On Stage

...The dialogue abounds in similes (Paris seen at night is "like a great ship riding high on the waters") that lack the vital spark of characterization...

...It is October 4, 1965, the day Pope Paul is to fly into New York...

...The curtain rises on the death watch of a man so famous that reporters wait to pounce on his friends and family should they ever break out of the tableau of frozen poses that director Sir John Gielgud has them assuming...

...House is a melancholy, hilarious little work, so affecting I would be willing to pay it the tribute of actually buying seats for a second viewing...

...What's it doing in Angela's eyes...

...After an hour of All Over, I envisioned Albee as The Unseen Patient concealed upstage behind hospital screens...

...There is a great deal of action in The Philanthropist but--after an initial burst of inspired gore I'm not supposed to reveal--all of it occurs offstage and the six characters then discuss it, calmly, as they pair off, politely, for sex...

...I appreciate his deftness and am utterly awed by the technical arsenal McCowen has at his command, yet I feel the production might better have been left in London...

...If his hero's wife is ripe for the asylum, it is a bit much to have her named "Bananas," as well...

...Artie gets--and muffs--is big chance at success, while also losing Bunny to Billy, his childhood buddy turned Hollywood producer ("Do you know what the greatest talent is...

...The audience of Broadway hacks, stragglers and hopefuls applauded the young arriviste from Off-Broadway warmly enough, but its ultimate tribute was the hush that settled upon the house like a collapsing tent as he stepped to the rostrum...

...His language has become so vile that I am convinced it is the villain of the piece...

...An unbroken string of flops soon diminished the Broadway crowd's respect...

...Mel Shapiro's galvanic staging errs only in allowing Anne Meara (Bunny) and Katherine Helmond (Bananas) to hammer home their lines too often...

...There such traditions as a young writer's success and a respected actor's starring fling are savored more...

...Ronnie fails, of course, though the bomb does go off...

...Guare's madcap wit often gets him past any awkwardness, though, as when Bananas says, "I was very sick a few months ago...

...Nothing he's written since has been memorable, either, for it was not the scathing dialogue of Virginia Woolf that set the tone of the plays to follow but its dreadful, pretentious contrivance about the nonexistent son--that is, once Albee deigned to cease adapting Carson McCul-lers, James Purdy and Giles Cooper to favor us with an original work...

...Then she launches into an explanation of why "fratricide" is not the proper word...

...Their Nude Scene is tasteful...

...On Stage ENERVATED ALBEE, ENERGIZED GUARE BY HARRIS GREEN The reverence and apprehension Edward Albee once inspired was best revealed almost a decade ago the night he received his Tony Award for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...Artie, who opened the evening pleading for a spotlight while he sang, is spotlighted at the final curtain, but not for the act he had planned...

...Occasionally the dialogue collapses altogether under the weight of intentionally perverse misuse: ". . . you're some kind of unique...

...Gould's seeming effortlessness also impressed me more than the virtuoso antics of Hampton's star, Alec McCowen, portraying a drab university don in whose quarters the play is set...

...Now it is doubtful that he can keep even their faith...

...I have no idea how broad his range is, but in this part Gould's acting is deep and true...

...Another tradition, the historical drama, has crossed over, too, in Ronald Millar's Abelard and Heloise, a concoction so leaky I'm amazed that it survived the trip...

...John Guare, author of the delightful Off-Broadway hit, The House of Blue Leaves, seems to have enough talent and energy to serve as a donor for Albee, but I would hate to see Guare part with any of his considerable gifts, unless it was to make way for a little more discipline...

...Nothing of his old power remains except his knack for creating potentially dramatic situations...

...We first meet him in the Prologue, giving his all at an amateur-night singing the utterly stupefying ditties Guare himself tossed off ("Where is the devil in Evelyn...

...The Wife and The Mistress spar fitfully over whether Their Mutual Beloved is to be cremated or buried, but both understandably lose all interest in what can only in the macabre sense be termed "a burning issue...

...I also wearied of the short-cut device of advancing the action by having each character come down to the footlights to talk things over with the audience...

...In The Doctor's monologue youth is envisioned as an executioner...

...Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst survive in these parts by sheer technique and intensity...

...When Albee spoke, he shattered a silence that was palpitant with awe...

...The rest of the cast--and I should add that reminiscing is also obligatory in this insistently static affair--fare less well with what now passes for Albee dialogue...

...Though I am delighted at Albee's obsession with definitions, particularly after his mauling of "unique," I suspect what obsesses him most is defining his own position in an old and possibly moribund art form in our neophiliac, youth-obsessed age...

...The insight is not exactly news, but I have rarely heard it stated with such furious humor...

...He never tells us what The Dear Departing has done to warrant the newsmen's fascination or, for that matter, ours...

...The critics' preview I attended of his latest, All Over, was not sold out--a portent I find as ominous for Albee as his choice of titles...

...I forget what he said...

...He is said to be entwined in tubing, just as Albee has ensnarled himself in twisted syntax and wrenched grammar contrived in a frantic search for an individual style...

...Act II finds over half the large cast of nuns, starlets, MPs and asylum orderlies entering through windows, as well as doors, and exiting to thunderous explosions amid great swirls of smoke...

...The Friends and Relations, while quarrelsome, evoke no concern in us or in each other...

...Here was a guy the highbrows raved about, f'Chrissakes!--people who crapped all over Arthur Miller...

...Neil Fitzgerald possesses enough old-actor's charm to make The Doctor's reminiscence, the play's obligatory homosexual passage, far less of an embarrassment than it deserves to be...

...and if his mistress, Bunny, lives in the apartment downstairs, then surely they could have met elsewhere than in a Turkish bath, by mistake...

...Most of the action in House is confined to the Queens apartment of Artie, the stage-struck, song-writing hero...

...Margaret Linn puts just the right force behind hers as the starlet, deafened by the special effects in Billy's Warmonger...

...I assume this removed quality, and this politeness, are among the points Hampton is intending to make...

...In the midst of a spat with An Offspring, The Wife (Miss Tandy at her most icily musical) asks, "What is it when you kill a daughter...

...Albee needs to have his enervating language removed and his atrophied sense of drama replaced with a transplant--if it's not too late...

...Millar employs Shaw's device of letting minor characters enliven the script by gruffly insulting everyone on stage, but he does not approach Shaw's ability to embody an epoch or a concept in a speech or a scene...

...Significantly, the one time All Over comes close to recapturing Albee's old electric bitchiness, language is the subject under discussion...

...The middlebrow public remained, though in dwindling numbers, to chuckle or gasp on cue like a congregation participating in a responsive reading...

...Guare, however, feels so strongly that Rome and Hollywood are placebo factories eminently in need of destruction that he has Artie's draftee son, Ronnie, attempt to blow up Pope Paul and Billy with a time-bomb he made applying the practical skills Uncle Sam imparted to him at Fort Dix...

...Anyone can create...

...I tried to cut my wrists--with spoons...

...Guare's pulsing energy looks all the more appealing when contrasted to the diminishing drive of Christopher Hampton's London hit, The Philanthropist, imported by David Merrick...

...Diana Rigg shows more passion as Heloise than Keith Michell summons for Abelard...

...Whatever life lacks, Guare cracks, it cannot be said to have an irony deficiency...

...Apparently nothing could be done for The Patient, who dies...

...The program grandiloquently identifies the figures as The Wife, The Mistress, The Son--I would refer to Albee henceforth as The Playwright, if only I had heard or seen anything to justify the name...

...As Artie, Harold Gould does not strike a single false note while tickling the ivories ("If there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway, screw in another bulb...

...House often resembles a wartime farce like The Doughgirls, or one of those fine old Preston Sturges movies of the early '40s...

...To be an audience...

...Slangy banalities ("It gets us where we live") give way to tortuously inelegant constructions ("He put down his fork one lunch at my house . . . slow shaked the head"), and the whole tottering, numbing mess is continually propped up with "as I think it's called . . . as everyone says today . . . you could call it...

...I began to enjoy Sturges only after I realized that he was never going to give patriotism, motherhood and the American Way the kick in the pants he was always threatening to deliver...