The Rebirth of the Phoenix

...By a lucky fluke, Broadway is now featuring a lively and successful production of Much Ado About Nothing that has even managed to earn a Presidential endorsement...

...This repertory group is presenting only two plays-Moliere's Don Juan and O'Neill's The Great God Brown-but that is, after all, two more than any other repertory in town...

...Clearly, Hecht's Juan, under Stephen Porter's direction, is as much the cock of the walk as he can be and still get swallowed up by the inferno in the play's last moments...

...Why did Arthur Miller, just before The Crucible opened at the Beaumont, bite the hand that was about to feed him and attack Lincoln Center for not maintaining a regular company...

...Curiously, the paucity of repertory is embedded in Manhattan's guilty conscience...

...The Comedie Francaise and the Moscow Art Theater are exceptions...

...Nevertheless, Guicharnaud obviously came to the play with some knowledge of what it is to see Dandin on the stage...

...Parisians were able, within a span of six years, to see Louis Jouvet's Don Juan, Jean Vilar's Don Juan, and a third production at the Comedie Francaise dominated by Fernand Ledoux as Juan's servant, Sganarelle...

...This fact was illustrated when Roger Planchon's exciting and inventive group came to New York from France...

...And Maxim Gorky's interesting Enemies, unevenly performed with an ending Gorky never dreamed of, recently closed at Lincoln Center-where a much more important event, a Beckett festival, had not long ago been confined, naturally, to the smaller Forum theater...

...What has inspired these melancholy observations is the brave rebirth of the New Phoenix Company...

...Prince has coaxed natural performances out of his actors, and he has gotten an especially persuasive one from Glover as Brown...

...The playwright once complained that the actors' masks in a particular production were too lifelike because, from the back of the theater, they did not look like masks at all...

...Nonetheless, it was hard to quarrel with the evaluation: The New Phoenix Company had not yet arrived, and so the City Center was the only repertory around...

...Juan's aged father, preaching at his wicked son, drones on and on in a monotone, sounding like an idiot...

...Although the leading lady, Katherine Helmond, is a good actress, she is too mature to play the ingenue, as she does here...

...True, the libertine, seducer and atheist does go to Hell at the end, but that is not the whole story...

...In New York, it is possible to persuade oneself that theatrical history began in the last week of last September because so few signs to the contrary exist...

...McMartin's Sganarelle, though interesting, is too patently afraid of his master to challenge Juan's intellectual authority...

...A little stylization might have preserved more mystery...

...The night I saw it, I ran into the directors of two of America's leading regional theaters, and each was enthusiastic...

...they were a Rumanian Yiddish company (not so good) and a Spanish company (much better...

...That opinion was rather startling because it meant preferring New York's green recruits-half of them less concerned with creating characters than with desperately trying to seem older than they were?to Lord Olivier's seasoned veterans...

...Why else was the Vivian Beaumont Theater originally intended for the company it has never housed (unless one counts the brief period when a troupe there managed to alternate King Lear with a play about Shakespeare...

...Even so, The Great God Brown is an historical curiosity that is worth seeing...

...physically, he is badly bent and so are his pious arguments...

...Elsewhere, in Los Angeles and Washington, permanent theaters not entirely devoted to the greats still consent to turn themselves temporarily into showcases where dramatic masterpieces are on view...

...The Times' first-string critic, not to be outdone, announced that the City Center's School for Scandal was better than the production of the same play at London's National Theater...

...So far this season, our only foreign visitors have come to Brooklyn, not to Manhattan...

...On its only journey to North America, the National Theater stayed up in Canada...

...Other American cities, like Minneapolis and San Francisco, enjoy the services of institutions sometimes known disparagingly as "museum theaters," which provide a steady diet of the classics...

...This is awkward, since it leaves the actors with only one hand free...

...Perhaps the New Phoenix will succeed in changing matters...

...Hecht gives Juan the full benefit of his intelligence, integrity and wit...

...The New Phoenix's other offering, Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown, is also distinctively interpreted, yet without the same satisfactory results...

