On Stage

...Irving, to you...

...And he remains in the shadows throughout Act I. The husband realizes during his session why she did it but, to keep the ambiguity content high during intermission, he exits without telling...

...A provincial housewife has killed her deaf-mute cousin, dismembered her and tossed all the fragments--except the head--into passing trains...

...Irving's loyalty to his directors continues to pay meager dividends...

...He even allowed such unlikely Asians as the insistently Jewish Lou Gilbert and the indubitably black Frances Foster to stroll about Setzuan devoid of make-up...

...Behan used to sneer about "Abbey Theater Irish...

...It would be sad, in a way, for he is not a Broadway hack, in show biz for cash and fame...

...One wonders how often he even considered it...

...The Gods, basking in the worship of the populace for restoring Shen Teh to them, prepare to leave...

...To my amazement it proved a howlingly successful try at standing pornography on its head, a position unique even for a genre obsessed by positions...

...Unfortunately, he is also not a gifted artist committed to the esthetic as a worthy end in itself...

...Indeed, the only Center regulars who have been entrusted with title roles are David Birney, who is a beguiling Christy though hardly the "slight young man" Synge described, and Robert Symonds, whose crusty-codger manner was acceptable for The Miser but ludicrous in Cyrano...

...Stephen Elliott, a most erratic actor, came off very well as the resilient elder Mahon, and Martha Henry, as Pegeen Mike, performed everything except her final lament so strongly that I am actually looking forward to seeing her in Antigone later this season...

...He never does for, as she insists, "Why did you do it...

...Irving's production had that unique Lincoln Center tang which comes from miscasting the director along with most of the cast...

...so when he comes shuffling on for a confrontation, Christy kills him again--he thinks...

...As in the Duras screenplay for Hiroshima, Man Amour, a sensational event is the subject under nonstop discussion...

...I don't mind it, frankly, since Synge is blessedly unsentimental about all those salt-of-the-earth country people who clump through his play, admiring its wandering hero, Christy Mahon...

...And who should be presiding but our old friends, the Three Gods, now in disguise and very much the worse for wear after their stay among mankind...

...I concede its resemblance to fruitcake--but every so often, I like fruitcake, if it's fresh...

...Only the reappearance of good old Da, bloodier than ever, dissuades them...

...I realize everyone is desperate to find new playwrights, but surely someone in New Haven sensed that a three-character work in which one character does nothing but question each of the other two for an act apiece is a new high in verbosity and stasis, even for the French...

...Of course not...

...Good Woman, set in a "partially Europeanized Asian city," is a delightfully stageworthy parable about the difficulty of doing good in this world where money and, for that matter, people are involved...

...Although all prosper under Shui Ta's iron rule, no one enjoys it...

...Brecht's overflowing delight in fable, pretense and a multiplicity of scenes makes his style one of the few expansive enough to fill the yawning proscenium and out-thrust stage of the Beaumont...

...Our regional companies offer no more encouragement, if the Long Wharf Theater's production of Marguerite Duras' A Place without Doors, recently transferred Off-Broadway, is any indication...

...ever the master, he wields this revelation like a two-edged sword for a backhanded slash in the finale...

...Not too often," say the Gods, beating it back to heaven in their little machina...

...Brecht hones one of his more cutting ironies when their all-highests discover that this heartless efficiency expert, Shui Ta, is in fact their good Shen Teh...

...The City Center's takeover of the Beaumont may signal the end of Irving's rule, although this has been denied...

...But my charge, please understand, is that Irving rarely hires versatile, gifted performers, not that he is disloyal to his company...

...The Beaumont, with all its resources, couldn't top it...

...By now, Jules Irving's company has become so infamously accident-prone it must rank with banana-republic democracy as a topic no one can bear reading too much about...

...where the head is!--if only he will ask the right question...

...they are not, as the camp "sensibility" would have it, so bad they're good but rather so bad they're funny (and that includes the cast...

...In a play like this...

...The balloons, colored feathers and silver stars dangling from red...

...Symonds, another Frisco member, proved with his production of Good Woman that he still cannot deliver enlivening staging, and now cannot establish a uniform acting style, either...

