On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage A TEXAS TAUTOLOGY BY JOHN SIMON Things get lost when you are moving. I have just moved into a new apartment and cannot find my programs with notes on the plays I am reviewing. But that...
...That is all...
...Ben Edwards, the set designer, is Broadway's specialist in seediness and shabbiness...
...In The Oldest Living Graduate, the action centers on ancient Colonel Kincaid, who owns the town hotel and some nice nearby lakeside land that his greedy son wants to develop, but that the Colonel, for sentimental reasons, wants to maintain as is...
...The son concocts a scheme whereby the Colonel will be feted as the oldest living graduate of his military school...
...Some characters appear in two plays, some in one only...
...Colonel Kincaid has the makings of an absorbing character: part senile, part shrewd...
...The Southernness of Williams is an arresting bit of costuming...
...So you are somewhat cheated whether you see one play or all three...
...Advance publicity—which included the Texas and Washington reviews, not very different from press releases—compared Jones to Tennessee Williams...
...And about the women of the town we get to know much less than about the men, which undermines the reality...
...In the third act, 10 more years have gone by and, as the result of a car crash, she is the widow Oberlander...
...The final problem with the trilogy is that it is not really a trilogy at all: You do get useful sidelights on each play by seeing the other two, but you don't get any continuity and organic growth...
...A Texas Trilogy is regional theater in its most constricting sense: Something that delights the natives but just won't travel...
...And under that weatherbeaten ten-gallon hat, the brain seems to be pea-sized...
...After a while Jones' jokes, amusing as some of them are, reveal the schematic nature of their construction...
...But making a particular group feel important and warm is of very limited value at best, and even that value is extra-artistic...
...As the fight between father and son, with the son's wife caught uneasily in the middle, worsens, the Colonel has a stroke...
...the black janitor, cleaning up after the final abortive meeting at which Colonel Kincaid had a stroke gets the last laugh as the curtain falls...
...Not only are major events and confrontations relegated to narration, but even the crucial question of why Lu Ann did not marry her pleasant, affluent beau is insufficiently explored...
...Where the sets have to be sleazy and dilapidated, they are fine...
...There must exist an unwritten law that says, "If you need squalor, call Ben Edwards...
...Baxter Harris is winning as her second husband...
...The language has no access to exultation, madness, prophecy, or whatever could vault it into poetry...
...Why Gwynne was ever hauled to the stage from TV's The Mun-sters, where he belongs, is a mystery far deeper than the ritual of the White Magnolia...
...half refreshingly outspoken, half rambling or downright rude...
...It is the sameness of insights that describe or assess rather than pierce, tear, flay their way to the truth...
...What is illuminating, though, is not the remote resemblance but the glaring contrast between the two playwrights...
...There she meets a jolly trucker, whose name, Oberlander, also fascinates her...
...But his stories about General Pershing and World War I, about an unattainable girl he loved, about old friends gone and old and new pests very much around, are just a bit flat...
...Why does the brother drink and the daughter disobey...
...Jones, to be sure, can write dialogue that rings egregiously true...
...If Jones knows, he does not tell...
...It is the sameness of second-rate lives, whether well-heeled or down-at-heel, of folks who know their frustrations, and others who wear their contentment without noticing the holes in it...
...Here some conflict actually gets on stage, but the contestants are too ordinary, the issue is too typical, the presentation too trivial...
...Unfortunately, Schneider's casting is haphazard...
...the Texanness of Jones is everything: flesh and drawled words and even lapses into silence...
...Time passes between or inside the plays, since two of them are more or less concurrent...
...some are at least mentioned in all three...
...The way out of the dilemma may be not to bother with any of them...
...What fund of common humanity he offers is a little too common, too old-hat...
...Yet a terrible sameness hovers over all...
...to cater, either with realistic or with distorting reflection, to a single region, ethnic group or profession is something much smaller, and boring for those not directly concerned...
...The very action is minimal: The greater changes, conflicts, upheavals are spoken about but never seen...
...where, as in the Kincaid living room, they could be a little more comfortable, they fail...
...The wealthy ex-beau returns on a visit...
...At the fall of the curtain, Lu Ann is left talking to her unreachable mother...
...Williams, however Southern he may be, is also national and international...