...Abroad, it is easier to develop a familiarity with the masterpieces of theater...

...Still, the play's experimental technique seems to require the kind of stylized performance historically associated with expressionistic drama...

...Prince's actors, by their plainness and naturalness, expose the banality, the naivete of the lines they speak...

...When the City Center Company played its short season this fall, the New York Times' second-string critic boldly proclaimed that this was the best repertory company in the city...

...One of them, recalling some of Milter's more pallid previous efforts, exclaimed: "Miller has discovered people...

...1 hope the group's American enthusiasts can tell the difference when it comes here again...

...I quarrel with the professor's last four words...

...How many really interesting and ambiguous classics of the English language have New Yorkers had the opportunity to see in the last six years...

...Reviewers likewise display a wild, if academic, enthusiasm for repertory...

...The other characters are less attractive...

...and we get an actual demonstration of his courage: When Juan goes to the aid of a stranger beset by three bandits, Hecht is permitted to depart from the stage directions and fight his heroic battle in our presence...

...Most established foreign companies fare poorly in New York and some have taken the lesson to heart...

...Yale professor Jacques Guicharnaud said of the same production: "Very moving Dandin...

...It gives every sign of becoming a strong company, if we may judge from the acting of Paul Hecht, John McMartin and John Glover, who are, respectively, the Juan, Sganarelle and Pierrot of its Don Juan...

...London and Paris get visits from exciting companies, like the Gorky Theater of Leningrad, that would probably die on Broadway for want of an audience...

...The Teatro Stabile of Genoa, for instance, the toast of Edinburgh, London and Montreal, the recipient of rave notices in the New York press, was a loser all the way with the city's theatergoers...

...The National's School for Scandal, directed by Jonathan Miller, was full of vitality and invention...

...Yet without professional repertory companies, domestic or foreign, we cannot become connoisseurs of the classics...

...They possess a variety of museum theaters of their own, and they receive frequent visits from the companies of other countries, most of them hawking their national masterpieces...

...In the present instance, Harold Prince has directed his actors to hold their masks like miniature flags in front of their faces...

...We overpraise anything passing for professional repertory...

...That was warm praise indeed for a bunch of pleasant and promising kids who had just graduated from the Juilliard School...

...The selection is not exactly overwhelming...

...We feel we ought to have professional groups because we ought to see the classics occasionally...

...Anthony), and the Businessman, Billy Brown, the four principal characters are supposed to wear masks to indicate their concealment of their true personalities...

...At present, the group seems weakest in its women...

...A few years ago, the Royal Shakespeare Company visited Los Angeles and Detroit but avoided the nation's "cultural capital" altogether...

...A beautiful Brechtian show, but little relation to Moliere...

...This Don Juan is heavily weighted on the side of its protagonist...

...Photographs of the Phoenix's 1959 version of the play show the characters with half-masks that somehow adhered to their faces...

...They will draw an audience in New York because people have heard of them, but back home they are regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned...

...Cities like London, Paris and Berlin are more fortunate...

...The Moscow Art Theater in particular has long been a laughing stock among the Russian intelligentsia, and is now being remade by one of its most vocal critics...

...Assuredly, there is now no danger of mistaking a mask for a face, but the price is much too great...

...In this experimental drama of the conflict between the Artist, Dion Anthony (combining the qualities of Dionysus and St...

...at the same time we give it little true hospitality...

...It was more astonishing to anyone who had seen both versions...

...In O'Neill's stage directions and in previous productions, at least, they wear masks...

...Eugene O'Neill's glum New Englanders nightly suffer the agonies provided for them in Mourning Becomes Electra at the Circle in the Square...

...One critic, blinded by too much Broadway phosphorescence, wrote in effect about Planchon's revolutionary staging of Moliere's George Dandin: "Well, if you want a plain, ordinary, everyday George Dandin, this is for you...

...Unfortunately, all of the talk generated by the subject of repertory theater doesn't mean very much...