On Stage

...The customer says, "Take a little more off the back...

...some of these scenes-to-come occur in the gloom-piercing stab of a flashlight...

...I do hope his production can be returned, with James Berton Harris' attractive, all-purpose costumes, David Frishberg's indefatigable piano playing--everything, in fact, but the Bronx accent used by that fine young actor, Christopher Walken...

...The masses are asses, and class, that ultimate distinction to a Marxist, is no true category...

...He doubted an entire community would be foolish and greedy enough to deny that its chief industry dealt in death...

...The future is ominously concerned with the question of individual identity amid such impersonal paraphernalia as dossiers, computerized voter-registration certificates, and id-cards so much a part of one's personal equipment they must be worn on the wrist, like a watch...

...A play that gets much of its vigor by causing a veritable peak of drama to thrust upward in the confines of a parlor or a newspaper office loses that effect if it is staged under a proscenium and on a stage capacious enough to contain a little Alp...

...And almost every scene is built around some ritual or quasi-ritual that Gurney can work for laughs or commentary or the numbing shock of recognition...

...upon seeing the mighty Niagara...

...America will have a very dim future, indeed, if John Scheffler's splendid lighting was any portent...

...Gurney says much about America in just this deft manner...

...Ibsen knew better...

...The barber keeps saying, "You were gonna be our artist...

...Ibsen would have understood a man strong enough to stand alone...

...It was much too good to be shelved so quickly, and Gurney deserves the kind of encouragement only royalties can give if he is ever to apply his gifts to those larger works today's theater desperately needs...

...Irving's decision to stage Enemy amid the incongruous vastness of the Vivian Beaumont would have impressed Ibsen as an instance of that destructive idealism he also protested...

...A simple haircut yields unsuspected pathos, for the customer is a local youth who has returned to Buffalo to take an office job after failing to crack New York...

...The rituals of the past are mostly middle-class family affairs set before World War II and shot through with an innocence about the world and life that can be devastating...

...The Browns sing "When That Great Ship Went Down" as their own little vessel sinks and Scheffler's lighting slowly fades...

...Sullivan directed Scenes in the same spirit, with a great faith in the stage's power to suggest and stimulate...

...That's the trouble with Hitler," says the father lecturing his son on honor, "he doesn't keep his word...

...Judging by their casting, they are as eager to cash in on the nostalgia craze as those responsible for No, No Nanette...

...All the action takes place in Buffalo, New York, a city that a Chamber-of-Commerce type assures us was not named after a dying breed of bovines but by a French explorer who exclaimed "Beau fleuve...

...But the stockholders will have to lay out a fortune of money...

...I sensed far more than a day or a season or a play coming to a close...

...the ghosts of their younger selves glide along behind them as they wander on and off along the many levels of Boris Aronson's gloriously ramshackle set...

...Stephen Sondheim's songs are a bit ghostly, too...

...Parody is a small-scale form, rarely an evening's entertainment, and a form of criticism as well...

...The final vignette, set in the present, proves the most haunting of all...

...Goldman makes a feint at middle-class marrieds, whom he says are unhappy, but his conclusion that unhappy couples should try harder will outrage few patrons of musical comedy by its boldness...

...For no good reason, Jules Irving chose to perform Arthur Miller's 1950 adaptation, a diminution of Ibsen's intent as well as a debasement of the English language...

...The week Enemy opened, the New York Times ran a story about a little town in Kansas where almost everyone voted to have atomic waste stored in the nearby salt mines because local business might profit from the service--everyone, that is, but a lone resident noted for his dissent, who considered the decision a fatal risk...

...Gurney says this with affection and regret, with none of the far Left's masochistic delight in Armageddon or the far Right's suicidal devotion to moralism...

...Had James Goldman's book had a mind or something that could qualify as intelligence, Follies might have been more than a highly selective shuffling of the latest cliches...

...Some of Lincoln Center's annoying old regulars among them stunned and delighted me with their spirited ensemble playing...

