On Stage

...Actually, Friedman gives the character almost nothing to do until the final virtuoso monologue...

...This ending is altogether satisfying, and its reflective tone points up Friedman's shift from burlesque to serious comedy...

...Not surprisingly, since his specialty is black comedy, Friedman's approach is deliberately irreverent...

...Left, therefore, largely to his own resources, Perkins seems somewhat helpless...

...To keep the evening going, Fu-gard has overwritten Lena into an inexhaustible chatterbox...

...Though they are not, like the tramps, waiting for a savior, their dream of freedom is as far beyond attainment...

...The old black can at least say her name, and allows her to put her arms around him...

...But the more serious objection to his characterization is that Lena is too articulate, and sees too clearly into her experience...

...Jones, however, does not possess the inner resources of Miss Dee...

...after Rip Torn's dismissal, Ivor David Balding, the understandably worried producer, stated that the role is one of the most difficult in the entire range of dramatic literature...

...Her speeches are punctuated with philosophical prattle about identity and meaning...

...Boesman and Lena are itinerant coloreds (in South African terms, a mixture of white and black) whose shanty settlement has been bulldozed by white landowners, and who are now, as we meet them, setting up another temporary shelter near the mud flats of a river, where they will dig up worms for fishermen...

...Granted that the premise has a certain amount of wit and audacity ????still, Friedman is treading on precarious ground...

...Act II finds Friedman moving into more exalted regions, without forsaking the contemporary, unheroic idiom...

...In the long Act II finale, with Morty serving as silent, attentive analyst, Tandy embarks upon a speech of self-discovery that destroys all the illusions of order in his life, one by one: He realizes that he does not care for his subservient new girl friend...

...With no discernible provocation, Morty decides to sentence him to the dark chamber adjoining the steambath...

...It has enough density to sustain a one-act play, but has been worried into a full-length work...

...His wildly unorthodox manifestations of the divine lack profundity, and the whole scheme often seems merely fatuous...

...Yet, he wants to go on...

...Most appealing of the minor characters is a cute, vapid blonde who, in the face of death, worries about beauty parlor appointments and grocery lists...

...To some extent, this is legitimate...

...In addition to Tandy, another resident of limbo is rewardingly developed: an Old Timer who, in the most casual fashion, recites wildly fanciful stories about his world travels...

...that his work for brain-damaged welders is not so fulfilling after all (Friedman's details are not always happily selected...

...Miss Dee is especially attentive to supplying a vocal and physical rhythm, managing to convey dignity and occasional flashes of joy despite Lena's life of utter squalor...

...Friedman's is not polished enough...

...As in Fugard's earlier plays given a New York production, The Blood Knot and Hello and Goodbye, the basic structure is an extended duologue...

...Friedman's Steambalh, the less finished but more provocative of the two, is a contemporary Morality in which Everyman wages a battle against the God of Death, and loses...

...In the wretchedness of their existence, in their eternal squabblings and reconciliations, in their desperate hatred and no less desperate need for each other, Boesman and Lena are clearly literary descendants of Beckett's Gogo and Didi...

...Some moments are managed extremely well, but too much of Steambath is careless, relying for its impact on facile jokes and clumsy incongruities...

...Act I was burdened with audience-directed quips, and did not quite come into focus...

...Instead, he tells one final story and dances a modest little two-step before walking courageously into the Dark...

...Lena threatens to break the cyclical pattern when she says that this time she will not go with Boesman????but her denial, inevitably, is only temporary...

...Friedman and Fugard ought to exchange techniques: Fugard's play is a relatively simple statement, and he overextends his basic ideas until they are practically invisible...

...Her best moment is her entrance, when she walks nonchalantly into the presumably male steambath, disrobes completely, calmly takes a shower, and walks off, totally oblivious to the men's stares...

...God appears in the form of a Puerto Rican janitor partial to lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches who, while looking at a special tv screen, devises untimely ends for unsuspecting victims...

