On Stage

...This is rather like trying to turn Sherlock Holmes into Davy Crockett...

...in Summer Brave, Madge does not go off with Hal, is dropped by Alan, resigns herself to a shopgirl's job and to being pursued by every young blood in town—though, as the curtain falls, her mother can see from the porch that Madge is not accepting any rides as she resolutely trudges toward Woolworth's on her own two feet...

...Circle in the Square began it with a revival of Ah, Wilderness!, Eugene O'Neill's only comedy...

...it smacks so of Thornton Wilder's brand of patronizing sentimentality, of a wish-fulfillment America that could stand in for Never-Never Land...

...Robert U. Taylor's set is authentic with a vengeance, but Tom Signorelli's direction does not perform any of the miracles that would be needed to save this opus...

...But there is something thin and stretched-out about Yentl, for all its tidiness...

...Or so it was in Picnic, where Joshua Logan, the Broadway-wise director, imposed this happy ending on Inge...

...Neither the language nor the mores fit properly, yet Pinero's fragile comedietta cannot dispense with any of its precarious assets, such as the suggestive spectrum of British accents evoking a class structure...

...Logan, on the other hand, put in a little zestful, albeit spurious, drama: the beautiful, unbright girl going off with the handsome, impractical drifter—inner emptiness calling to inner emptiness to share the greater, unavoidable void...

...the gesture, improbably grand...

...Ian Calderon's lighting is somewhere near the middle...

...Joseph Papp began his Vivian Beaumont season of "classics" (having failed in previous seasons there with new American plays) by reviving his own revival of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells: At the Public Theater, under another director, the action had at least been kept in the London of the 1860s...

...Probably not...

...The always more than competent Gabriel Dell is here miscast, uncomfortable, and often inaudible, too...

...and Peter Link's music falls resolutely short of it...

...For example, Augustus Colpoys, who is simply the head comic of the Wells Theater, is turned here into a cheap burlesque comedian who carries on like all Three Stooges rolled into one...

...and that of Nan Martin, the Mother, who is all metallic Broadway stridency...

...Even allowing for the slow development of his genius, the difference is instructive: O'Neill simply wasn't a playwright of the Active imagination (consider, too, his failure to recreate the legendary past in Marco Millions, and his inability to create mythic archetypes in The Great God Brown...

...When Hal is forced to leave town next morning, Madge, after some hesitation, runs off with him...

...There is much after-hours boozing —and after-Albee playwriting?eliciting reminiscences, recrimination, acrimony, and ultimate reconciliation...

...he depended for his best works on sticking close to his and his family's tormented lives...

...As you may recall, this was the story of a hot day and night in a Kansas town, where the outer flatness seems to infiltrate inner beings, and passionate aspirations smoulder in vain, blanketed by shabby-genteel conventions...

...I would prefer to believe that he didn't write this one, either...

...Not all the performances could have been so unsatisfactory without generous help from Antoon's direction...

...O'Neill was writing here about the sunny family and cheerful adolescence he never had, as opposed to the un-censored version he let out with Long Day's Journey Into Night...

...We are not allowed to believe in the genuineness of Avonia's concern for Trelawny, or Wrench's decency?let alone his talent...

...from the very first moment, we do not believe that a New York boarding house would be kept by a woman named Mossop...

...I single out merely Helen Verbit's totally amateurish landlady...

...sentiment is given equally short shrift, and such a hokey but moving moment as the reunion of the lovers on the stage of The Lyric falls right between two heartstrings...

...Wisely, Sinatra refrained...

...The playwright, besides minor changes along the way, has reimposed his own brave old ending...

...Instead, he spends the night seducing Madge, Alan's fiancee, the prettiest but far from brightest girl in the area...

...and Walter Abel's turning the crotchety, dictatorial Justice Gower into a feeble-minded oaf...

...Again, Captain DeFoenix is played clearly by a madman from the nearest asylum who thinks he is, not Napoleon, but Captain DeFoenix, which is madder yet...

...now, under A. J. An-toon, it has been shifted to New York at the turn of the century...

...The Xerox Company and the Kennedy Center of Washington have been reviving a series of American plays for the Bicentennial (I wonder, by the time it is over, how many atrocities will have been committed in its name...

