On Stage
GREEN, HARRIS
On Stage PLUNDERING THE PAST BY HARRIS GREEN IN THEIR search for material today, playwrights and producers have turned to literature in much the same way Renaissance sculptors and architects...
...The Renaissance men reduced their sources of supply to rubble but they did create...
...Consider the word "fits...
...Like the trendspotters among our reviewers, whose raves have assured Subject a longer run, he has caught the virus enfeebling the arts today, making novelty a virtue, experimentation a goal and almost anything done by youth an achievement...
...As it is, I can extend only qualified praise to Sills & Co...
...The lectern manner can provide only a monochromatic substitute for O'Casey's local color...
...She is piping away in a tattered little wisp of a voice that wickedly imitates one of the several banes of my existence, the contemporary folksinger...
...whose career would not exist if it weren't for a battery of unfolksy technological marvels—mikes, amplifiers, tape— to magnify her tender hymns to the simplicities of the good life...
...Such busywork doesn't impress me...
...Matters are not helped by the play's moving on to Jabez Stone, since he did not sell his soul to the devil (Scratch) for power but for a better life...
...On Stage PLUNDERING THE PAST BY HARRIS GREEN IN THEIR search for material today, playwrights and producers have turned to literature in much the same way Renaissance sculptors and architects turned to the structures of antiquity...
...A dramatization of the myth of Phae'thon has no business ending with a winking epilogue couched as a warning to youth about driving "father's car...
...A hired man tells Webster that this marks his —and, apparently, America's— choosing Power over Freedom...
...One can be certain only that the expansion played hell with Benet's original to no good result...
...They are charming, clever, talented—if only Ovid had supplied them with the kind of tales that could be dramatized adequately in their light-hearted, facile manner...
...for reminding us again of the joys of live performance—while unintentionally revealing the limitations of their own approach...
...It's short on ideas but well-stocked with riots, death-watches and the various pleasures Dublin afforded in the '90s...
...Accents ranged from Minsk to Minsky's...
...Fragments of the novel protrude here and there, tossed about like confetti by Montgomery's prankishness...
...Paul Shyre's Pictures in the Hallway, a dramatization of the earlier portion of Sean O'Casey's autobiography, was revived on short notice at Lincoln Center's Forum to substitute for the previously announced play...
...The two-fold moral I drew from this speedy flop was: (1) For a relevant adaptation, one adapts something relevant...
...Will Geer's Scratch was less devilishly delicious than Walter Huston's in the 1941 Dieterle movie, but it was infinitely more bearable than Patrick Magee's Webster...
...and (2) one doesn't let Archibald MacLeish do it...
...If this droning Irish ham whose one concession to American English was "meb-be" is the best actor the producer could hire, then our theater has already gone to hell...
...O'Casey's rather too alliterative prose does not lend itself to abstraction...
...Would that all of Ovid could have been metamorphosized as happily...
...There, Montgomery could have indulged himself in puns, the one form of language he employs with skill...
...I fear Montgomery has heeded too well the urgings of Richard Gilman, one of his teachers at Yale Drama School, to make theater "brash . . . disturbing...
...Didn't the old Hollywood hacks take and retake scenes where an actor lit a cigarette or crossed a room, poured a drink or climbed a stair...
...But he has seized upon a disastrous credo for an artist—even for a fledgling playwright with a ready-made masterpiece to futz around with...
...Archibald MacLeish's Scratch, the only outright adaptation I have to consider, was a fusty, uncertain attempt to expand Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" into a relevant commentary about America Today, I think...
...Montgomery is said to be having his way with The Possessed now...
...After what he's gotten away with so far, I suggest he call this "response" Crime Without Punishment...
...It is typical of MacLeish's tepid updating that his joke about vice presidents slipped my mind before I could jot it down...
...I was particularly taken by their retelling of the myth of Picus, who foolishly spurned the advances of Circe because he loved Canens, a nymph whose voice had won his heart...
...Producer Papp may well leap to the defense of Subject by citing, as proof of Montgomery's seriousness, the fact that he rewrote it 20 times before he had his Idiot-ic fragments arranged as Papp wished...
...Shyre's directing his cast of five to dress in costume and to leave their stools occasionally to grope and writhe toward one another reminds us that we are also getting a rather drab substitute for theater...
