On Stage

...Duff and Beth are married and have served a rich man With a clumsiness that makes me doubt any refining of his technique, Pinter implies that their marriage achieved its present stasis after Duff told Beth he had been unfaithful Or did it...

...On Stage LESS IS MORE NOTHING IS EVERYTHING BY HARRIS GREEN An adaptation by Frank McMahon and two one-act plays apiece from Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter have convinced me that originality, like courage, is a relative virtue A criminal may be brave, yet his bravery satisfies only himself Similarly, a playwright whose creative energies are dissipated in puckish eccentricity, or one who willfully tills stony ground, offers us a meager reward Henceforth no craftsman who fashions a full evening's pleasure will be scorned by me just because he echoes another instead of thundering out original nonsense McMahon, an American now living in Ireland, adapted Brendan Behan's memoir...

...says an old-tune Western badman in Hand to Willie, the creature from Outer Space who has brought him back from the dead to liberate Nogo, an oppressed planet a galaxy or so away "Fierce morons," says Willie, twitching to the ululations of the ARP Synthesizer References to nerve gas and assassinated Presidents may reassure those who still believe Shepard will develop into a serious-and by that I do not mean "solemn"-playwright For me, however, his writing comes alive only when he is larking about in the detritus of Pop, confecting loving variations on themes culled from Westerns and Flash Gordon serials Monologue still gushes up for eons at a stretch and, as you may have guessed, Hand has a plot so insanely complex yet simple-minded that much numbing exposition is required for it to get absolutely nowhere (Willie returns to Nogo alone, by the miracle of teleporta-tion, of course ) Lee Kissman, Beeson Carroll and David Selby play spacemen and badmen with infectious boyish glee under Jeff Bleckner's unflagging direction An truly promising situation develops about midway m Forensic, when two aspiring revolutionaries, planning to tunnel into a government installation, start fighting with each other over that ultimate Symbol of Power, a cop's revolver Shepard soon abandons this development to indulge in comic by-play tailored for his wife, O-Lan Johnson-Shepard, whose unique allure had distracted the cop into losing his revolver in the first place I can well understand why As a New Left moll, or possibly squaw, she presents the oddest packaging for sex since Mae West swung into view I dare say her saucer eyes, Shredded-Wheat hair and five-foot height will be just as engaging when she is no longer eight months pregnant The cop kneaded his groin in lust Shepard merely copped out, resolving nothing at the end-simply obscuring the stage with clouds of dry-ice fog so the cast could sneak off If, as I think, he just stopped writing when the play bored him, then my tedium sensibility is in advance of his Our most modish playwrights are pushing Mies van der Rohe's dictum, "Less is more," to an extreme wbce nothing is everything Harold Pinter's Landscape and Silence, now at Lincoln Center's Forum-suitably miniscule for a running time, with intermission, of about an hour—were said to have been marred by bad acting The acting could have been better, God knows, but there is a limit to what can be done for the kind of minimal art Pinter produces m his new, drastically simplified style Many have likened this to Beckett, but Beckett's abstracted universality justifies and sustains his reductions Pinter remains realistic The best cast m the world could not make drama ot these mere disconnected reminiscences In Silence, three people (named for some reason Ellen, Rumsey and Bates) toss out fragments ot recall from the bare stage where they sit with their backs to one another "She dresses for my eyes She listens, looking down " Their rare dialogues hardly raise the temperature "Do you want to go anywhere " "Yes" "Where9" "I don't know" Exhausted by such conflict, they return to their chairs "I go up with the milk The sky hits me ' Some of this is reprised before intermission By comparison, Landscape seems three-dimensional We learn that its two characters...

...Originality of this sort has already destroyed cabaret satire by making the parodist redundant Theater seems to be next...

...And—after hearing Duff talk to Beth ("The dog's gone I didn't tell you") and hearing Beth talk only to herself ("I would like to walk by the sea It is there")-who cares...

...Who knows...

