On Stage

...Since she neither grinds out junk for movies (who would dare buy the rights to Expensive People...

...The cast of five men and three women do not enact plays but playlets--based on Grimm, Andersen and Aesop, among others--that they have dramatized themselves in rehearsal under Sills...

...Paul Sand can make his face, body and manner suit everything from a brigand lover to a manic-depressive hound...

...Dinner is set in "an American home in our time" where the fine old native ritual of the title is being conducted by four single, aging grotesques and a young moronic brother...

...Now Zakrzewski comes along with his updated "concept"--featuring a madcap Friar Lawrence as well as Mercutio and Tybalt as ex-lovers--but his "protest" and "comment" seem just as soft, for all their tough shell...

...In South Pacific 20 years ago, good old Oscar cheapened the very concept of brotherhood with "You've Got to Be Taught," putting it on the same dreamy level as boy-meets-girl sentiment...

...It sounds like more of the fashionable and opportunistic fare we've had in abundance ever since Hair became a hit, though Bill Brohn's arrangements do cushion the numbing impact of amplification and eternal basso ostinato by assigning some bars to a harp and a string quartet...

...Richard Libertini can be a henpecked husband or a hen-snatching fox, while Richard Schaal can be any ass...

...and Score, an Off Broadway effort in the round as well as the raw...

...and (3) although apt has not discovered a playwright "of distinction," it has found in Kurt Lundell a designer of merit...

...Abruptly...

...a ragged, blind--yet menacing--Census Taker appears to sound a chord of Pinter-esque dread...

...S. had taken on in Scene 1. "When rejection comes, can middle age be far behind...

...Hamid Hamilton Camp and Peter Bonerz become Aesop's two crows when they simply don inky black baseball caps with long yellow bills and begin to walk with a quirky sway...

...Their chief topics are the decline of all standards (the cemetery is a mess...

...At that he succeeds, I assure you...

...This dramatizing consists of having the performer who portrays the simpleton or the goose or the princess speak not only the lines of the character but any narration connected with the role...

...at the same time, a blessedly discreet, unnaturally gifted rock group, The True Brethren, says all there is to say about such hysteria by performing Country Joe McDonald's "Fixin' to Die Rag," a sardonic paean to Vietnam fervor...

...The questions of Miss Oates have exhausted me, so I'll not field this one--particularly since I somehow feel Douglas is really interested not in commenting upon today's often sad sexual fervor but in stripping the cast in four of his five scenes...

...I am certain of only three things: (1) Miss Oates, for all her gifts, is no playwright...

...He observes the Aristotelian unities by confining all activity to the Queens apartment of a jaded swinger couple bored by those who respond to their ad in Screw ("Every time I turned over, there was a new appendectomy scar"), and by keeping his action within 24 hours...

...The title song, by the way, is a pleasant ballad ("Trees are green, the greenest green") that could have fitted nicely into an old Walt Disney live-action feature...

...Besides, it is supposed to be "new baptized"--but let's forget it, shall we...

...Jerry Douglas, who wrote and directed Score, is not the man...

...In their version of "Henny Penny," Valerie Harper, by far the best of the girls, goes bustling about the stage spreading her message of celestial instability among the unthinking...

...S. beds the lass' innocent young latent-homosexual husband, too, but bliss is fleeting...

...Bruce Scott, Ron Martin and Joe Masiell are talented enough to fit into any show...

...and the disappearance, years ago, of Father...

...And they are so personable, gifted and witty that they can work upon our imaginations with such spare props as a bench, some projections and the starkly exposed battery of lights at the Ambassador Theater...

...I can spread no more gloom about this method, however, for the performance of Sills' troupe in no way resembles those other group efforts...

...It works so well that I fear producers may soon start hiring talented actors who can mime, and borrowing suitably short works from the treasure-trove of world literature--thus permanently bypassing those who persist in scribbling away in splendid isolation, toiling to reduce dialogue, incident, setting, and character to that essence we once termed "a play...

