On Stage

...The younger one loses all interest in the creature upon discovering a hippie girl out in the night (O-Lan Shepard-Johnson, the playwright's wife, who is undeniably distracting...

...The solution now being offered us by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center is a translation of Antigone by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald that makes Creon sound like a Rotarian: "And I need hardly remind you that I will have no dealings with an enemy of the people...

...John Hirsch's production seems to be laboring under a curse itself...

...O'Neill's utterly stoic self-acceptance enables him, in one particularly moving speech, to have Edmund quietly correct his father for hailing him as "a poet...

...While a case can be made for portraying Antigone as a conservative —she is, after all, intensely religious and wishes to keep the old laws— still she has to display more defiance than a well-bred yaf maiden firmly holding her temper in check during a discussion about the UN...

...There may be something tragic in the American Place Theater's waste of its cash and our time on Sam Shepard's interminable one-acter...

...Robert Ryan, for all his sincere effort as the father, diminishes the role by never once indicating that it was a great acting career he sacrificed through his miserliness...

...The older gunslinger decides he had better fight the beast here, in this already devastated swamp, before it invades his ranch...

...He dragged the Oresteia to New England for Mourning Becomes Electra...

...After we suffer through dialogue as awkward as the title and through three pointless appearances by a black folk-singing ghost, the beast finally bursts in upon us, and an ugly creature it is, too...

...and electronic cacophony, miscast as incidental music, continually rends the air...

...Greek drama, too, is frequently stripped of its grandeur by contemporary productions that either blend piety and ineptness in equal measure or run amok with misguided updating...

...Bless thee...

...and when she feeds him hallucinogenic mushrooms, he loses his mind as well...

...Martha Henry's Antigone is a primmer, brogueless version of the Pegeen Mike she gave us last winter in Playboy of the Western World...

...Eurydice is played by an actress who jarringly resembles Andy Warhol's former tragedienne...

...The actors' insistent slamming down of bottles and upending of chairs betray Brown's inability to come to terms with O'Neill...

...Frankly, I wished it had arrived sooner...

...And Ronald Wallace's lighting effectively suggests the forces that wrack the Tyrone summer cottage, with its fading sunlight, enveloping fog and inevitable night...

...Fitts and Fitzgerald orchestrate for tin bugles: "You're sick, Creon...

...Obviously Ryan was never a Shakespearean of any promise, nor does he possess that "famous beautiful voice" Jamie mentions...

...Elmon Webb and Virginia Dancy's setting uses the Promenade's cramped space to best advantage...

...Philip Bosco, for all his intensity, cannot make Creon embody every ruler who proudly confused his will with divine law...

...The playwright is trespassing upon critics' domain here, but I forgive him...

...Love can be a fatal flaw...

...Brown does handle this scene well, and it is the finest moment of young James Naughton's often too callow Edmund...

...No one laughs, for all realize that Edmund's brutal recrimination rises from the profound love he feels for her...

...If the effort of reviving these tragedies is not to be wasted, they require nothing less than the finest direction and scenic design...

...Lesser playwrights, like William Inge and Frank Gilroy, who have sprouted up like toadstools in O'Neill's shadow, have their quarreling kin resolve their differences in sticky, last-act embraces...

...The theater may become as devastated as Southeast Asia if politics continues to be given precedence over esthetics, as it has been this season at American Place...

...Back Bog Beast Bait...

...For a time, he tried wooing the tragic muse by affecting fashions that once appealed to her...

...Stacy Keach does considerably better as Jamie, despite the overly weepy moments that suggest the Tyrones wore hearts on their sleeves to match the chips on their shoulders...

...By returning to the numb, fogbound existence morphine provides her, she has disappointed the only idealist in this unsentimental family and he wants to punish her...

...Two out of three women in the Chorus lisp...

...Those are my principles, at any rate...

...Geraldine Fitzgerald, however, playing the mother as a kittenish colleen still aware of her charm, makes the part more interesting and moving than anyone else I've seen...

...A penniless widow summons two Western gunfighters to guard her shack in a swamp from a beast (said to have once been a man...

