On Stage

...On Stage MURDERERS AND GABBLERS BY HARRIS GREEN c ^^^^ompared to Broadway, where plays that never had any life to begin with are being dug up for revival, Off-Broadway may seem an oasis, where one can be refreshed by works that would quickly wither m the parched wasteland of the commercial theater A closer approach to a couple of Village productions, however, finds them about as substantial as a mirage The Phoenix, a producer that always provides its own pile of ashes to rise from, would seem to be doing us a service in presenting The Criminals by Jose Tnana, the first playwright from Castro's Cuba to gain international attention But, since my Spanish is negligible, I cannot tell whether a service is being done Tnana by using Adrian Mitchell's adaptation, written for the London production by the Royal Shakespeare Company Anglicism ("Will you join in7"), rubbed against redundancy ("Then I was whacked and punished"), and awkwardness ("What we needed was to build a house") Mitchell could have boiled away as much flavor from the text as he had from its title, La Noche de los Asesmos In fact, this one-act affair about three siblings rehearsing ritualistic parricide, literally under their own roof, was so insistently obstreperous under David Wheeler's slambang direction that it might easily have been called Noise m the Attic By the time it was a third of the way through, I decided that even translating the title was a waste of time The homicidal Lalo, Beba and Cuca carom about their attic, upsetting chairs and shouting and periodically lapsing into stretches of calm for contrast They are acting out a fantasy in which their parents become their sacrificial victims Soon they start abreacting to their mem-ones of parental domination Finally, as the line between reality and fantasy dutifully blurs, they begin to enact the trial of the murderer, Lalo, with the late parents, impersonated by these swell kids, appearing to testily The actual parents were out of the house during the whole play To inject the kind of conflict they would have provided merely by climbing the stairs to see what in God's name was going on, Tnana has Cuca or Beba or Lalo take turns refusing to join the merry game, just as 'lHe Criminals is about to heave itself up onto the next level of meaning I couldn't have cared what any of them did, but I must confess to a more than passing interest when it came Beba's turn to furnish the crisis She said she didn't feel well, when they pleaded with her, she began to gag, then heave Knowing that the actress attempting this role was a Method-ist by persuasion, I feared that she might at any moment be delivered of her dinner Actually, nothing of any great depth marked this play Once, during that mock trial, I had the sensation that "Daddy" on the stand might become Big Brother, causing this turbulent family trio to embody an even bigger family The moment passed Symbol playing of such resonance simply is not possible with characters as flat and tinny as these interchangeable beings The whole production suffered by comparison with Nichols & May's unforgettable "Pirandello," which began with their pretending to be two children playing make-believe From pretending to be two children pretending to be Mommy and Daddy having a quarrel, they became Mommy and Daddy having a vicious quarrel, and then, like a horrifying closeup coming into focus on a giant movie screen, they became Nichols & May, seemingly slashing out at one another as everyone whispered they did all the time, offstage It took about 15 minutes Edmund Wilson called it one of the few moments of genuine terror he's known m the theater I had at least the reality of Nichols & May to build on in "Pirandello" In The Criminals, there was nothing but Tnana's three voids, tor whom a most unappealing cast did nothing, except to mouth Mitchell's flat lines ("Look?cmawn1 Wassa mattuh'") in a way that located this odd domestic drama firmly in Nyawk Yet when the kids whimpered something about love, just before descending to the sanguinary deed, I saw the canefields of Tnana turning into Inge's fields of corn The other Village production, that of Eedda Gabler by The Op-posites Company, is not a service to Ibsen but an homage to Eli Sie-gel, a thinker of somewhat less renown Siegel's deeper musings, lumped together under the heading "Aesthetic Realism," have become a philosophical commodity with alarming appeal for actors AR says Beauty is the making of opposites mto one—at least I think that's what it's about And another feature of the doctrine, I believe, is that Truth is the opposite of what