On Stage
GREEN, HARRIS
On Stage HEADLINE DRAMA BY HARRIS GREEN Last issue, in discussing revivals of classics, I dismissed that mystical quality, relevance, as irrelevant to a good performance. Now two Off-Broadway...
...He justifies the murder of children by pointing out that kids were slain in the Bible, too...
...And I wish that the Phoenix had spent more money on extending the Trial run instead of producing what turned out to be a lackluster revival on Broadway of Moliere's The School for Wives...
...I thought it a flashy bit, at odds with the directness of all that had gone before...
...They also borrow Brecht's worst idea, those damned songs he used in his famed "alienation effect...
...It did garner my sympathy, first for the brutalized young actor (Michael--son of Kirk--Douglas), then for the character he played and, finally, for all the boys who still must suffer...
...Here Trial becomes a drama of the age-old, unending conflict between the Procrustean rigors of the law and the limitless demands of justice...
...Once again he is working in the extended-family-quarrel tradition...
...William Schallert is no less fine as a sincere, blessedly uncaricatured Judge--but I must protest the decision to deprive this character of his name...
...Depending on whether he heard about My Lai 4 on the 7:30 p.m...
...The judge tells the defendants that there would be chaos if everyone acted illegally at the prompting of conscience...
...There really is no substitute for artistry in theater, How I wish that fact would make headlines...
...I pass this news along to my fellow apt subscribers who, like me, have never seen any announcement or admission that early performances are actually dress rehearsals for later ones...
...Tabori's idea of revealing dialogue is to let Jerry account for his part in the massacre by saying he always wanted to be a cop...
...The sequence in which a recalcitrant draftee is forced to do pushups and then undergo harrowing abuse should seem familiar to admirers of The Brig, too, not to mention Artaud...
...Journalists like Seymour Hersch and John Sack have made me see the all-too-human pathos in a perpetual loser like Lieutenant Calley...
...I do not object to borrowing...
...The cast is a flawless ensemble playing under the direction of Gordon Davidson, who staged the original Los Angeles production by Center Theater Group...
...And when the defendants try to explain their acts by recounting the past outrages that radicalized them, the whole world seems to be on trial...
...The three Reardon sisters, all employed in the New York City public schools, meet for the first time after Mother's death to exchange recriminations...
...Moreover, he should have been allowed to do what the real judge, a devout Roman Catholic, did at the sentencing: break down in tears...
...Except for Barbara Tai Sing as the squad's archetypal victim (The Girl), APT's cast of nonsinging non-actors is an embarrassment, and Fried's direction consists mostly of repetitious contrivances...
...George Tabori's Pinkville, produced by the American Place Theater (APT), deals with the My Lai 4 massacre...
...the style of the hanging, I suppose, is Zindel's--such as it is...
...a green beret'd look good on Jack the Ripper . . . why should the Eichmann boys have all the fun...
...Another lapse, alas, is Paul Zindel's And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, the first Broadway production for the author of last season's endearing The Effect of Gamma Ravs on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds...
...or the 11:00 p.m...
...What is truly unique about Tabori is his thinking he has dramatized this horror with his trendy theatrics, sophomoric wit and puerile insights...
...The music Stanley Walden has supplied for Tabori's GI ditties is not one whit less annoying than anything I have writhed through in the plays of Brecht, nor is it in the least better sung...
...If everything else about it had matched Richard Wilbur's delightful, graceful closed-couplet translation . . . but it didn't...
...Though confined to the courtroom that Peter Wexler has cunningly superimposed on the fixtures of Good Shepherd-Faith Church, Father Berrigan's script (incorporating excerpted testimony) never seems cramped...
...Tabori's smug script--his ninth version, I learned from the apt subscribers' newsletter...
...It was enough to have the nine performers, whom I had come to love, join hands for their sentencing, saying as the lights go down about them: "This is the happiest moment of our lives...
...I also wish Davidson had not ended the performance by lowering a screen to show a newsreel of the actual nine being arrested after their undeniably illegal act...
...he had seen me taking notes and informed me--politely--that critics were not to be invited for three weeks, when many changes will have been made...
...Stalking out of the theater, 1 was stopped by APT's director, Wynn Handman...
