On Stage

...On Stage GROAN AND BEAR m BY HARRIS GREEN his is the year when either actors take it all off or producers put it back on—nudity and revivals have been with us to an unprecedented extent Yet I would credit neither with this season's equally unprecedented badness Nudity on stage can be artful and essential, and a great play, by definition, is one we must see again The questions a critic should ask, therefore, are "Is this strip really necessary9" and "Was the play ever worth doing9" If both can be answered "Yes" (and we may well be seeing worthy revivals in which a nude scene is more than a box-office gimmick), then we must consider the performance In this vital matter, on-stage nakedness has already effected a great difference in quality So far, bare performers have shown me everything but ability The better actors, out of fear for their careers or pride in their profession, are obviously not taking it off Were my mathematics sharper, I would formulate a law giving the wary theatergoer the inverse ratio of acting skill to simple exhibitionism Economics would be one essential factor in the equation, inept players who sign on with a flesh-merchant producer may well have been employed so rarely that they are desperate enough to do anything If I ever work it out, I will call it Green's First Law of Thermal Dramatics, in acknowledgment of another discomfort audiences must endure at nude shows an overheated house Nudity came into view Off-Off-Broadway, where actmg standards are notoriously low, performers young, and revolutionary attitudes obligatory Tom O'Horgan and Jacques Levy, the two directors who have done most to strip away the commercial theater's inhibitions, got their starts there O'Horgan, who added the now historic be-m to Hair, began at La Mama, swathing the cast m gauze for Tom Paine and setting them to grope at one another's barely covered bodies, Gro-towski fashion, m Futz1 Levy sent a bare-breasted actress out m Scuba Duba before he bared his entire cast m Oh' Calcutta' The Lmdsay Administration's permissiveness toward such revelations gave producers a few more ideas Che has been the only play closed so far, apparently for its politics Neither The Livmg Theater nor Richard Schechner's troupe was harassed for discarding clothes along with craftsmanship Also tolerated have been several Off-Broadway productions aimed at a none too discriminating homosexual trade It may be some cause for hope that a decent play, John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, was revived for this crowd and is having a better run than the voyeuristic junk, but Sal Mmeo's production is cause for alarm if it is a portent Pretty boy prisoners, shower-equipped cells and weepy confrontations quite remove the play from the grim realities of prison life that concerned Herbert The current use of nudity in the theater is epitomized on Broadway in Grin and Bate It', a one-acter old enough to be a revival but never before done professionally When Tom Cushmg wrote it in 1928, he called the work "the unplayable play" because its entire cast had to be naked One gets a decided sense of progress knowing that Broadway has achieved this plateau of accomplishment, allowing mne—count em'—thoroughly commonplace performers to bound about in the raw Grin and Bare It1 is about nothing but nudism The only characters who appear dressed—and they soon stnp—are a bride-to-be and her "hopelessly Boston" fiance, who have arrived at her family's secluded estate outside Los Angeles so he can meet his prospective inlaws Blissfully unaware at first that he is marrying into a family of sun-worshippers, he begins to suspect as much when each member comes swinging along in a state he describes as "starko " After considerable confusion and good clean fun —for adapter Ken McGurre is a nudist and his script is about as salacious as a 20-year-old copy of Sunshine & Health—the fiance joins the cult because it means so much to his bride Along the way, "sun and a'r" arc mtinly contused with "son and heir " T us theatncal milestone, as you nuy have gathered, is a millstone as well The period setting by David Mitchell is the only stage-worthy creation on view David Chnstmas' playing of the Bostonian is so inept that he never even tries to speak with the propei legional accent, had he done so, I'm sine he would have bungled it as badly as he did the several opportunities tor elementary farce the role provides The other performers are little bettei Finally, none of the bodies would make a Michelangelo reach for his chisel or a Renoir his brush, but a couple of the ladies might mspire an Al Capp Watching the cast stride around, piteously exposed, I felt I was seeing