...Subject to Fits, described by its 24-year-old author, Robert Montgomery, as "a response to Dostoyev-sky's The Idiot," is nothing but wreckage, a junk heap of highjinks on one of the arena stages at Joe Papp's Public Theater...
...If a line is uttered worthy of Dostoyev-sky ("You, alone, must know how much I detest my mediocrity"), someone else utters another unworthy of anyone ("You're the pick of the nose of manhood...
...they seemed no more out of place on a stage than everyone else...
...Stand-ins filled the parts of Myshkin and Rogozhin when I attended...
...A young playwright is doubly treasured at a time when youth is said to care only for moviemaking and rock...
...Papp is no hack, out for the quick buck, but his notions of art are as debased as Hollywood's...
...our contemporaries set their ruins upon our stages and insist these are theater...
...Because it worked then, actors are still lecturing at us...
...One would think that a critical essay would be the proper "response" to a novel...
...By far the oddest feature of this triumphantly odd creation is its being on stage at all...
...He has it refer to Myshkin's epilepsy, recur in "counterfeits," and carry some philosophical weight of sorts in comments like "nothing ever fits or makes sense," which he feels is the ultimate insight into life, as well as art...
...Picus, I insist, would like a folksinger...
...They shouldn't, though, unless they have on their lecterns speeches so passionately and wittily concerned with ideas that actors who speak them with heat and light, the two qualities Shaw prized most, will need no more props than a stool to perch on...
...Pictures has been around long enough to serve another purpose: Pointing up the confines of that reading-from-lecterns method Paul Gregory and Charles Laughton devised 20 years ago to present the Don Juan in Hell sequence from Man and Superman...
...Not every little show that's done alive should be considered theater...
...Often the cast bursts into song, as if it were appearing in the worst possible collaboration of Brecht and Weill...
...Those artists would demolish any nearby Roman amphitheater or triumphal arch if they thought they had a better use for its marble...
...But having sampled youth's films and its lieder, I would say theater has suffered no artistic loss by having such talent avoid it...
...Our theatrical artisans now quarry novels, poems, autobiographies—anything that can somehow be transformed into a live performance...
...now that I've seen Aline MacMahon play a long-suffering mother, a slatternly old junk dealer and a prim bookkeeper in precisely the same fashion, I feel I have sampled all the art she can provide...
...I kept getting the disconcerting impression that the cataclysmic pranks of fate and the gods were being presented in a sort of sophisticated, with-it version of Walt Disney...
...Or that themes crying out for symphonic treatment were being scaled down for a divertimento or a serenade...
...Two of the four scenes were devoted exclusively to Webster and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850...
...I presume he cut class the day Gilman taught that not everything brash and disturbing is automatically art...
...Yet I would be dishonest, as well as ungrateful, if I denied the joy Sills' ingratiating bunch often delivers...
...gasps Paul Sands as Picus, burying his face in the drapery of Penny White, as Canens...
...A belated quest for perfection can't offset a basic error about producing a pile of trash...
...Great harm will come if the stage is given over to philistine sensibilities that consider art a pointless affair, a playful matter of anyone's doing his thing—anything...
...Montgomery may, with the weight of years upon him, have come to as good a conclusion about life as any...
...Public Theater's characteristically amateurish production was poetic justice, of a kind, but the audience suffered from it as much as Montgomery did...
...MacLeish's dramatization of his dilemma isn't all that dramatic, either...
...The myth of Procris and Cephalus deserves better treatment than a Bronze Age soap opera, complete with throbbing organ accompaniment...
...A confrontation between Myshkin and Rogozhin is interrupted by the rest of the cast, traipsing through Indian-file, dropping pointless asides as they pass ("I'm getting hungry...
...It's beautiful, don't stop...
...In Metamorphoses, at the Ambassador, Paul Sills' company of im-provisers are applying his Stoiy Theater approach to Ovid, combining mime and song, dialogue and narrative, in a manner that deserves all the adjectives I had no use for in describing Papp's mingy troupe...
...I would welcome seeing Stephen McHattie, Michael McGuire and Helena Carroll under other circumstances...
...TWO RECENT short-lived affairs deserve discussion because they too reminded us of what should not be considered theater...
...he merely demonstrates it...
...He does not prove his point about senselessness here...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