...The White Magnolia, a foolish and perhaps evil thing, will leave behind it a vacuum that may prove something worse yet...
...Others seem uncomfortable in their roles (like the talented Patricia Roe), or stumble in and out of their Southern-ness (like Lee Richardson and Henderson Forsythe), or do not age well (like Graham Beckel...
...When the current induction is to take place, the rule book cannot be found, but along with the letter, the spirit is missing...
...The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia is about a society not unlike the KKK that meets at the Kincaid hotel mostly to drink and play dominoes these days, and occasionally to induct a desperate soul willing to join...
...the crusty old colonel and the two inseparable friendly enemies who keep oheating each other at checkers and horseshoes, even the sardonic barkeep who has the best lines, become contraptions rather than people...
...The garrulity lacks grandeur, the canniness is a bit simple-minded...
...He and Lu Ann reminisce about people and places—plus ca cluinge They part a little more than awkwardly, a little less than sadly...
...A wasted life, to be sure, but for what inner and outer reasons...
...There is a kind of playwriting whose main function is to make special groups of people recognize themselves on stage—they may be Texans or New Yorkers, blacks or Jews, servicemen or housewives—who are tickled and flattered by seeing themselves, as it were, exalted to the theater boards...
...the difference lies mainly in what, for lack of a clearer word, I shall have to call the poetry...
...But the humor tends to be obvious and repetitious, and the pathos facile and schematic...
...he can often be funny and pathetic as well...
...Jane Greenwood's costumes are incisive...
...Thomas Toner, Ralph Roberts and especially Patrick Hines shine as assorted local exotics...
...Things smack of arbitrariness...
...Would the marriage to Oberlander have solved most problems had it not been prematurely cut off...
...The cross made up of numerous light bulbs symbolically malfunctions...
...Conversely, Diane Ladd, as Lu Ann, gives a bravura performance only slightly marred by occasional oversimplification...
...There is pathos in that, just as there is steady humor in the incommensurability between the absurd loftiness of the induction ceremony and the cynicism and apathy of its execution...
...Who and what is Lu Ann really...
...For all its blatant symbolism, this is the neatest of the three works, because the horseplay among the men that smacks more of mulish stubbornness than of genuine fun, the incompetence of the new members and the bored obliviousness of the older ones, manage to convey a greater sense of transience and loss than does either of the other plays...
...the son becomes grief-stricken and solicitous...
...Josh Mostel, as a pathetic mother's boy, is more pathetic as an actor...
...To hold up the mirror to all nature, to all human nature, is one tning...
...Thus Fred Gwynne's Colonel Kincaid sounds diagonally removed from Texas—roughly New Hampshire—and his performance is all surface mannerisms, bad timing and total inability to convey inwardness...
...It would have helped to turn these plays inside out, making the offstage the onstage and the present onstage, by and large, food for the waste-basket...
...In act two, 10 years later, she has divorced him?couldn't stand life in the trailer parks—and now lives with her little daughter, works as a beautician, and hangs around a bar...
...Yet soon the old man will die and the vulgar land exploitation commence...
...These three vaguely related works about an imaginary West Texas town by Preston Jones, an actor-director from you guessed where, have managed to lose in transit their very raison d'etre...
...The simplest people in Williams' better plays find words that transcend both their topics and their speakers—that compress or expand meanings and feelings, that hold the toroh of imagery to existential recesses cobwebbed with ignorance or curtained with lies...
...Lu Ann lives with her insolent teenage daughter, drunken loafer of a brother, and a mother whom a stroke has turned into a vegetable...
...Still, the production does have its merits—notably Alan Schneider's direction with its expertly varied tempos full of significant retards that never deaden the overall pacing...
...But that is nothing compared to what A Texas Trilogy lost in moving from Dallas to New York—via the inevitable Kennedy Center and its master, Roger Stevens...
...when the oldster catches on to a tie-in between this and the land development, though, he will have none of it...
...he is now a Kansas City clergyman with a family...
...Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Ober-lander concerns, in act one, Lu Ann Hampton, a high-school student with a well-to-do beau who nevertheless becomes fascinated by the presence and last name of her brother's Korean War buddy, Laverty...
Vol. 59 • October 1976 • No. 21