...Borstal Boy, for The Abbey Theater, and the play now gracing the stage of the Lyceum is a re-creation of the Dublin production Admittedly, that is a great deal of second-hand effort, but I assure you the result is full-blooded theater-not like those skeletal affairs one usually gets when a movie or bestseller, pared to the bone tries to transfer its prior success to this alien, demanding medium McMahon understands the stage, and he treasures Behan's ingratiating chronicle ot his fecklessly brief career as a 16-year-old IRA terrorist Arrested in Liverpool before he could unpack his suitcase, much less set off a bomb Behan was sentenced to three years in Borstal, an English reformatory Aided immeasurably by Tomas MacAnna's designs and direction, McMahon dramatizes this ute du passage in a Brechtian epic-theater style that is true to the original and a joy to watch Though the writing falters a bit in Act II, MacAnna's production is steady throughout Terse, well-paced scenes sweep one along through a host of artfully suggested settings-a grimy doorway, a granular cell wall, a paint-scabbed cot In the background hangs an ever-present haze that Neil Peter Jamp-olis' evocative lighting does not so much pierce as transform into the acrid smoke of battle, the drifting Dublin fog of O'Flaherty and Ford, or the sweet enveloping incense of Mother Church Behan himself calls the events forth from the mists of time He is always on stage, played in duplicate by the two stars of the Abbey production Niall Toiban, looking shockingly like the original (but for having a full set of teeth), ambles about near the proscenium, commenting on each scene and bursting into song when things look especially grim Frank Grimes, full of talent, charm and energy, is all over the rest of the stage as Young Behan He is frequently flat upon it as well, floored by his jailers or that other sadistic prankster, lite "Go on," says Toibin as Grimes arises to shout continued defiance, "throw the hammer after the hatchet " And so he does, cursing his captors and this larger jail that imprisons us all "I always had an answer ready, historically informed and obscene," Toibin remarks Like much in Boistal Boy, two actors simultaneously playing the same character is a terribly familiar device, and I shall certainly deplore it the moment it ceases to work Here it supplies that one essential so often lacking m adaptations, the author's commentary Toibin's diy, flawlessly uninflected speech flavors the evening with Behan's special blend of fatalism and mordant wit ("It was said to be the healthiest cemetery in all Ireland for it was by the sea") When, in Act II, the action shifts to the Borstal reformatory, it is Behan who keeps the play fiom becoming an all-boy vaudeville, like Biothei Rat or Mister Robeits There are plenty of easy chuckles in the scene where the young prisoners attend mass and virtually convert the chapel into a den of iniquity, smoking cigarettes amid the altar's swirling fumes and reading tabloids by the candles' light But McMahon does not try for the easy laugh, since he knows that these boys who will be boys have also been thieves and murderers Instead, he adds Behan's wryly humane comments on the spectacle, and the lads kneeling before the footlights become a panorama of mcorrigibility that we can only regard, Behan-fashion, with a laugh and a curse combined McMahon's single lapse ot tone occurs during one of the several beatings administered to the resilient Grimes, when Toibin observes that such blows to the kidneys could well lead to an early death I think Behan would have jeered this preemption of blame For he was a self-destructing talent, like Dylan Thomas, maddened by the knowledge of how good he was and how much better he had to be One need only glance from Toibm, all worn and rumpled, to Grimes, ablaze with youth's glory, to feel the poignant irony MacAnna's Abbey production must have undergone many a sea change on its voyage from Dublin, sailing as it had to between the Charybdis of hiring Equity people before it could dock, and the Scylla of double-casting them to break even I have no idea what the Borstal inmates looked like at the Abbey, but at the Lyceum they give new meaning to the terra "old boy " Americanization does cause some choppy going but Borstal Boy offers so much to see, to hear and to cherish that I must give those who sailed her into our port the same heart-felt salute Young Behan gave one who'd done him a great favor "Your blood should be bottled" Indeed, Sam Shepard could use the transfusion His Off-Broadway double-bill of The Unseen Hand and Forensic and the Navigators showed a considerable advance in humor over Operation Sidewinder, but little in discipline "Who guards that region...