...Is he Father"} And when the young moron--who may be a cop since he talks about polishing "my badge"--gouges out one of the old man's eyes and takes over his dark glasses and cane, are we witnessing a vision of the police state...

...And Mr...

...Score, the nudie, proved to be a milestone of sorts: It is the first full-length play about bisexuals logically to require its cast to strip on stage, and features two performers, Lynn Swan and Ben Wilson, who actually seem talented enough to eat without having to go "starko" (a locution I picked up at last season's Grin and Bare It...

...They lose this promising and unscarred pair to the oafish telephone repairman Mrs...

...A couple of original works did open during this time of reworks: Sunday Dinner, by the alarmingly prolific Joyce Carol Oates, produced by the American Place Theater (apt) for its long-suffering subscribers...

...The idea may be a greater menace to the creative individual than anything to come out of those repulsive collectives run by Grotowski or the Becks...

...Appallingly contemporary (yes, our star-crossed lovers die from an overdose of drugs) and very moving--if you know Shakespeare and know you are supposed to be moved by the demise of two kids whom Zakrzewski's lyrics and plotless adaptation do not bring to life in the first place...

...They are fresh from that other weekly routine, The Visit to Mother's Grave, and reminiscing madly in response to baby brother's simple-minded requests...

...Douglas seems to be asking...

...Instead of reworking the fine old story, he uses the audience's knowledge of it as a frame of reference on which he hangs a virtually nonstop medley of songs about alienated youth, horrid, impotent, old parents and violence in the streets at home and abroad...

...In the true Pinter (not to be confused with the true Oates) mode, the chord is never resolved...

...His players have not chosen to protest the dehumanizing pressures of our time by becoming extremists of "freedom" or converts to bestiality...

...I felt I was in the presence of an author but not in the grip of a playwright...

...It is difficult to dread all the effects Sills' Story Theater may have when one sees the essentials of the performing arts used so delightfully and in so contemporary a manner...

...In addition, she has exchanged the grind-of-life approach that served her so well in Them and A Garden of Earthly Delights for something I guess we must term "Absurdist Gothic...

...nor writes many plays, I was pained to find much of the dialogue in Dinner sounding like rehashed narrative...

...Now all we need is a playwright to carry nude theater on to glory...

...Wally Harper's music is little help...

...2) Patrick McVey's portrayal made the Census Taker about as menacing as a Bowery derelict awakening after a bout with the d.t.'s...

...Miss Oates, whose first play was done at the Actors Studio five years ago, is definitely one of those "American writers of consequence" apt boasts about bringing into our theater but rarely does...

...Will she make it...

...Sills' performers know, too, exactly when and how to season their whimsy with a dash of acrid comment...

...Swinger has set for corrupting the innocent young newly-wed wife from across the street...

...John Savage may have been hired for this kind of Romeo because of the havoc his accent would wreak on the few incongruous chunks of Shakespeare that occasionally bob to the surface : "Call me but love, and I'll be babtized anoo...

...For all the diverting distraction of Jerry Dodge's energetic production and the Eckarts' shiny steel and junk-sculpture setting, I still found myself thinking almost every time a song burst upon me that Zakrzewski was little more than a radical-chic version of Oscar Ham-merstein II...

...Is he really blind...

...They neither behave like a baboon colony engaged in calisthenics nor devastate the stage in order to rebuild it...

...The success of the Yale Drama School (where Sills has also worked) with stories by Philip Roth enabled director Larry Arrick to have his Story Theater, too...

...On Stage THREE PLAYS WITHOUT A PLAYWRIGHT BY HARRIS GREEN Paul Sills' Story Theater, a bill of improvisations supervised by the Chicago cabaret impresario who discovered Nichols & May and the Second City troupe, could be yet another nail in the already well-secured coffin of the playwright...

...Most of it occurs in the final hours of the timetable Mrs...

...Yes, indeedy...

...Is this ominous ancient a symbol of Federal authority...

...Paul Zakrzewski has raided Shakespeare's treasure for his rock musical, Sensations, not so much borrowing Romeo and Juliet as looting it...