On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage LIBRA AND THE MOON BY ALBERT BERMEL THE HEROINE of David Ra ce's Boom Boom Room (Vivian Beaumont) is Chrissie, a Libra who longs to lead an orderly life, as balanced as the scales of...
...For years we have watched stately classics gasp and die there under the weight of expensive decoration and helpless pity...
...Looking down at the black and white tiles (what is his next move...
...Good Evening is not decisive enough to be bad...
...In the first, Bob's uncle arrives to tell him about his mother and to drive him back to the city...
...And doesn't slip up once...
...When Papp sacked the director, Julie Bovasso, and took over himself, four or five days before the opening, he did not have the time to rescue the show from a statically conceived staging...
...Michael Weller, the playwright, is working a Chekhovian (or Odet-sian) vein...
...His callousness, and the matter-of-factness of the speech, mask his numbed outrage...
...Girls on tap...
...Nonetheless, Rabe has composed some glorious free-form monologues, molded by the actors into fascinating shapes...
...she has succeeded only in becoming a repository for people's gripes, a beautiful doormat on which they leave their grimy treads...
...Even better, indeed well-nigh inspired, are Charles Durning and Robert Loggia as Chrissie's dad and his psychic echo, the redneck...
...But we didn't really feel like it...
...Only when he is about to go does he remember that he ought to leave a reprimand hanging in the air, an impression that the law is impartial and severe...
...Yet paternal impulses do break out...
...To weep...
...Then, too, when a man beats a woman up without landing a blow, wouldn't it look more cruel to separate them physically and stylize the punishment...
...After seeking guidance from her parents, a lesbian friend and an assortment of men, she decides to devote her future to a redneck who turns out to be a younger version of her father—brutal and demanding, someone who uses her for momentary gratification...
...With one exception, the 15 numbers do not have punch lines, they simply tend to fade out...
...Still, this is a big show, big warts and all...
...and has the effrontery to get a grip on our slippery times...
...The production does not come up to the play's challenges, however...
...The sex act, still looked upon by young people as the great liberation, constricts them, drives them into a relationship they cannot sustain...
...The conversations between Chrissie and the others occasionally founder, or sound as if—like the heroine herself—they are searching for an inner life...
...A policeman who reports that neighbors have been "seeing you all running around bareass-ed" finds he has no desire to carry the complaint any further...
...Weller, though, is very much at home on the obverse, miniature side of Chekhov's dramas, the portrayal of individuals who yearn for other times and places...
...throws off arresting ideas and lines that sing...
...Cook mostly keeps a straight face...
...He enters radiating heartiness and reassurance, only to be tongue-lashed by his nephew for not having written ahead of time...
...All those dirty clothes...
...Admirable as the acting is, I would have liked to see it—and the staging—escape now and then from the realistic mode, as the play does...
...The playwright, on the other hand, has every reason to cheer...
...Why not exploit them...
...The others take it as a gag, not as a reference to his having undergone the unritual-ized rite de passage and feeling now like an adult among children...
...INEVITABLY, the action of Moon-children, as of Chekhov's Uncle Vanxa, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, heads toward the disintegration of a household...
...his lost youth...
...Does Bob mourn for his lost friends...
...Yet her life remains stubbornly base metal, and the author declines to play the alchemist...
...As he turns away, we see his face crack into grief...
...Good Evening (Plymouth) presents Peter Cook and Dudley Moore speaking, singing, dancing, miming, and mugging their own material...
...they rib the others to avoid facing up to their misgivings about themselves...
...Their landlord tells the kids he loves them: "You're goin' to save this fuckin' country...
...A dancing platform, an open, furnished space off to one side (Chrissie's apartment), and enough glitzily-colored doors and openings to keep two farces in business simultaneously are overhung by gilded cages in which some of Chrissie's go-go companions look stranded and bored...
...The performances of Madeline Kahn as Chrissie, of Frederick Coffin, Peter Bartlett, Michael Kell, and Warren Finnerty as a quartet of her male oppressors, and of Mary Woronov as her lesbian suitor, are impressive...
...But we did...
...Finally, there is a music student who is summoned home because his mother is dying of cancer...
...He explains at length how to cover the windows with cheap gingham curtains from Woolworth's...
...In many ways Chrissie is the counterpart of Rabe's hero in The Orphan...
...He has watched his roommates part as strangers and said his good-byes with an alternation of indifference and cynicism...
...A girl wants to save every boy she sleeps with...