it seems This can make for some odd interpretations It is quite possible that some actors are hooked on AR for the one-upmanship its pronouncements m-vanably contain A bad actor might be pleased to learn he's good, after all Or perhaps actors are attracted by the notion of opposites because it is their lot to make a career out of seeming to be what they are not, and they are flattered to learn they are not really hars after all The escalation of Siegel's appeal leads me to speculate that he may someday do for Broadway (or Off-Broadway) what McLuhan did for Madison Avenue AR had only mustered three converts when I first encountered it six-and-a-half years ago Now it has enough faithful not only to staff this production of Hedda but ample numbers left to go forth between shows like missionaries, foistmg handbills on prospective theater patrons in Times Square The handbills sneer at Walter Kerr for sneering at Siegel's idea that Hedda was —need I tell you?essentially a good person " Since The Opposites are threatening a Hamlet soon (he didn't love his father enough, in case you're wondermg), and since AR shows no sign of abating, I may as well expose you to some of its fevered logic now, so you can develop immunity To begin with, the play is not the thing m AR, but whatever Siegel has had to say about it And there are more things in Hedda Gabler, Eh Siegel, than are dreamt of in your philosophy T m. _ ed van Griethuysen, a 10-year man on the Siegel team and the duector of this production, refers in his program notes to the many "conversations" Hedda had with Lovborg years before the play begins It is these conversations ("intellectual and kind") that prove her "essential" goodness They influenced Lovborg's masterpiece, his history of the future, whose sole manuscript the dear girl destroys m Act III, after giving him her father's pistol to shoot himself "beautifully " I cannot refute this hypothesis, since Ibsen never wrote those conversations, and no one durmg the 24-hour span of the play repeats them Ibsen, van Griethuysen admits, "seems purposely unclear" about those discussions In confronting what Ibsen made all too clear on stage, director van Griethuysen does an about-face only a connoisseur of opposites can savor Hedda's use of the pistols, and, perhaps, her burning of the manuscript, can be questioned But the most important thing is her beginning intent Was it malice'' or spontaneous good wAP A person trymg to be honest may not be smooth " It is precisely the smoothness of his Herfrfa-accordmg-to-Siegel that prevents the abrasive conflict of drama God knows, the cast is rough1 One quickly loses hope in most of The Opposites at their entrance, when it becomes obvious that each newcomer is as lousy as the one who preceded him, with the same smg-song delivery, and run by the same rusty clockwork that made the others walk, turn this way, then that, and finally leave Van Griethuysen, who played Lovborg at my performance, did not act in this manner He actually seemed to be acting—that is, reacting to what was being said—instead of responding with the same weary rhythm that suggested the pace of the production had been set with a wrecker's ball for a metronome Some cunning bit of AR insight, I suppose, can justify his doing exactly the opposite of the other Opposites—but it is not necessary He is by no means the first ideologue to let better instincts alter his philosophy Besides, Rebecca Thompson supplied more than enough consistency as Hedda the Good Reading Ibsen, I found Hedda awesome, smoldenng in fate's confines until consumed by the spontaneous combustion of revolt Watching Miss Thompson, with her eternally moist eye, relentless monotone and propensity for collapsing prettily upon whatever furniture awaits her, I felt as if I were seeing a role Warner Brothers had custom-made for Bette Davis, then filmed with Olivia de Havil-land Whether refusing to be embraced by Aunt Juliana, who represents the smothenng togetherness and domesticity of the Tessmans, or destroying Lovborg's manuscript and thus gaining control of another's destiny in lieu of her own, Miss Thompson indicates by her own little smile and delicately tdted chin that nothing more disruptive than acid indigestion seethed within her Regardless of any essential goodness, I could not be gnpped by her polite tussle with fate General Gabler must have earned his rank m the Salvation Army if he could breed this prime specimen of middle-class bland Although I have not checked that out with Eli Siegel, Ibsen's seeming so purposely unclear on this pomt must make it so Fancy that, Opposites1...