...Despite some huffing and puffing toward a plot that remains embryonic and preposterous, it is all mostly boozy and bitchy wisecracks that seldom come off...

...Lamppost Reunion is so bad that even a lawsuit based on it would have to be a flop...

...only the gifted Meryl Streep salvages something from the part of a friendly rival actress, Miss Parrott, turning her into a somewhat condescending, ironic Southerner, with quizzical Dixie hauteur...

...Lamppost Reunion brings the prolific off-off-Broadway playwright Luis LaRusso II to a theater that is nearly Broadway with a play that is nowhere near a play...

...It almost looks as if the producer was counting on the publicity of a suit by Sinatra to assure the show's survival...

...And Montel has cast the production for the most part badly, failing also to get the best out of his few good actors...

...There is a Fourth-of-July picnic at which Hal Carter, the nomadic stud who has blown into town to get a job from his ex-school chum, Alan, does not show up...

...And a large cast, doubling in smaller roles, performs with balletic precision...

...The movements and groupings are routine, the rhythms do not strike one as organic, even Stuart Wurtzel's set is too obvious to be truly evocative...

...This is a notion that may work as a legend, as a tale we read, but requires, in the theater, rather heavy chains to suspend our disbelief by...

...Even Marybeth Hurt, an actress usually touched with grace, is allowed to make Trelawny into a high-pitched, whining, one-note creature...

...Yet even if the dialogue were better, a mumbling actor like Frank Quinn could still effectively garble it...

...There was a pathos in this: Can beauty lean on beauty, and the two survive all their other lacks by sharing them...

...for once, however, the director was right: Inge's revision, or reversion, merely makes a bad play worse...

...Comedy, throughout, is whipped into farce...

...But the attempt is gallant...

...In the current production, Michael Montel's staging has done everything to make things look flatter, more provincial-repertory than necessary...

...Nor does the new ending work as a sobering anticlimax, for Inge feels obliged to telescope the futures of several characters into the last 10 minutes, and there is enough breathless plot outline here for a whole other (thank goodness unwritten) play...

...You need something snappy to finish off this parade of folksy platitudes where every character is at best a type, at worst a grotesque...

...Yet there is still Kalfin's Brechtian mise en scene to admire, with Karl Eigsti, Carrie F. Robbins and William Mintzer providing spare, no-nonsense scenery, costumes and lighting, respectively...

...Thus Alexis Smith, while not unmoving as Rosemary, the frustrated high-school teacher, does not find an adequate way of interweaving the ludicrous and desperate strands of her poorly repressed anguish...

...In the past, I have always defended the author against directional interference...

...On second viewing, too, I am less able to accept the improbabilities of a plot that would have me believe a girl can fool all the people all the time into believing she is a young man—can actually fool her wife into feeling satisfied in bed...

...In praising the original production of Trelawny, Bernard Shaw stressed its charm and delicacy, and that is just what Antoon has bulldozed out of every scene...

...It purports, dishonestly and exploitatively, to be about the reunion of a thinly-disguised Frank Sinatra with his old cronies in a dingy Hoboken bar...

...The Leah Napolin-Isaac Ba-shevis Singer adaptation of the lat-ter's story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, has been transferred from Brooklyn to Broadway, its title shortened to Yentl, the part of Hadass given to a different but equal actress, and the rest recreated pretty much identically by Robert Kalfin from his production for the Chelsea Theater Center...

...One real difference is that Tova Feldshuh, though still a delightful Yentl, seems to think she must play broader for Broadway, and elevates her winsome devices into conspicuous mannerisms...

...But there are two shameful performances: that of Ernest Thompson, playing Hal, who speaks and moves with so many retards, so many pouting cutenesses and funny gutturalizations, as to make the youth emerge generally retarded...

...And so on...

...Now we are treated to William Inge's Summer Brave, as Inge retitled his Picnic when he finished revising it shortly before his death...

...Mandy Patinkin's wrongness of sound, look, and gesture as Arthur Gower...

...David Mitchell's scenery and The-oni V Aldredge's costumes are at the upper edge of competence...

...Yet this play cannot accommodate a dying fall because there was not enough of a rising action—nothing very climactic preceded it...

...Inge, be it said, knew how to wring a kind of two-dimensional stage life —if not a literary life, or life life?out of these animated silhouettes (once, in Come Back, Little Sheba, he was able to do better than that...