...Friedman, on the other hand, has not worked hard enough, although the ideas in his play are extremely complex and therefore demand a more penetrating treatment...

...Indeed, they are too obviously imposed upon her...

...Steambath has had an immoderate number of previews because of its succession of leading men...

...To counter the literary thrust of the dialogue, Ruby Dee and James Earl Jones work for intensely naturalistic performances...

...While Boesman is comparatively mute, even he, when talking about freedom, is rendered with a rhetorical flourish that turns him into a symbol rather than a believable character...

...At the end, he again voices his determination to leave, but he does not move...

...He died in the middle of a Chinese dinner, and feels cheated because he was not given a chance to get to the ice cream and fortune cookie...

...It is a supremely moving moment...

...This note of cool incongruity, of treating the remarkable as a commonplace, is what Friedman is after throughout the play, but nowhere else does disparity work as neatly as it does here...

...Here Tandy confronts his middling humanity and recognizes that, in the presence of death, all things in life are equally meaningless...

...Lena wants to keep the old man around, for Boesman has long since stopped listening to her ravings...

...He has a vibrant voice and a strong presence but, as in The Great White Hope, he demonstrates little capacity for modulation, playing Boesman on one note of sustained fierceness...

...The Old Timer does not, as did Tandy, protest his fate...

...Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambalh (at the Truck and Warehouse Theater) is an allegory of life after death, Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena (at the Circle in the Square) is an allegory of death-in-life...

...that he has not begun to communicate with his daughter...

...Following his death they are on the run again...

...Fugard handles his small, strong play as though it were the announcement of the Second Coming...

...that his book on Charlemagne is a fraud...

...Though neither play is fully satisfying????for opposite reasons, it turns out????both have considerable merits...

...Morty complies reluctantly, his demonstrations culminating in the startling cadenza to Act I, in which he transforms the steambath into an organ-resounding, psychedelically-lit cavern...

...As Steambath is, for the most part, relentlessly insouciant, so Boesman and Lena by Athol Fu-gard (a white South African) is for the most part relentlessly grim...

...The dramatic core is the continuing struggle between the janitor-God (punningly called Morty) and Tandy, a current tenant at the steambath who insists he has just begun to straighten out his life and deserves the opportunity to return to it...

...Conrad Bain as the Old Timer?brusque, sardonic, dignified????And Hector Elizondo as Morty????relaxed, alternately ingratiating and threatening????Give triumphant performances...

...Friedman has a potentially large, strong play, and tosses it off as though it were a Neil Simon trifle...

...The pattern of their lives, too, is disrupted by the intrusion of an outsider, in this case a black (in South Africa, of course, there are rigid class distinctions between coloreds and blacks) who speaks in a language unintelligible to the couple...

...This heavenly caretaker's system of retribution is thoroughly inscrutable????some of his prey are unlikable types, but others are worthy, defenseless souls...

...The ostensibly cosmic dialogue is generously spiced with references to Bloomingdale's and Norman Pod-horetz...

...Anthony Perkins' performance as Tandy, however, is not the equal of his solid and precise direction...

...limbo is represented as a meticulously designed steambath...

...Practically immobile and altogether downtrodden, the black has come among them to die...

...The prevailing sense of physical and psychic claustrophobia recalls, as does much else in the play, Sartre's No E.xit...

...In the manner of its dimly perceived Biblical antecedent, the Book of Job, Steambalh attempts to define the nature of God: Friedman's deity, like Job's, is demanding, occasionally wrathful, above justice and, finally, beyond human comprehension...

...But the way in which she voices her anxiety is not organic????her speeches do not develop from within her...

...T he conception of BoeSman and Lena????life reduced to grim essence????is noble, but in performance the play is fatiguing and irritating because it is fundamentally un-dramatic and self-consciously literary...

...To put it another way, Fugard's writing is too finely chiseled for his rough, beleaguered characters...

...The only one who is at all skeptical of the custodian's claim to divine right, Tandy asks for proof of his powers...

...Unfortunately, the playwright has failed to discover a congenial context for his awesome subject...