On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage AGING BADLY BY JOHN SIMON N Now the Phoenix Theater has joined in the Bicentennial madness and hauled out Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, a typical product of the '20s and...
...The play concerns lovely old Mrs...
...Because the asylum seems to Mrs...
...Everybody does the right thing...
...There are two small parts that work: a truckdriver who arranges his delivery routes to coincide with the availability of women he has stashed away in strategic locations across the city, and another truck-driver-mechanic who comes in with a funny-looking, worn-out part and grotesquely and ineptly asks for its replacement, conveying that he too is missing a part inside his cranium...
...That most of this eludes one's comprehension matters less than that the strained-for wit eludes the author's grasp...
...I find it hard to trust a play where every worker is wise and noble or picturesque and jolly or pathetic and lovable under a surface gruffness, and only the boss is vile...
...and it is Joe's picture too that, unbeknown to its owner, is sent off as Tony's likeness...
...B. comfortable, although the latter allays her fear of death...
...and the good but confused Joe, who wobbles between Socialism and womanizing, remains a pallid figure...
...Tony is a magnanimous bore...
...here we see him at his obscure origins, surrounded by good, ordinary working people whom he will have to forsake, wistfully and apologetically, to assume his manifest destiny as Arthur Miller...
...Louis Zorich and Barry Bostwick are a stock Tony and Joe, respectively, but Lois Nettleton, an undervalued actress, does as much for Amy as the author and director allow...
...the still older man, devoted friend of the former, who remembers fighting the Indians, whose antiquity makes him immune to everything and enables him to execute his arduous chores with the privileged precariousness of a sleepwalker negotiating a high ledge from which a waking man would plunge to his death...
...The thing is merely a star vehicle for an aging actress, and Miss Hepburn goes through her bag of tricks, the main ones being the abilities to sound as if she were cackling when she is only talking and to grow gratuitously lachrymose...
...Bert's sensitivity is attested to by his reading War and Peace, and by his humility toward his fellow employes, all of whom seem to him his superiors in colorfulness and reality...
...the somewhat soiled Amy's struggle to recover her innocence is a sublime cliche...
...On Stage AGING BADLY BY JOHN SIMON N Now the Phoenix Theater has joined in the Bicentennial madness and hauled out Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, a typical product of the '20s and '30s when the American theater, though very active, yielded little of lasting value...
...B. goes off with Dubois to the asylum where the maid used to put in time...
...His mail-order bride is Amy, a decent but battered and disenchanted San Francisco waitress, to whom he has not dared write in his broken English or send his own picture...
...Dubois, her very fat maid, is also given to lesbianism and levitation, neither of which makes Mrs...
...Katharine Hepburn returns to Broadway in A Matter of Gravity by Enid Bagnold, the English novelist-playwright-gentlewoman now in her mid-80s...
...The two of them inherit the manor the girl craves, while Mrs...
...two out of the three performances are substantial...
...Young Bert is working in the shipping room of an auto parts warehouse in lower Manhattan, and we observe him on two Mondays: a hot summer one, the day after Hitler took over Germany, and a gloomy winter one, the day before Bert-Arthur goes off to college—two events of roughly equal historic importance...
...Amy, the multiple fracture to her heart notwithstanding, goes through with the wedding to a prostrate yet enthusiastic bridegroom...
...the office seductress neatly contrasted with the dowdy great-hearted spinster...
...Basil and her lovely old manor, both in some disrepair but still gamely carrying on...
...Howard was a journalist, and there is something uncomfortably journalistic about his writing—as if a play were a human-interest story to be told in Reader's Digest style...
...I'll spare you the details, except to note that the action covers eight years—and feels it—results in Nicky's marrying the black girl who, never fear, is light-skinned enough to be played by a white actress...
...Just as Sidney Howard's play owes its survival to the movie version and the Frank Loesser musicalization (feeble as it was), the Williams one-acter is probably remembered more for its cinematic adaption into Baby Doll...
...This warehouse stocks more cliches than auto parts: the lovable Irishman, full of imagination and poetry, but too shiftless to make it in the world...
...The play might more felicitously have been called "A Memory of Two Truckdrivers," and been shortened accordingly...
...This 1924 play concerns Tony, an Italian-born California wine grower thriving despite Prohibition, who decides, rather late in life, to marry...
