On Stage

...Certainly our nation's leading low-key tv pitchman deserves a sharper response, even from Elliott and Goulding (who seem to care about nothing but television these days), and certainly from the old Bob and Ray (who in 1954 were among the few in the mass media not to be intimidated by Joe McCarthy...

...you bet your ass...

...The four little theaters he has already built into it have great potential and the latest of them, the 299-seat Newman, is a charmer...

...Nostalgia, which seemed to be the controlling force last season, may be unstoppable this year, too, if it can push onto the New York stage Bob and Ray, The Two and Only, a feeble run-through of feeble skits written and performed by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding...

...Few writers could raise this subject above horror-show level...

...fettered by cameras, lights, props and the rehearsals these entailed, they moved like deep-sea divers underwater...

...Their performance enthralled me even after I realized that the object of their ridicule often was the kind of self-evident idiocy that needed no comment...

...Now transplanted to Broadway, they move about in William Ritman's attic-like setting--appropriately crammed with 20- and 30-year-old junk--like the old men they are...

...Elliott maintains an unswervingly blank expression at all times while Goulding, who plays more of the various parts, radiates the theatrical gift of the talented drunk at the office Chrismas party determined to make a fool of himself...

...I dissent, but I am willing to admit that my youth is gone and that I wasted a lot of it enjoying spirited trash...

...I listened every chance I could...

...But a member of the Republican National Committee can chuckle over that, too...

...Cineastes glorify the old Hollywood rubbish in the tortuous and sophistic pedantries of the auteur theory...

...Winthrop Fairfax, the murdered man's nephew, is trying to kill Gwendolyn Carstairs, his aunt's secretary...

...A plea to us to stop filling up the Grand Canyon with beer cans (what brand of beer, fellas...

...In Cage, set in a veterans hospital, it takes the form of implanting tiny electronic equipment in the brain, with patients either cajoled or forced into serving as guinea pigs...

...I was then at the age where I had begun to perceive the thinness of such fare, and here were Bob and Ray, not a conduit for others' gags like Bob Hope, or surrounded by character actors like Fred Allen, but improvising in a host of voices, often to cues tossed out by playful sound-effects men...

...The President receives one glancing reference in an election-night "interview" with a small-town politician who takes his overwhelming rejection by the voters most tearfully, whimpering that the press won't have him "to kick around any more...

...Freytag, the scientist who performs it on him (Henderson Forsythe, who played the scientist, gave the evening its only sense of spontaneity, albeit an unnerving one, by his inability to remember his lines...

...Ronny Cox's vicious hillbilly patient and Marjorie Kellogg's grim and grimy multilevel hospital, setting were the only fixed points of consistency amid the veerings of Reardon's intent...

...Their argument is conducted at the lowest possible level, philosophically, and at the worst possible time, dramatically, since Reese aready has the tiny equipment embedded in his shaven head...

...After all, Dick did say it (heh heh)--but he's The New Nixon now...

...THE SHOWS OF YESTERYEAR BY HARRIS GREEN Nudity, nostalgia and the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater dominated the opening weeks of this season, but I can report upon the effects of only the last two...

...Nothing in Bob and Ray's "Mr...

...I am sure the names are wrong but, in essence, here is how "the kindly old tracer" ordered his assistant to respond to a nearby shriek for help: "Quick, Mike...

...He has in the past tolerated and even personally perpetrated horrendously vulgar productions of Shakespeare in Central Park during the summer...

...Trace with the solution of tonight's case...

...I have no complaints about Papp's treatment of the library's architecture...

...Keene's theme music for each week's search was "Somewhere I'll Find You," I wonder what was left for Bob and Ray to do...

...The producers of Score and The Evil That Men Do, two nudies already "previewing," were so shy about letting reviewers see their wares that neither show boasted an official opening night when their enticing ads first appeared...

...And when I recall that Mr...

...in winter, at the Landmark Astor Library Building the Lindsay Administration placed at his disposal in 1967, he has foisted upon us worthless plays by deservedly unknown playwrights...

...I had expected nonstop "previewing...

...The seriousness of thought control is virtually ignored until the penultimate scene, when Reese, a doomed patient (annoyingly performed by Lewis J. Stadlen), starts arguing the immorality of the experiment with Dr...

...Nostalgia may have prompted the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater to dig up Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells' as one of its two initial offerings this season...

...In the theater, Odets and Hellman are revived as if their Leftist visions were classics of world drama...

...It is what Papp produces on these stages that distresses me, and the first tenant of the Newman--Pinero was offered at the Anspacher--is about as distressing as they come: The Happiness Cage, by Dennis J. Reardon, "Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Michigan...

...Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons...

...Screw delicacy...

...I also feel that turning the theater into a repository for sentimental exhumations, far from keeping it alive, will fill it with the stench of death...

...In fact, it is painful for this aging fan to look at them...

...The suspect came to my office and confessed")--the whole vat of pap that network radio served to the nation...

...I was one of their most faithful listeners 19 years ago, when nbc fearlessly started broadcasting their deft and high-spirited spoofing of soap operas, quiz shows, melodramas presided over by a master sleuth ("Now here's Mr...

...The only possible good that could come from bringing something like The Two and Only to Broadway would be the inducement of a total revulsion for the current manic indulgence in nostalgia, the insistent search for the shows of yesteryear...

...I am inclined to credit the selection to the usual bad taste of the Theater's producer, Joseph Papp...

...Their present material is most painful of all...

...A mock commercial showed a flash of the old spirit ("You know, friends, there is a difference in ball bearings") but there were few of these throughout the evening...

...If this season continues to veer between a mindless delight in the old and a foolish encouragement of the new, I may look back on last year as The Golden Age...

...revels in self-abnegation...

...Freytag world famous but little better off, for his experiment is now controlled by the Army, represented by a general called, I'm afraid, "General...

...Now two of the better regulars of radio and tv, whose confections even at their best were never for the ages, come forward to caricature themselves and are acclaimed as if they had the bite of Nichols & May or the breadth of Beyond the Fringe...

...Reardon cannot decide whether to write melodrama, tragedy or black comedy...

...Most of the time, Cage plays like an inept sci-fi thriller in which mystery is generated by not telling us anything, and excitement by having characters periodically threaten and shout...

...Trace, Keener than Most Persons" was as preposterous as a line I heard 16 years ago in Frank and Ann Hummert's Mr...

...Their switch to tv squelched the infectuous brio they had on radio...

...is as close as they dare get to controversy today...

...Score has since been given one, to my amazement...

...He is played by Paul Sparer with the kind of hammy rubato, oily leer and prideful smirk that Vincent Price might find excessive for The Return of Roderick Usher...

...Bob and Ray have made plenty of genuine commercials, and for the kind of sponsors (General Motors, General Electric) one seemingly does not kid with mock public-service announcements about pollution...

...Into that room with your gun drawn...

...Nothing their director, Joseph Hardy, has devised for the closed-circuit tv screen suspended at Stage Right enhances their poor visual sense...

...Comic relief takes such odd forms as a sadistic male nurse pusher and a Grey Lady who gets raped...

...On the stage of the John Golden, they are doing pretty much what they did years ago--with the same decreased effectiveness that has marked their work each time they changed media...

...Cage soon ends with Reese a blissful zombie and Dr...

...General" became increasingly difficult to accept as he oozed such incongruous dialogue as "your repertoire of self-righteous expression...

...To his credit, Reardon has seized upon a major theme, the amoral intrusion of science into our very minds and genes...