On Stage

...On Stage GOOD, BAD AND INDIFFERENT BY WALTER SORELL Two melodramas and a comedy recently premiered-one rather good, one bad, the third indifferent The first, at the Royale Theater, is Child's Play, Robert Marasco's initial Broadway attempt Far from what the title implies, it treats of evil for its own sake as well as for man's The background is a Roman Catholic boys' prep school, with Joe Mielzmer's Gothiclike set and ingenious fighting creating the eerie mood necessary for accepting flagellation, self-infhcted wounds, physical and mental torture, and finally murder Two parallel plots merge mto mounting terror, starting with a brief incident that has one of the schoolboys taunting a teacher and provoking him to strike We sense immediately that in the end the tables will be turned, but before the boys gang up to kill their Mr Chips, they torture or seriously injure other students The accompanying plot dramatizes the deadly hatred between two faculty members, pitting a studious disciplinarian against a jovial old teacher who never outgrew his boyhood mentality The latter's relentless and vicious persecution of his colleague to save "his" boys from a taskmaster is as fnghtemng as the students' lurking violence Evil done in the name of good is juxtaposed against the boys' brutality, a menace one oan neither name nor pinpoint, but which grows in its own shadow, with fear and malevolence quickly changing Source and reason for the youngster's sinister actions are never explained It is clear, however, that they serve as background orchestration to the solo parts, the fatal struggle between the two teachers And their hatred, in turn, reflects the senseless violence of the young In a New York Times interview, Marasco admitted that although he always starts writing comedy, invariably a mysterious sense of menace seems to overwhelm him There is, of course, a close kinship between farce and melodrama, but it seems to me that the one funny role written mto the play was put there far less for comic relief than for creating a voice through which the author might speak freely It would appear that by donning the fool's cap, Marasco has given himself permission in this strongly autobiographic work to say what was weighing heavily on his mind Taken as sheer entertainment...

...Child's Play is a gripping Grand Guignol, Broadway has not seen such harmonious acting, brilliantly directed by Joseph Hardy, m a long time Pat Hingle finds the ideal image for his personality in the jovial old schoolmaster, and Fritz Weaver gives one of the best characterizations of his career m the role of disciplinarian As a physical education teacher...

...Ken Howard creates a touching figure of innocence frightemngly caught in an increasing awareness of the worst m man-the only character in this drama who matures in front of our eyes from a playful boy to a responsible man One might see in Child's Play a parable of our time, reflecting the alHoo-familiar menace in the dark, the fear that brings out the evil in us, the patronizing empty gestures of love, and the refusal to understand out of sheer hatred And if I am reading more into it than some might think the text implies, perhaps that is because this work, written with integrity and skill, merits greater praise than the momentary relief and acclamation that has greeted it for being the first decent play produced on Broadway this season I cannot say the same for The White House Murder Case, the satiric melodrama by Jules Feiffer at the Circle in the Square Whether intended as a cabaret skit or a walking cartoon I am not sure, but I am inclined to think it is a cabaret idea executed in the manner of a cartoon Like Child's Play, it has two parallel plots and deals with the phenomenon of violence But here the comparison ends Marasco is a painstaking dramatist who takes his craft seriously, Feiffer takes his convictions more seriously than his craft He does not develop characters, he creates tableaux The roles are two- and sometimes only one-dimensional, the dialogue a series of captions accompanying a sardonic comic strip Presenting a diabolic view of how government business is conducted at the White House, the action takes place sometime m the future, in a Presidential election year The United States is involved in an interventionist war in Brazil, and by accident, a new poisonous gas has been released Because of adverse winds, 750 men in an American battalion are wiped out, others gradually lose limb after limb, while the commanding general, the very caricature of a corrupt and twisted man, participates m the White House discussions of how best to tell the American people what has happened The second part of the play is a clownish spoof on how the White House would solve a murder story The President's wife, who has loined the peace movement, is murdered with a picket sign carrying the slogan "Make Love, Not War," as she tries to pass on important secret information to the New York Times The political comic strips illustrating these goings-on are interrupted every eight or 10 minutes by war-horror "commercials Two soldiers affected by the gas progressively disintegrate in a Beckett-like manner from scene to scene The visual impact of these vignettes is so strong that one has the inescapable feeling of watching a live Feiffer drawing Yet the paial-lel action of antiwar propaganda and burlesque satire do not go well together As often happens when viewing TV, I thought the "commercials" had the bettei lines and bite Although one cannot reproach Feiffer for being a cartoomst, one must question his presenting a cartoon as theater The White House Mutdei Case is a sequence of black-outs, and the Second City cast, used to these quick takes, fortunately does a very good job with a very tricky task Directoi Alan Arkin has mght-clubbed some of these black-outs, others have inspired him to gimmicky wit It is a pity that Feiffer did not do dramaturgic justice to his forthright convictions If you do not know that some of the greatest men in history were homosexual, from Socrates and Alexander the Great to Andre Gide and the best window dressers of our time-including the son of a Midwestern dry cleaner in Norman, Is That You7-then I recommend this lightweight comedy at the Lyceum Theater Lou Jacobi portrays the part of a father whose wife has run off with his own brother Coming to New York to find solace in his son, Norman, he discovers instead one Garson Ho-bart, his progeny's unmistakably girlish roommate When it begins to dawn upon the father that Norman is queer, the already shaky bottom is knocked out of his dry cleaning existence After failing with old-fashioned paternal persuasion to convince the boy that he is on the wrong road to marital happiness, the father tries the Trojan horse trick and brings a high-priced call girl to Norman's apartment In the process of trying to save his son's disoriented soul and body, however, he learns from a dozen-odd books that there are at least two ways of looking at homosexuality As a good dry cleaner, he ought to have known there are two ways of pressing pants That the authors, Ron Clark and Sam Bobick, felt induced to teach their middle-class hero a lessen is acceptable But letting him loose on the audience with a Brechtian educational harangue is hitting below the belt—whatever the sex and its inclination When I entered the lobby on the second-night performance, the walls were plastered with posters trumpeting the good notices, all constructed around the root-word "fun" "A very funny show'"—Judith Crist, nbc, "Lou Jacobi is a wonderfully tunny fellow"—Richard Watts, New York Post, "A comic nugget of a play Funny is funny"—Time magazine Personally, I found this nugget—a solid precious lump, according to my dictionary—neither solid nor precious It is, rather, a sticky mass of old and new, good and bad jokes, squeezed into five thin scenes and whipped into seeming shape by director George Abbott Jacobi, a good actor who usually excels in bad situations, has to work hard to make his predicament seem comic, while Walter Willison is delightful as the girlish Garson Maureen Stapleton gives a sympathetic performance as the mother, but appears only in the last scene It must indeed be dreadful to feel compelled to run away after 26 years of marriage, and then be disgusted by your lover, to return to an Ohio dry cleaner with your only son's girl friend—who is a boy?while the son himself is drafted into the Army ("But it's cheaper than a wedding," is one of the last jokes ) Yet worse than all this is seeing a fine actress like Miss Stapleton having to accept such a role Should you miss this comedy, don't worry Given the rate at which permissiveness seems to be making inroads into all the media, five years hence we will no doubt find Norman, Is That You7 on tv, where it belongs And New York Times critic Jack Gould will write that the premise and jokes are, with five exceptions, rather poor and obvious...

...that the play when first produced on Broadway may have had a touch of the new and daring to make light of something so serious, but the work concerns something so natural it isn't really very funny After all, some of our best friends are homosexuals...