On Stage
GREEN, HARRIS
On Stage SHALLOW PROFUNDITY BY HARRIS GREEN The one positive achievement of our insistently different young playwrights may well be to make stolid, traditional authors look good by contrast....
...True, Stephen Elliott did argue with Paul Hecht at the Forum but not, I suspect, about matters or in a manner that either would have chosen off stage...
...eventually the young man plays his own part in the tragedy...
...It's this matter of prankishness that I consider crucial, and defenders of contemporary art rarely face...
...In dispensing with such past demands as plot or melody or imagery, far-out artists have permitted prankishness from outsiders that challenges the seriousness of their art...
...The title was a reference to a German folk tale about a traveler who unknowingly crosses a frozen lake in the dark and drops dead of fright after learning the risk he had faced...
...Vivat Regina...
...Vivat Regina...
...It was not words alone that made the traveler drop dead after he learned he had crossed Lake Constance but the powerful meaning of "freeze," "drown" and "death...
...In contrasting the reigns and persons of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, Bolt uses a theme that borders on the realm of Woman's Fiction: A queen may be a success either as a woman or as a monarch but never??ever??as both...
...I doubt that this familiar and even beloved form ever got such dismal results...
...While it is more a stately historical pageant than a play, it has characters, progression and conflict??luxuries Handke had rigorously denied himself??and I suspect it will be parading heavily across the boards of the Broadhurst for some time...
...On the whole, David Merrick and his co-producers have done a great deal better by Bolt than he has by them...
...Handke is moved by the "spirit of Wittgenstein," and concerned about "the relation of language and reality...
...I think our dependence on TV has not whetted our visual appetite but destroyed whatever standards we had, and I cite Kalfin's tolerance of these ugly distractions as proof...
...A maid got the inaction under way by vacuuming the place for minutes on end...
...It would not surprise me if playful types like young Handke, whose previous epic had the cast insulting the audience throughout, were luring all their tolerant defenders, burdened by their own weighty rhetoric, out onto the thin ice of intellection that these same defenders have so coolly spread over the void...
...Indeed, events on the stage can stir our emotions so thoroughly that a playwright, no matter how trivial his theme, can well deserve the accolade "profound...
...Marilyn Chris was particularly amateurish as the mother...
...and not a few are jarring ("Look...
...Had artistry been on view, I wouldn't have been bored, as well...
...Since drippings and blobs became painting, a chimpanzee has become a prizewinner, and now that we have "earth art," any bulldozer operator can be hailed as a sculptor...
...Instead, he showed he had succumbed to McLuhanacy, which some consider a philosophy of sorts...
...Many superb works have been built around nothing more than an aphorism, or even a truism, about character or fate, love or society...
...Obviously, he is not the man to perform for drama the great artistic service George Balanchine did for ballet: employing tradition in an inventive, fascinating, wholly contemporary manner...
...it can be done by a nonartist...
...Neither, apparently, is Allen Ginsberg??at least not on the evidence of Kaddish, which he "adopted to script" from his poem about his late mother's paranoia...
...Eileen Atkins' tartly poised Elizabeth takes the stage, along with everything else, away from Claire Bloom's ingratiating though none too forceful Mary...
...I do not ask that you should share...
...In the third scene, after taking us to France to meet young Marie and to England to meet young Bess, he suddenly brings on a dour, gnarled elder, wrapped in a black cloak, who enters to thunder and rain, turns to the audience and rasps in a burr: "Welcome to Scotland...
...There was talk in the program about creating a new art form by using video...
...Most appalling were the series of video projections (live shots of the cast, tapes made at Pilgrim State and elsewhere) thrown up on the vast screen that dominated the stage...
...After all, sedulously advanced writers have been doing similar work for six decades, ever since Dada reared its grinning death's head...
...A void of meaninglessness, dug by nihilists who despair of anything surviving this atomic age, yawns under today's art...
...The evening was a flux of words, none of them very memorable in Michael Roloff's translation, and words by themselves are not enough...
...is like eating a seven-course meal consisting mostly of dressing...
...with pleasure...
...After dutifully enduring Peter Handke's The Ride Across Lake Constance at the Forum in Lincoln Center, I started recalling Robert Bolt's Vivat...
...For all I know, this thesis is correct and could serve as the philosophical core of a great play...
...Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, who was by no means overjoyed with The Ride Across Lake Constance, did labor mightily to explicate it...
...After they bounded out, the maid rounded off the evening by returning with a squalling baby (actually a large hand puppet) who felt everyone up...
...Bolt is least successful in choosing resonant words to compel our interest and belief...
...I wish the others on stage had acted in Hecht's madcap, delightfully unrealistic manner...
...Mercifully, the lights dimmed...
...Ride must be discussed even though it has ended its intentionally brief run...
...Furthermore, I suggest that playwrights, not fun-loving philosophes or video technicians, are what our theater needs...
...Why, John Knox...
...Ride is merely a more distended and humorless variant...
...Because cacophony is considered music, staff members of the BBC have, by strolling about a studio and banging resonant objects at random, duped some English critics into believing they had heard a broadcast of a new work by "the contemporary Polish composer, Zak...
...Words make the danger and kill him," says Kauffmann...
...Handke's purported philosophic content would have been more impressive had he occasionally followed Plato's example and referred to the subject under discussion in his dialogue...
...He's neither fool nor charlatan because he shows a power of selection, a sense that the pranks and nonsense arise from a mind that encompasses a good deal more than prankish-ness...
...And who is this figure of fun...
...Robert Kalfin, director of the Chelsea and of Kaddish, did not reveal a heightened visual sense by bombarding us with this muzzy, jerky imagery...
...If a play requires no plot or characters, imaginative creations that only a writer can provide, then any typist can become a playwright??particularly if he's seen a few Absurdist plays...
...many fall leaden on the ear ("God gave each of us a different life to live...
...Handke, a 29-year-old Austrian, is considered quite a talent, and if this particular play is done no more, he or someone else is certain to be delivered of one quite like it...
...how someone can write a nonplay while being "neither fool nor charlatan...
...My delight at this transition immediately turned to doubt about how fully Bolt could characterize the mighty names and issues that would loom before us...
...The Chelsea Theater of Brooklyn premiered the play in one of its characteristically short runs, and what was understandably a great personal tragedy for Ginsberg moved me only clinically, journalistically: I empathized because I knew genuine flesh and blood has been abused...
...Vivat Regina...
...There's no need to argue about Handke's "power of selection," for Kauffmann conceded that "in vitality, the play came and went . . . like a radio fading in and out...
...How apt that Bolt's speeches for the vain, aging Elizabeth do not catch her mood half as well as Peter Dews' increasingly garish costumes, for the effect of sitting out Vivat...
...As Allen, Michael Hardstack favored us with such stumbling delivery and lumpish diction that he cast a pall over proceedings already muffled to the point of suffocation...
...And sure enough, he proves more adept at selecting Elizabethan incidents than dramatizing them...
...Robert Bolt shows in Vivat...
...Toward the end, twin girls bounded in to do a menacing tap dance (at least the cast acted as if they felt menaced...
...The language sounded flat??but who can say...
...The Forum production was set in a drawing room or, possibly, a lounge...
...Bolt provides cleverness instead of such probing and churning...
...Both ladies would have done better had they ignored Carl Toms' direction to bellow or yelp in moments of stress...
...Ride lasts a mere hour and 40 minutes...
...Often the characters went off into their own orbits of monologue...
...Occasional, forgettable quarrels flickered over who was to pick up spilled cigars or pour tea...
...Douglas Rain, Alexander Scourby, Lee Richardson, John Devlin, and Peter Cof-field are quite good, but fellow Americans Robert Elston and Noel Craig sound as if they had been hired merely for their looks...
...Each well-dressed speaker had no name but took that of his performer: "Paul Hecht . . . Paul Hecht," the program read...
...an English accent slips around in their mouths like an ill-fitting set of dentures...
...Without plot or characters, how can Ride contain any of that "reality" Handke was said to be concerned with...
...Ginsberg's sole dramatic device was to have himself as a young man stand off to the side, reciting the poem and watching his family (including the still younger Allen) endure the mother's comings and goings from and to Pilgrim State Mental Hospital...
...Give Barnes of the New York Times couldn't explain the play, but urged us to go...
...Some of his lines ring true ("There is such hammering in the Spanish shipyards that all Spain shakes...
...Who else...
Vol. 55 • March 1972 • No. 5