...The Brown family is doing what it has always done at summer's end: tossing old tennis balls into an old canoe to see who gets first choice at the lakeside cabin next year, then setting the boat afire and shoving it out into Lake Erie...

...Alexis Smith, once the unthawable ice-blonde of the Warner lot, is the only old-timer on stage who is neither a grotesque nor an embarrassment but a lovely, ingratiating performer...

...Then there is someone named "Snoozer" Brown (Gurney has a deadly accurate ear for idiotic American nicknames) who only appears in the first scene, as a babe in arms being christened, and in the last, a grown man of the present, but who is a frequent topic of conversation throughout...

...Possibly the America we know, this America of innocence, ignorance and an uncritical reliance upon ritual cannot survive in the grim future it is shaping for itself...

...Nor should anyone have much difficulty grasping his notion of daring narrative: A group of showfolk and ex-show-folk return for a reunion on the stage of the partially demolished theater where they used to work in Weismann's Follies before going out into the Greater Follies of Life...

...Douglas W. Schmidt's setting gave realism another deathblow by providing a great, expressionistic window to dominate the action...

...It couldn't appear simpler...

...Harold Prince, in his latest musical collaboration with Stephen Sondheim and Michael Bennett, seems to have some kind of social commentary in mind, too...

...Gurney sets his vignettes flowing swiftly, in no particular order, into the past or the future or the present, yet he always gives us a phrase or a topic (or Sullivan gives his cast a prop, like a telephone) that immediately sets the tense for us...

...Gurney Jr.'s Scenes from American Life, which ran all too briefly in the tiny Forum under the Vivian Beaumont, was the first offering of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center that I hated to see close...

...At least three devices afford strands of continuity that prevent the work from spinning off into chaos...

...The rituals of the present involve a search for a lost intimacy, where new involvements, like sensitivity groups, are tried, or the old activities are attempted again and found wanting...

...This ritual is so silly I'm certain Gurney has lifted it from real life...

...Lake Erie is dying...

...Anonymous informers and propertied classes are the villains now...

...Those responsible for Follies, with its coating of dietetic bittersweet, don't impress me as being all that dissatisfied with the old-timey musical...

...a father and adolescent son, going for a sail in the old sloop, provide a gem of alienation at close quarters ("I didn't pay for your bail so you can sit there and stare at me...

...The work is a series of tenuously related vignettes, perfectly scaled to the size of this intimate hall and to the range of the eight performers, who played a multiplicity of roles...

...Stockmann, substituted energetic coarseness for the role's rare blend of naivete, idealism and Promethean outrage...

...The Repertory Theater simply must revive Dan Sullivan's production soon...

...Snoozer," we know, will soon be dead--murdered...

...Barnes should read his employer more closely...

...Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which ran all too long upstairs in the Vivian Beaumont, could well have been subtitled "Scenes from American Life: The McCarthy Era...

...The beloved masses merely err, misled by a cowardly, self-serving elite...

...While it couldn't run beyond April 24 because both the auditorium and the cast were scheduled for other uses, I doubt that either will serve a better purpose than Gumey's, or serve one quite so well...

...Some of this truth occasionally acquires the predictability of truism as Enemy begins to boil (it is far from my favorite social drama), but apparently even an Ibsen commonplace is too scalding for a tender-minded reviewer like Clive Barnes...

...He already shows a mastery of sketching in a broad canvas...

...Stephen Elliott, as Dr...

...mankind's only hope is a natural elite, the good, courageous and intelligent, who are always in short supply...

...This could knock the big bellies right into the garbage can...

...He's a playmate, a fellow Yale alumnus, a victim of a recent "insurrection...

...Such double-casting serves little purpose here except to supply a crowd for Prince and Bennett to churn into a semblance of action...

...The dialogue clumps about like something Dreiser might have written for a gangster movie: "It was pretty tough going a lot of the time...

...Practically every one is a parody of an old show tune, done with a cleverness that eventually cloys...