On Stage

...Tillie, the younger and more withdrawn, finds in science a niche to shelter the new and precious individuality she is awed to find blooming within her...

...Then came the final effort of the season, Ed Bullins' The Pig Pen, apparently to recapitulate all the traits that made this the most unrewarding year in apt's history...

...Nannie's quite some little cross to bear, ain't you, Nannie...

...Anne Sexton, in Mercy Street, served up an unintentionally hilarious phantasmagoria of her pet manias, religion, mental illness and poetry, all combined in the classic line uttered by Our Heroine upon being denied the solace of Communion: "Must I wander forever between hell and breakfast...

...But it is the topic under discussion, of course, that ultimately determines whether a work attains the white-hot intensity of tragedy or the rather low boiling point of melodrama...

...Then there was the inevitable bill of one-acters, so compulsory in a theater of declining creativity...

...The Tyrones, in Long Day's Journey into Night, have at one another about fate and character, and O'Neill's artistry expands in the incandescent heat of these great subjects...

...It wasted its subscribers' time on works either insufferably pretentious or so devoid of ambition they made me wonder exactly what kind of writers apt was trying to encourage...

...says Beatrice to the deaf old creature...

...Besides, Malcolm X was shot in the afternoon and black and white had previously been divided...

...And it can be shockingly funny, even when directed with painful obviousness at their youth and their promise...

...Dizenzo thinks all psychiatrists and psychotherapists are quacks, helping people to do what common sense should dictate...

...Barnes, like apt, mistakes attempt for achievement so often that his approvals of failure are becoming a tradition...

...Maybe she and Russell had planned to slip Mr...

...A bit derivative in spots too, and not always as formally secure as I could wish (there is a jolting shift from the living room to the high-school auditorium for Tillie's presentation)—yet still a play I find myself recalling with increasing pleasure for its honesty, gusto and stage-sense...

...since Blanche is a rather odd embodiment of The Finer Things of Life (a phrase I'm sure she'd use...

...its craftsmanship is indefensible...

...This ancient lodger can cast a chill of approaching death over the theater simply by clumping out from her bedroom...

...Nannie acknowledges "nursie" with the curtest of deadpan stares and returns to her honey and hot water...

...Paul Zindel's Off-Broadway success, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, is very much in the family-quarrel tradition, and a better representative than most, too...

...It is her own world she rails against: her two teen-age daughters...

...Brooks" from the moment they were married and made her set down in a notebook every activity he had planned for her each morning...

...The opening scene, played for minutes in the dark, showed how director Dick Williams intended to pad out the piece...

...Antagonistic kin, interacting in the closeness of the stage, have raised the dramatic temperature of our most ambitious, if not most successful plays...

...A high-school experiment with marigold seeds exposed to radiation supplies the title, and also wins Tillie first prize at the science fair...

...This batch proved even more ominous than most of its kind by being incomplete, apt was unable to present David Scott Milton's Duet for Solo Voice, an apparently brutal monologue, because Jules Munshin had died while rehearsing it and his replacement had been reduced to voicelessness the evening I was to see it...

...Streetcar smolders along on such damp fuel as the inaccessibility of the bathroom and the mortgages on that place in the country...

...Along with almost everything else at apt, it was also staged in that most predictable experimental-theater manner: having the actors troop in through the house...

...Then an argument flared over how Sharon had met Len...

...With a killing stare and winning twinkle, Judith Lowry brought more than a weight of years to Nannie...

...He proved it, too, in The Last Straw...

...apt did manage to deliver Charles Dizenzo's The Last Straw, however, though I have no idea why it bothered...

...One character was a quack, the other a patient who had quit coming to see him...

...All very well, snaps Beatrice, but after school everyone must work on mother's latest, most desperate project: converting the family hovel into a tearoom...

...Melvin Bernhardt's direction, Martin Aronstein's lighting and Fred VoelpeFs setting do it full justice...

...The Hubbards, in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, snap and growl over stolen railroad bonds...

...Atom," she says, almost to her self...

...Pig Pen is the work of a Negro author and thus seems to have been judged worthy of production only by rather patronizing criteria (not that apt is so demanding of Caucasians, either...

...Frankly, I don't care if it shows the end of the world...

...A little pat in its symbolism...

...Those mismatched in-laws in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire are supposed to represent human spirit and the brutish force that stands ever ready to crush it, yet the play never burns with quite so pure a flame...

...I hate the world," she says in the closing moments, staring straight at the audience...

...It was mercifully brief...

...At last Len, the host, uttered the first line of that winged Bullins dialogue: "Well, tell us, Ray, why did you decide to visit us at three this morning...

...Pamela Payson-Wright was completely convincing and most affecting as Tillie...

...Ruth, an epileptic, is reduced to a tremulous vegetable by the final scene—but I fear she was a rather weak creation to begin with (Zindel uses her mostly to bridge narrative gaps with gossip and simple-minded questions...

...Sada Thompson filled out Beatrice with such force and subtlety that I wish there were some way Zindel could, without limiting others to her interpretation, note in his text those places where Miss Thompson, with unerring precision, took a drag on her cigarette or blinked or unleashed her amazing intensity...

...Tillie ignores her...

...The American Place Theatre (apt) did not produce a playwright who could match either of Zindel's achievements this dreary season...

...Clive Barnes of the New York Times, who has a vast appetite for junk by beginners, believes this play, set on the night Malcolm X died, shows, "let us, black and white together, face it, the night of the great divide...

...When the lights finally came up and we discovered Sharon (white) and Len and Ray (both black) at breakfast, they did not speak—just ate and gestured—for quite a few minutes more...

...Blossoming now like the rare flower that benefited from the burning force of the gamma rays, she is lost in blissful contemplation of the word that has come to mean so much to her...

...Judy Ann Teer's sledgehammer direction succeeded in flattening this creation further...

...Aside from throwing a pretty mean fit, Amy Levitt was drabber than necessary as Ruth...

...Life, Zindel is saying in this awkward yet haunting little work, is as searing and erratic as any radiation, and life—its reality, its potential—is what his three main characters are quarreling about...

...Like Mercy Street, Pig Pen is played without intermission and is neither a full-length work nor a compact one-acter...

...Zindel allows neither his characters nor us to indulge in that specious hope playwrights like William Inge not only proffer but grasp at themselves ?that Love will smooth over any differences...

...Charlie L. Russell, in Five on the Black Hand Side, delivered a loose and moronic farce about Harlem life, in which the main character was a tyrannical black man who had called his wife "Mrs...

...And that's not the kind of tradition our theater needs...

...she looks back in anger like a female Jimmy Porter, but without his sardonic despair of the world...

...Besides creating a good minor work, Zindel has written a major role for an actress...

...But the full impact of Beatrice's corrosive scorn must be borne by her daughters, Ruth and Tillie...

...Brooks under Daniel P. Moynihan's door to refute his black matriarch thesis...

...Another stretch of rapt inactivity ensued as his poetry was read (not aloud...

...Beatrice, a none too gay divorcee, spends most of her time bitching, on the phone or face-to-face, about everything to everyone...

...The one genuine moment of tension for apt's predominantly middle-aged subscribers occurred when a trio of black friends arrived—with rock instruments...

...Exclamation greeted the news that Ray had arrived by bus...

...her ratty house crammed with junk from the half dozen professions she's abandoned, and now serving as a boarding house-nursing home for a tottering crone shipped there by her daughter...