...Shen Teh was in charge of the Repertory Theater when it was a Shui Ta we needed...

...Will Antigone be about a flower child who opposes her elders because she's high on Consciousness III...

...Many of Synge's countrymen insisted that the language in Playboy was of a kind not spoken before or since in Ireland...

...the citizens haul him into court to explain the mysterious disappearance of their beloved Shen Teh...

...The wife (Miss Dunnock has an actress' field day playing her) promises to tell the questioner everything--why she did it...

...Actually, the old Mahon is still alive, bloody, unbowed, and mad as hell...

...three of them come to earth to seek one good person...

...white and blue streamers that shower the nude trio in the finale of "We Came Together" is sure to be one of the great inspirations of the season--any season...

...The Setzuan prostitute, Shen Teh, befriends them...

...Gods are involved, too...

...Following his usual odd approach to the concept of "repertory," he once more went outside his regular company for his star...

...She also tries to help others with the silver the Three Gods give her, but for all her sterling intentions she proves completely ineffective-until disguised as "Shui Ta," a ruthlessly practical "male" cousin...

...plays the title role...

...It isn't...

...Continue to keep our commandments, they tell her...

...He has fled to this windswept coastal village of Mayo after killing his father--he says...

...But where Hiroshima diverted us with Alain Resnais' powerful images and rhythms, Place offers nothing to watch but, first, Richard Dysart as the cut-up's husband, then Mildred Dunnock as the wife, seated and spotlighted, responding to questions from Alvin Epstein...

...He still clings to far too many of the generally drab crew he and his ex-partner, Herbert Blau, brought along from San Francisco: The monotonously untalented Ray Fry, the amateurish Elizabeth Huddle, the shrill and wearing Priscilla Pointer (Mrs...

...Colleen Dewhurst was brought in to do Shen Teh (she was somewhat less manly as Shui Ta), just as Anthony Quayle was brought in for Galileo, Lee J. Cobb for King Lear and Diana Sands for Saint Joan...

...Now the good yeomen turn on Christy to hang him, as much for lying about his great deed as for having the bad taste to recommit it in their county...

...She--wonder of wonders...

...I did not expect half the mad involvements that burst upon me...

...Synge's Playboy frequently boils over, too, though much of its action amounts to steam--or, if you prefer, a uniquely Irish kind of hot air...

...I'll need my cousin, she wearily responds...

...In Playboy, Bosco and Walker joined everyone--but Fry, of course --in flaunting a brogue so impenetrable it made Frank Grimes and Niall Toibin, the stars of the Abbey Theater's Borstal Boy, sound like Texans by comparison...

...A note in the program about the upcoming production of An Enemy of the People assures the subscribers they will like it because it is a timely drama about pollution...

...John Hirsch's staging of Playboy was consistent, often making it appear as ponderous as Lorca's Yerma, his first success at the Beaumont years ago...

...is not the right question...

...The level of mere competence in this troupe is so low that Philip Bosco and Sydney Walker really seemed to be Two Gods (the ineffable Fry was the Third) by speaking Ralph Manheim's translation in a precise, untainted English worlds removed from the ethnic and regional gabble ground out by almost everyone else...

...I am somewhat at a loss for words myself, now that I must describe Stag Movie, a nudie musical...

...An occasional communique from the Vivian Beaumont is all that is necessary to keep you informed of its minor achievements, its partial successes, and the inevitable avalanches of backsliding that obliterate what good has gone before...

...So far, the Repertory Theater has done Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, works that do not mark the summit of dramatic achievement, surely, but are not despicable plays, either...

...Any crudity is possible in a company where a muddled high-mindedness (Unconsciousness I) decides that make-up is a racial insult instead of a theatrical device, and insists that hard work and good intent prevent bad results...

...He has come to claim the son who has won his respect by besting him another time: ". . . my son and myself will be going our own way, and we'll have great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here...

...David Newburge's book may even deserve to be hailed as "Pirandellian," since it is about the filming of a stag movie, a musical remake of "The Grocery Boy...

...Would that he were...