay alive...
...In these scenes, Hanley attempts a flamboyance out of keeping with his usual posture...
...come home, Sam, and I'll make you that pot roast you always relished...
...Hanley presents another dimension—a kind of total blackness where the human condition seems beyond the instant salvation a little useful information might bring...
...Several scenes in which the father and son perform their vaudeville routine do not maintain the proper tension between public and private meaning, too often straying into what the son calls "memoirs...
...if he would just relax and admit that these are essentially Gothic inventions, in which the manipulation of emotion is an end in itself, he would avoid the misty ambiguity which often obscures his melodramatic gifts...
...The author lets life's pitiless logic have its way...
...She now refuses to speak, getting on Jim's nerves, and the plot details his various ruses to try to get her to talk again...
...The same concerns have dominated the stage for centuries, and even strong emotion often takes on conventional form...
...The first, Laugh, Etc., is a short monologue by a bitchy girl...
...His is such a stagy presence that it is hard to imagine any reality lurking beneath those mannerisms...
...Even though its ambience of dank and drab furnished rooms is not very cheerful, the work possesses the depth of honest passions...
...In all three plays, the author builds tension carefully, releases it, then rises to new plateaus of suspense until the final moment of horror...
...Instead, they seem specious metaphysical seasoning thrown in to give the mix a significance it does not possess...
...Rather more rarely than one might suppose is a play written because a dramatist feels something he is compelled to express...
...The principal defect is Robert Symonds as the father...
...Larry Bryggman succeeds in the arduous task of sustaining our attention throughout this long one-act...
...She is somewhat incoherent to the ordinary ear, but he knows so well what she wants to say that he can unravel her end of the dialogue from the slightest cue and respond to her half-formed queries with the information that her husband is same old pathetic fraud...
...The second one-act, Terrible Jim Filch, concerns a church-robber and his girl, holed up in a motel room...
...It is a source of infinite regret that I know of no other parts suitable for Michael Dunn, for his exquisite blend of bitterness and compassion as the son would be hard to equal...
...and the son, of, course, is deformed...
...The world of people constantly on the move to nowhere is perfectly conveyed by the conversations between the father and a succession of landladies...
...The man and the woman are in a horrible mess when we begin, she constantly drunk, he constantly telling her how this destroys him...
...It is all too typical...
...He has seen much of the misery in the world—his mother, a hooker, abandoned him when he was 13—and feels the Deity is responsible for it all...
...I hope I have not made The Inner Journey sound too dismal...
...ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Facing the Darkness Plays are written for any number of reasons — to make money, to gratify an author's ego, to entertain an audience, to give actors an opportunity to shine...
...Since they do not have any of the usual bourgeois pretensions, nothing holds them together but their emotions...
...These feelings are very strong but not very pretty...
...Certainly the father is always trying to make an impression, but his purpose is to affect the other characters, not the audience, a distinction Symonds does not properly comprehend...
...In the end, the girl starts to pray and so brings on a final catastrophe...
...Altough they deal with doom and destruction, the three one-act plays by James Leo Herlihy at Stage 73, under the collective title Stop, You're Kiling Me, have a lighter texture than Hanley's work...
...In the usual domestic drama, the characters get on each other's nerves for two and a half acts, until someone whispers the magic word, "Love"—then all is forgiven...
...Yet in the next scene, the woman has left her husband...
...The third play, Bad Bad Jo-Jo, does well enough in portraying Kayo Hathaway, an effete hack who has created characters that surpass even James Bond in sadism...
...the woman always drank too much...
...One scene finds him proposing to a pudgy specimen that she come away with him, while the son tries to distract them...
...The production is very good...
...Throughout the scene they address only the landlady, but it is clearly the other member of the family each is seeking to affect...
...Terrible Jim is seemingly hung up on God, which is why he robs churches...
...The Inner Journey is nevertheless a flawed work...
...It is one thing to show a family at cross purposes by having a daughter talk about her latest beau, while father lies about his business and mother wonders how to pay the bills...
...She is in her cups, and while she strokes a cat and pulls on a bottle of gin he has brought, they talk...
...William Young turns him into an amusing sketch of upper Bohemia, but when his characters come to life and start haunting Kayo, we are once again into that gloomy portentousness about American society that flows far too glibly from the pens of such as Herlihy...
...Perhaps the most telling item in the play is the family's lack of communication...
...It is not surprising, then, that a drama such as James Hanley's The Inner Journey, now at Lincoln Center's Forum Theater, can easily be overlooked amid many more outwardly prepossessing displays screaming for the attention of a distracted public...
...Couples just keep on arguing until a secret is revealed that changes things...
...Though one of the characters is a dwarf and feels the drawbacks of his condition keenly, he is locked into a family triangle we have witnessed in countless other dramas: a father and mother with strong feelings for each other, yet somehow never understanding one another and seeing the world differently...
...They are loaded with laughs, well plotted and engagingly performed...
...While Terrible Jim's peculiar speculations about God have their charm, they do not seem related organically to the fear of being left alone (something he shares with characters in the other plays) which motivates his treatment of the girl...
...The underlying observation— that the bonds uniting father and son cannot be broken—may be correct, but I thought it was expressed a little cheaply after so much that had been made genuinely moving by the relentless pressing of hard facts...
...Thus they do not have an amiable facade which must be penetrated to reveal the hollowness within...
...That's just like my Uncle Harry," a woman behind me nudged her companion at William Inge's last bit of bathos...
...The best plays of Racine, Moliere and Shakespeare superficially resembled those of their contemporaries...
...The Inner Journey may be a late arrival to the kind of theater that has obsessed playwrights since Ibsen, but it is a work where slight aberrations from the dramatic norm combine to produce a truly individual specimen...
...Instead, we must be persuaded of their ultimate human value...
...But Hanley's is not conventional dramaturgy—an author giving the customary lament for his lost childhood, creating characters overly reminiscent of other people's familial relations...
...Unfortunately, Herlihy imagines he is commenting on life in the modern world...
...Here, however, the implication is not simply that the characters are not getting through to each other, but that everything vital has already been said or felt, that they know each other's limitations so thoroughly any further discussion is superfluous...
...continuing her drinking, she suffers the usual tragic alcoholic's end—blind and dying in a hospital...
...Priscilla Pointer as the mother nicely expresses her dim apprehension of the surrounding world...
...God, he tells the girl, has an undeserved reputation for doing good, and he speculates that Heaven will turn out to be "just another Albuquerque...
...The parents are aging vaudevillians whose act was never very successful...
...It is hard to imagine such an act actually being performed before its intended audience...
...For one thing, Hanley has not retouched the bitterness of this family's strife...
...This common cliche has been made workable and palatable by any number of dramaturgical plumbers...
...Terrible Jim has just disfigured the girl because she was starting to look a little too perfect and he wanted to share his life with another outcast...
...Or sonny boy, having been prey to his parents' lies all his life, finds out about the revolution, art or the girl next door, and rushes out to freedom and ultimate salvation...
...The lack of self-esteem is evident from the start...
...At first glance, there is little that is distinctive about Hanley's play...
...Still, Hanley convinced me that this family's only force was in the blend of love, hate, pity, and contempt they felt for each other...
...While one might prefer a more genial place, it is somehow more comforting to face the dark than to light candles that can be blown out by the slightest whiff of reality...
...He conveys Jim's chameleonlike moods brilliantly—his outward bravado, spiritual exhaustion and the tenderness underlying his "mean streak...
Vol. 52 • April 1969 • No. 7
