On Stage

...On Stage THE FORCE OF FARCE BY HARRIS GREEN M Wy importing the Stratford National Theater of Canada's production of There's One in Every Marriage, David Merrick has done more than bring a merry staging of a randy Feydeau play to the Royale He has also provided us with a welcome reminder of the true meaning of farce, a definition that is bemg eroded daily by the streams of pap poured forth by writers trained in the mexacting media of movies and TV No one who fully appreciates the giddy delight of being tossed about in the ever shifting eddies of a Feydeau plot can accept what passes for it now, the dilemmas of Lucy, Archie, Goldie or the latest Neil Simon hero seem to be feebly plotted shouting matches, in which uproar must compensate for the writing's lack of any genuine energy, the essential trait of farce Withm the first 10 minutes of There's One in Every Marriage, Feydeau exhausts and grandly discards the kind of preposterous situation our frugal contemporary gagsrmths would sustain for an entire act A Parisian roue has chased the latest object of his affections, whose name he does not know, off the streets and into her very maison, only to learn she is the wife of an old friend And how long after her husband enters does it take him to learn what has happened7 At the most, five minutes He laughs at the notion of his wife's betraying him and so unintentionally goads her into accelerating a dalliance with another family friend And how long does it take the roue to detect this unsuspected streak of indiscretion7 Possibly eight minutes—maybe nine All the while, the butler is announcing visitors—when he isn't intoning shattering irrelevances like "M'sieu, there's a man here with a painting of a bent tree' Since each newcomer heralds more complexity, the plot builds up the inexorability of a waterfall and rushes through two more acts with enough mad force to prevent any of the several liaisons that develop from achieving that consummation devoutly to be wished "Oh, what a tangled web we weave," repeatedly laments the virtuous lady's husband in Act II—at one point, just as he is unknowingly about to slip into bed with a deaf old stranger a mere room away from his own eavesdropping wife Feydeau's is hardly the most profound or resonant comment that can be made on the subject of infidelity or the gnawmgs of the groin But one does not go to a farce tor profundity or resonance, and I never regretted a mmute spent at the Roy-ale Feydeau has supplied in prodigal abundance all that is expected flourishing involvement, manic drive, and characters with just enough ballast to bob about in these delightful shallows It is impossible to protest that a play is more sauce than substance when the sauce is obviously the product of a master chef—not some assembly-line concoction, as flat as it is predictable and possibly poisonous, too The only regrettable thing about this revival was its appallingly brief run on Broadway It's worth traveling up to Canada to see Neither Jean Gascon's staging nor Suzanne Grossman and Paxton Whitehead's adaptation is exactly surfeited by nuance, but the Strat-fordians generally do so well that it gives one a jolt when they make an obvious try for a laugh, as is done occasionally with a nasal aside or a pun more ghastly than necessary (a Russian was punched so hard he "saw czars") The ladies—Roberta Maxwell, Tudi Wiggins, Patricia Gage, Marilyn Gardner—are charming enough to warrant the confusion they inspire Richard Curnock and Tony Van Bridge have style and strength to spare, and Peter Donat and Wyman Pendleton are effective most of the time Helen Burns as the deaf old innocent bystander raises the hilarity level every time she favors anyone with her wide-eyed, detached gaze Alan Barlow's designs sum up the Stratford approach best Instead of pelting Feydeau with a mass of overly ornate costumes, props and furnishings until he is reduced to a state I call Cecil Beaton-to-death, Barlow creates a suitably horrid but not too assertive variant of I'art nouveau that never gets in the way of Gascon and his cast Barlow not only trusts them, he also trusts Fey-deau I salute him and everyone else, including both David Mernck and his associate producer Byron Goldman There are farcical elements in the latest production of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, Narrow Road to the Deep North, by the young English playwright, Edward Bond, but as is all too common at the Vivian Beaumont, the acting is the funmest thing on view The play's Japanese setting proves a curse as well as a blessing While it allows director Dan Sullivan and designers Douglas W Schmidt and Carrie Fishbein Robbins to employ the handsome, blessedly inexpensive styhzations of Oriental theater (a long blue scarf becomes a river, a set of painted screens a landscape), it