...Schmidt's representation of the royal palace at Thebes looks like a gigantic frieze with a doorway punched through it as an afterthought...

...that has castrated every young male in the region except her infant son...

...If someone as untalented and inexpressive as Foss can be considered an artist, then Western civilization has deteriorated more than the Elgin Marbles, or whatever it is that Douglas W. Schmidt mistakenly thought would make a fitting background for the Beaumont's extended stage...

...Antigone seems beat: "Is-mene, dear sister, you'd think we'd already suffered enough with the curse of King Oedipus...

...God knows, it isn't a laughing matter, despite Shepard's usual light-hearted try at stating timely themes in a pop plot...

...Long Day's Journey into Night, revived wisely though not very artfully Off-Broadway, must surely be his finest play...

...Because they care for one another, they fight—fiercely, hilariously, abrasively—over what each has done to himself and to the rest of the family...

...Has any other major playwright run the risk he did in making young Edmund Tyrone (actually young O'Neill himself) say to his mother, "You know, it's pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother...

...Even if we could see on our stage a Creon acting unlike any man of our time, the great problem would remain how to render his speech into words capable of conveying the same effect as the original...

...Shepard was setting records for tedium by making his characters erupt in psychedelic monologues reminiscent of his 1967 La Turista...

...Like the jumpsuits and suede boots Jane Greenwood designed for Haimon and the sentries, Lukas Foss' nonscore is objectionable more for being ugly than anachronistic...

...I suspect a stern letter to the editor of the Thebes Intelligencer would be Miss Henry's idea of dissent, and she'd probably write like Fitts and Fitzgerald, at that...

...Viva...

...Furthermore, they demand performers who can move and speak so awesomely that we are able to feel something of the dread that gripped Athenian audiences when, for example, in Sophocles' Antigone, Creon enters to announce his edict...

...Thou art translated...

...The Vietnam war is thus introduced and the cast is reduced to groveling bestiality...

...On Stage BEMUSED MUSE BY HARRIS GREEN THE MUSE of tragedy that spoke so gloriously in the Elizabethan era often sounds flustered, bombastic and more than a bit foolish when her classical cadences are translated into the lesser English of today...

...At times his direction is too flashy for a work that never attempts to sentimentalize, or capitalize upon, the a"ony it must have cost its author...

...Yet it was not until he turned away from the outward finery of props and plot and began looking inward and backward, viewing his past with compassion and his peculiarly acrid Irish humor, that O'Neill approached tragedy...

...In The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill's other acknowledged masterpiece, the trivial recurring phrase "pipe dream" drones through the dialogue like the flies that swarm on the free-lunch sandwiches in Harry Hope's Bar...

...Journey is also about illusions but it develops other themes—"past . . . time . . . fault . . . loneliness . . . blame . . . fog"—as it builds its grinding, glacierlike force...

...O'Neill's realization of that sobering truth sets him apart from all other writers who had or are having their brief hour on the American stage...

...It's enough to make one paraphrase Quince's exclamation upon discovering Bottom topped by the ass' head: "Bless thee, playwright...

...Lines that would sink most other plays in a broadside of audience laughter acquire raw power in O'Neill...

...His music—a kind of spaced-out echoing overlaid with Javanese-gong banging—creates a sense of uneasiness that has nothing to do with fate or Sophocles...

...These are not the most musical words in the language, but they can bear considerable dramatic weight...

...Of course, if the beast was the war, then our gunmen could not have fought with it...

...The ritualistic maneuvers of the Chorus are occasionally quite effective, but then Hirsch violates his own stylization by allowing such naturalistic gestures as Haimon clapping his father on the shoulder...

...ARVIN BROWN'S staging of Journey at the Off-Broadway Promenade is not bad—it is just not good enough...

...He slapped masks on his characters in The Great God Brown (a practice I wish Hirsch had mercifully followed with more of his cast...

...And though Teiresias can state Sophocles' theme with such brutal simplicity it blares like fate's trumpet—"The only crime is pride...

...Language was a flaw in Eugene O'Neill's works, too, though not a fatal one...

...Almost every embrace between Tyrones invites one to go for the other's jugular...