...At the apartment, confronted with each other and the imminent loss of the persons closest to them, they make a futile, life-giving gesture...
...gracefully, it reproduces the trials of coming of age in the swinging '60s...
...At the Theatre de Lys, the revival of Moonchildren does everything possible to achieve an unexaggerat-ed stage life, and the results suit the play, which is less ambitious and better carpentered than Rabe's...
...And his very failure (or refusal) to put dramatic pressure behind every scene lends the play an experimental tone that makes it a brave choice for starting Joseph Papp's stewardship at the Beaumont...
...Perhaps, if one can bear to...
...His work has been consummated as devoutly as he could have wished...
...If the play does not equivocate, neither does it moralize...
...He rhymes the new name with Bob, but as a Jew he sees himself becoming a reincarnation of the classic sufferer...
...I wanna be golden," she sings at one point...
...You know who you are and where you're goin...
...Two of the boys are jokers...
...But what hope does she have...
...The music student, whose name is Bob, insists that everyone call him Job...
...At last Chrissie flees...
...Here it is not the forces of historical change that sunder the characters?this is not, after all, a play on Chekhov's scale, simply in his style—but the approach of that all-too-predictable event, graduation: Following the summer hiatus, the new school year will bring a different set of boarders...
...another is a "fun-loving Pisces"), Chrissie feels desperately inquisitive about herself and the people she runs up against...
...All in all, Boom Boom Room does not seem quite finished...
...Bob, he keeps saying, has died...
...his lost nephew...
...Papp is reported to be unhappy about Boom Boom Room's mixed reception, yet if the drama had raised no hackles it would have been a throwback to the old days...
...Although he could not take on the obligation until he felt it as a pressing, personal motive, once he did, the actual retribution gave him no difficulty...
...and lowering his head, he weeps...
...Meanwhile the playwright is demonstrating that they have no inkling who they are or what they will do next...
...Moore plays a nice baby-grand and never runs out of charm...
...Even this plan miscarries...
...Moonchildren offers a score (musical and numerical) of such yearnings, and at least two of them correspond...
...The frustrations of Chrissie and her constellation of acquaintances cry out for bold theatrical imagery...
...Another tries to set himself on fire, like a Buddhist priest, when he learns how many Vietnamese have been killed in the war (fortunately, one of the jokers fills the gasoline can with water...
...After Bob strides into another room to pack for the trip, one of the girls appears and begins, not unpleasantly, to question the man...
...It runs for close to three hours...
...A cast of young players become the very people they are impersonating, students living communally in a sleazy pad during the mid-1960s...
...Afterwards he takes her back to his mother's empty apartment "to ball her...
...To sit bleakly...
...retains its stamina and a packet of surprises through to the end...
...his director, John Pas-quin, loyally delivers an interpretation by Stanislavsky (or Harold Clurman...
...Chrissie, by contrast, selects her own grand mission, self-discovery and maybe self-improvement, but has no idea how to carry it out...
...Some amusing lines flit by, as when a shepherd who witnessed the Nativity is interviewed by Matthew for "an in-depth profile of Jesus" to appear in the Bethlehem Star...
...No shaving...
...anyway, just to be polite...
...It is doing terrific business...
...What is the correct behavior at a mother's deathbed...
...Those on the opposite bank of the generation gap eye the students with distrust and envy...
...This would not matter if the rest of the content were satirical, but—a letdown from two chaps associated with Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment night club, and Private Eye magazine—it continually retreats into whimsy...
...Did the uncle mourn for his lost sister...
...On Stage LIBRA AND THE MOON BY ALBERT BERMEL THE HEROINE of David Ra ce's Boom Boom Room (Vivian Beaumont) is Chrissie, a Libra who longs to lead an orderly life, as balanced as the scales of her sign...
...Yet the revue has to buoy itself up on exhausted Noel Cowardly adjectives of disapproval: dreadful, awful, ghastly, terrible, disgusting...
...Orestes came to life with a predetermined mission, to avenge his father's death...
...Those cages and doors, for example, must have cost a mint...
...Under-educated, the child of a disastrous marriage, an "easy lay" earning her way as a go-go girl and working with other dancers who know what they're doing (one is studying for a doctorate...
...In the next hospital bed lies the mother of a girl he had been pursuing in high school, and the young people gaze at each other across the bodies of their dying parents...
...In the last scene Bob retiles the floor, alone in the pad like the aged servant Firs in The Cherry Orchard...
Vol. 56 • December 1973 • No. 25