also requires the cast to play both Japanese and 19th-century English imperialists These demands are quite beyond the all-American regulars at Lincoln Center and then current guest star, the black actor Cleavon Little, who stndes about triumphantly un-made up Only Martha Henry, playing an Occidental religious fanatic far more energetically than she has anything else, makes a try for style Still, I am grateful to the Repertory Theater for giving us even this rather blurred look at Edward Bond His success is of greater interest for what it demonstrates about the London theater than anything he says in this curiously unsatisfying Brechtian play Bond's play, Saved, attracted attention m a manner guaranteed to endear him to Leftist reviewers It was about the lower class, a topic the English intellectual—ever conscious of his class consciousness?thinks inspires a more genuine art, and it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, a censor whose displeasure is presumably visited on nothmg less than masterpieces Road surely strengthened Bond's reputation Along with caricaturing imperialists, it scorned as ineffectual an unproductive arty type like the poet monk, Basho To be antiesthe-tic, I suppose, is to be proreahty Since London reviewers now hail such ugly indulgences in the classic theater as Nicol Williamson's monotonously proletarian Hamlet and Peter Brook's creepy miscasting of Shakespeare's highborn protagonists, there is a logic, ol sorts, in acclaiming Bond talented because he is lowborn I would rather praise him tor what he says about tyranny, imperialism and religion in Road, but I did not hear or see anything worth repeating Bond's opinions I happen to share, yet he states them in a manner that had me nodding in more than agreement If the reader is getting a rather vague impression of the play from my observations, I assure him I am doing my best Its chief effect was to stir fond memories of the Angry Young Englishmen of the early '50s who set the anti-Estabhsh-ment tone that made Bond's success possible They didn't write great plays or novels—but what wit and rhetoric they commanded 1 A result of elite university training, perhaps o ur theater's latest fad, the tough musical that tells it like it is, continues unabated Now we have Inner City, a "street cantata" conceived by the inescapable Tom O'Horgan that sets the varied ills of urban existence to song ("It's so easy to get a gun and shoot anyone") I fear O'Horgan is smitten with nothing more profound or admirable than chanty-ball syndrome, a desire to remove the escapist taint from entertainment by insisting it's for a good cause—then making a buck off it, of course He is as wasteful as some chanties, too He constructs a towering assemblage of junk that must have eaten up a third of the budget—then uses it for only one fleeting scene Why' That haunting demand can be made of almost everything about Inner City except the casting of Larry Marshall, Allan Nicols and Linda Hopkins, who should have a bright career ahead of her if she takes vocal lessons to beef up her perilously thin high notes Nightnde, the off-Broadway play about homosexuals by the pseudonymous "Lee Barton," is as feebly constructed as the book of any musical Jon Bnstow, an aging, fading playwright (acted with succulent oro-tundity by Lester Rawlins), is visited m Puerto Rico, where he hves in seclusion with a sailor, by his agent He has an offer for Bnstow from Jab Humble, a young rock idol who flaunts his own inversion and wants to use a set of love poems Bnstow wrote in 1939 as lyrics for his next album This poetry was too blatant to be published in America at the time (Jab, who also pops up in Puerto Rico, has seen a Mexican edition) and Bnstow still fears exposure Dare he relent7 The unlikeliness of these involvements prevents Nightnde from being a serious play about homosexuality's generation gap, just as the muddled smcenty of Barton prevents its blossoming into farce Though Bnstow's refusal to reveal his perversion may be relevant to Barton, it makes no sense if Bnstow is as good a writer as he's presented I can think of two playwrights whose careers were not harmed when their sex lives became general knowledge Barton offers wishful thinking as truth, I doubt that a representative of Today's Youth like Jab (unset-tlingly well acted by Chandler Hill Harben) admires his elders so slavishly Naturally, the agent (a good job by Don Draper) is both the only heterosexual m the play and its only completely swinish character The relentlessly bitchy dialogue ("You wouldn't trust your own grandmother if you could coax her out of a tree") suggests that Barton has not read Freud closely on wit, either Freud said wit was hostility—not that hostility was wit The Boys in the Band, which had at least one good act, remains supreme of its kind...