...news, Tabori is either the 37,864,045th or the 89,732,543rd person to have seen a connection between Captain Medina and Herod...
...Yet he remade the loans into his own, and his selections were invariably rewarding...
...War is the most human of businesses...
...Having a GI on a Nam-bound troopship illuminate the darkened auditorium by snapping on a bare light bulb over his bunk whenever he speaks is eerily effective--for a while...
...Tabori and Fried are content to sketch in a squad of stock characters named--so help me...
...Now two Off-Broadway productions prove that it is also beside the point in contemporary plays about topics so undeniably relevant they make the headlines daily...
...Had he done so, however, I would probably have given way myself...
...Tabori and his director, Martin Fried, seem in Pinkville to be trying to replace artistry with frenzied borrowings from the far-out theater of yesterday and today...
...Yet one can no more create a play out of that knack than one can from the hardly searing insight that life is cruel...
...Shakespeare, for one, lifted quite a lot...
...Rae Allen, splendid as a vulgar Jewish neighbor, offers more proof that Zindel writes rich, meaty roles for actresses...
...Will Catherine, who has taken to drink, join Ceil in committing Anna...
...I can make no comparison between Pinkville and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine--only contrasts...
...Jerry the Naz, Consequently Joe, The Honeychild, and The Jock...
...Ed Flanders, as Father Dan, single-handedly restores to life those much-abused critical stand-bys, "luminous" and "incandescent...
...To cite but one triumph, the defendants' affection for one another is the most convincing show of such emotion I have ever seen enacted--no smarmy embracing or manly pummeling, merely handshakes and smiles and whispered asides that, by their effortlessness, imply no more is needed because so much is already there...
...She is eternally at odds with the soft-hearts, like her single younger sisters, Catherine (Estelle Parsons, who flubs her Big Scene) and Anna (Julie Harris--a bit too spunky, perhaps, for a bundle of Williamsian neuroses, but nevertheless good...
...Anna is causing trouble, as might be expected from one who looked upon telephone poles as murdered trees and lost her faith after seeing a puppy squashed by a truck...
...Welcome as this scene was, a genuine characterization of the gi would have engaged my interest and emotions more...
...It provides the rare, exhilarating opportunity to see Christianity cast as a social force once more, instead of a vehicle for church socials, a petty insurance policy against the afterlife, or Dr...
...His current play suggests an Arthur Miller framework hung with Tennessee Williams finery...
...but Father Berrigan, with some assistance from Saul Levitt, has recreated the trial so well and so very movingly that my heart goes out to it...
...Their selections include the annoying tricks of the Grotowski-Beck-Schechner crowd: compelling the audience to wait an extra-long time for admittance, to pick their way among the actors for a seat in the oddly formed auditorium (Pinkville is played in a space shaped like an upside-down, malformed "Y"), to sit next to a sweaty actor--gimmickery generally used to mask a lack of content...
...hit bottom with The Captain's lengthy harangue to the squad...
...Ceil (Nancy Marchand, well-cast, always in character) is married, a school official and one of the world's hard-hearts...
...Tabori and Fried cannot be praised on either count...
...they remind him that they burned paper to save flesh and blood...
...Any change would be an improvement...
...She has seduced a student ("The boy--he revealed himself as an astral form, a star...
...He explains the soldiers" homicidal tendencies, which he blames on TV, by singing "Television Babies" ("50 murders daily...
...He delivers a pep talk that is a veritable furnace at producing ingots of wit so ponderous and impure it can only be termed "pig irony...
...Such discoveries rate no headlines...
...Its wit ranges wide ("our icebox Pope, Pius XII...
...Peale's get-rich-quick home remedy...
...but it does so in such an opportunistic, hackneyed manner that it exhausts all the patience I was prepared to have for any work about this numbing moral enormity...
...Admirers of the Basic Training production number in Viet Rock will be delighted to find it reprised in somewhat varied form here...
...having four bulbs going on and off throughout a long exchange is exasperating...
...Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, presented aptly enough in Good Shepherd-Faith Church by the Phoenix and Leland Hayward, is a dramatized brief for Father Berrigan and his fellow Roman Catholic radicals convicted of burning draft records in Maryland three years ago...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 6