this foolish season made flesh m one sad production Revivals on Broadway thus fai have taken the form of old hits exhumed for a dying generation of theatergoers, or movies set to music for a younger age group The Front Page and Out Town were honored with the kind of "all-star, limited-run" production that genuine classics used to get For those who prefer non-Broadway fare, the season has offered a travesty of this select appioach in a part-time gym in Yorkville called Sokol Hall, inflicted upon Giraudoux' The Madwoman of Chatllot This bare-bones effort was apparently intended as a tribute to 83-year-old Blanche Yurka, who co-starred with a rather dim galaxy of familiar names from theater, tv, radio and the best-seller list Peggy Wood, Leonard Sillman, Hilda Simms, Staats Cotswoith, Jacqueline SusannP) Even Giraudoux' limited exercise in whimsey deserved more rehearsal than it got here Very old or very young bit players stood around like store-wmdow dummies, watching the leads fluff their lines with as tangled a mass of accents as one could hear this side of the UN The run was more "limited" than anyone expected, but if it kept Miss Susann away from her typewriter a while, then it was not a total loss (She can't act either ) M ?? playing and noblei intentions aie available farther downtown, at 89 West Third Street There an Off-Off-Broadway group, the CSC Repertory, is doing Shaw's Man and Supetman, Betti's Boat Island and, by the time this review appears, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya plus an adaptation by CSC's artistic-director, Christopher Martin, of Moby-Dick After seeing the Shaw, I would say this three-year-old company organized by NYU students deserves attention, encouragement and, above all, patronage I hope I put off none of these by discussing some weaknesses—as indeed I must The ladies, at least in Man and Superman, are rather grim, with the exception of Myra Rubm, who fleshes out Mrs Whitefield very well (a name I am certain should be pronounced "Whitfield," not "Wlute&tld) A couple of the men aie completely thrown by the foreign accents, while Martin Kove seems at a loss when impersonating an American—the result, I hope, of following Shaw's phonetic dialogue too closely As for the group's assets, its theater, though cursed with two stalwart poles in its arena playing area, has comfortable seats and an acceptable lighting setup Many of its actors are quite good Paul E Domger does not look like Octavius to me, but he manages his many emotional shifts gracefully Ronn Mullen needs more gruff and less strut as Rams-den—and certainly as The Statue?but I was glad to have his musical diction and delivery Harris Laskawy, as Mendoza and later The Devil, could have done with fewer lapses into a Yiddish lilt while m Hell He has a good voice, though, a fine sense of timing and enough personal magnetism to keep you watching him when he is doing absolutely nothing (He knows when to do nothing, too ) Laskawy could probably earn a nice little fortune in those roles George C Scott hasn't time for, but I hope he rises higher than that Artistic-director Martin, another forceful and personable actor, did double duty by playing Tanner and directing Unfortunately, he directed most of the cast better than he did himself in those long crackling speeches Tanner uncoils Since Shaw was a superb music critic and Man and Superman is a sort of opeia buffa with a high IQ, I am not mixing metaphors in advising Martin to use less fot ttssimo and presto, and more rubato—slowing down on the vital words for emphasis Otherwise, he has paced this uncut performance very well, with no more gimmickry than having Yosef Karsh's famous photographic portrait of GBS light up to utter excerpts from The Revolutionist's Handbook as entr'actes And I lather liked that Rave reviews and foundation grants might have flowed in had Martin indulged in some of today's fashionable theatrical vandalism, but CSC is not that kind of company Despite occasional posturing by Martin as Don Juan and a rather gushy embodiment of the Female Principle by Marianne Creamer, The Hell Scene came off well enough to give a solid intellectual core to the evening, making one tolerate not only the flaws in CSC but in the play as well (the chilliness of Shaw's Superman, the silliness of the subplot) And how doubly gratifying to hear the Scene's devilish wit anud an audience of young Village cultural innocents, hushed by the discovery that theirs is not the first generation to prefer a war on poverty to one on their brothers Clearly, there are many other cultural voids CSC can fill I hope it keeps fighting the good fight—and managing it better, too—for many seasons to come...