...onstage there is only paltry bustle and panting after cleverness...
...Meryl Streep, an extremely accomplished fledgling actress, is a fine fleshly booby of a child-wife, though she could look a smidgen more attractive...
...Let's face it: No work that hinges on a girl's having sex one solitary time and getting impregnated ever amounted to a bag of beans...
...All the vaguely fetching things happen offstage...
...It is, however, well acted by most of the cast, although Thomas Hulce fails to humanize the goody-goody Bert with his exquisite sensibility...
...Amy, who has come to love the exuberant and generous Tony, sadly prepares to leave...
...A Memory of Two Mondays was originally a long curtain-raiser for Miller's A View from the Bridge, wisely dropped when the show reached Broadway, and its resuscitation is rather less wise...
...Stephen Porter's direction is routine where resourcefulness is desperately needed, and James Tilton's set lacks the imagination necessary to overcome its blatant inexpensiveness...
...The rest of the production is profoundly undistinguished, although Wanda Bimson is very sexy and now needs only to learn how to act...
...She builds audience adulation into her very movements and intonations, which always inhibits my enthusiasm, lest it come between the actress and her relish of herself...
...Basil like the proper halfway house for learning levitation and preparing for the beyond...
...Although this is biologically possible, it is artistically inconceivable...
...When Amy arrives with her trousseau, full of boisterous hope and quiet pathos, Tony, afraid to meet her at the train, drunkenly crashes his car and incurs multiple fractures in both legs...
...Instead, he has Joe, a young former organizer for the Wobblies and now his foreman, write the letters...
...It is one of those memory plays whose central character reeks of sensitivity and promise of a glorious future...
...Arvin Brown's staging is at least adequate...
...The mind that sees the sadness of life in these terms is the literary equivalent of bleeding-heart liberalism in polities...
...The three major characters and the two principal minor ones—a jolly priest and a grouchy doctor—are simplistic in action and banal in utterance...
...Even Bernard Shaw went into a decline as an octogenarian playwright, and Miss Bagnold, the author of some respectable novels and one quaint but not unworthy play (The Chalk Garden) as well as some lesser ones, is no Shaw...
...Joe will put her up platonically until she gets a job...
...the crusty old man who hates his wife yet cracks up when she dies, then withdraws his savings, defies the boss and dreary common sense, goes off on a binge of spending and giving away, and dies amid ecstatic prodigality...
...It predicates an absurdly sentimental author who thinks, "Poor girl—just once she deviates from the straight and narrow, and look what happens to her...
...B.'s beloved grandson, comes to visit from Oxford, whence he brings along two mismatched couples: a homosexual don with a young ruffian of a lover, and a radical Marxist lesbian don with her lovely West Indian protegee...
...The other current Phoenix bill (two more are to come) is a double one: Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays...
...Yet sentimentality is the lessor of the play's problems...
...Her concoction is essentially a weak novel dragged and squeezed onto the boards...
...Only Roy Poole is poor as the husband, and remarkably un-Southern to boot...
...Tony Musante is a rollicking mixture of suspicion, cunning, meanness, and sensuality as the victim-turned-avenger, even if he is a bit too imposing for what the script terms a little man...
...the office drunk who reforms and becomes holier than thou...
...Tony, after wanting to shoot Joe, whom he loves "like a son," forgives the pair, makes Amy stay, and promises to love the baby like his own...
...The fighting couples are drawn to Mrs...
...the main one is the barrenness of its invention...
...He knows that they will promptly forget him, even if he will be haunted by their memory until, presumably, he immortalizes them in a comedy-drama that will live forever or a day...
...Nicky, Mrs...
...Joe is deeply loyal to Tony, but the "madness" of the fiesta gets to him, and though he and Amy sleep together only once (you guessed it), she becomes pregnant...
...Arvin Brown's muscular staging works well, and he marshals his 14 performers tidily across the shallow stage...
...B. and her old-world ironies like overheated moths to a rather cool candle...
...This story of the possessive older man and his dumb-sexpot young wife, of his burning down the syndicate's cotton mill to got work for his own, and of his having to end up paying for it by letting the syndicate man enjoy his lush spouse, makes for a sharp study in Southern-style mischief...
...Though Wanted is scarcely over 50 years old, it comes across hoarier than a Jacobean drama or Restoration farce...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 5
