On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage PAPP FAILS THE TEST BY JOHN SIMON Joseph Papp has followed up his disastrous Hamlet at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, starring Sam Waterston, with a no less catastrophic production of...
...But oh, the horror of Ruth Gordon...
...If only life—or playwriting—were that simple...
...She brought up her daughter Vivie as a nice young lady unaware of all this...
...Vivie having graduated from Cambridge, her mother wants to bask in her sweet daughterly love until the girl is ready to make a suitably genteel marriage...
...Her timing is exquisite, and even lines tossed off in the most matter-of-fact way are enriched by a teasing melody in her speech...
...His better efforts—Muzeeka, Cop-Out, The House of Blue Leaves —contain bits of true satirical humor embedded in a huge lack of discipline...
...Had he given her the title role in King Lear, a part this ever-the-same actress would have played exactly as she does Mrs...
...This might work if all the leaves were equally expert rather than wildly uneven...
...and a gallery of other rogues and dummies who pop in and out...
...Yet none of this is what makes Leonard Bernstein satir-izable...
...his former classmate, a star of all media who had wanted to be in Bing's play and now turns cold on him...
...even his humor, as in the otherwise not unfunny Mom and Dad scene, is apt to descend into mere games of punning word association...
...What, however, was Papp up to with Miss Gordon...
...The voice lurches between a provoking sputter and an incoherent diminuendo, its utterance broken up into meaningless units, its dynamics inexplicable...
...Her arms and head move with a condescending grandeur and without a trace of sound motivation...
...Miss Gordon is circa 85, and wizened like a prune...
...Miss Redgrave manages to embody Shaw's New Woman not as an out-and-out virago, but as someone whose directness is not without charm, whose lack of traditional femininity does not result in mannishness...
...Lise also has a black lover, who spouts and begets the usual black-and-white platitudes, and there is a grotesque abortion scene...
...Shaw's third play reveals him well short of his mature best, writing a thesis play in the manner of Ibsen as Shaw misunderstood him...
...The dialogue, meant to be clever, is like a club-footed man doing softshoe: "To say the bedbugs just were roaches would be nitpicking...
...his quirky producer, who wanted the play to bomb, so she could later have a spectacular comeback...
...It is about Lise, a girl from Nuremberg, whom the Nazis put on trial after destroying her officer father and raping her mother...
...Lest we miss the point, he wears a peruque out of Candide...
...how she can pardon her being driven into whoredom but not her becoming a whoremistress and capitalist exploiter of other unhappy women...
...and how she ends up rejecting a variety of suitors and Victorian shibboleths like the Gospel of Art and the Gospel of Getting On, as well as her mother's money and, finally, her mother...
...Down at his Public Theater Papp is making no less a public nuisance of himself with his staging of Apple Pie, a "musical work" by the feminist playwright Myrna Lamb...
...William Atherton's performance sheds no light on this ambivalence...
...Storm troopers suddenly turn into various American stock figures, including a pompous suitor, although Lise is already married to Harry...
...the famous composer of classical and show-biz music with whom he is writing a musical, but who promptly dumps him...
...As Lise, Stephanie Cot-sirilos, fresh from the Yale Repertory Theater, is unimpressive...
...Vivie decides to dedicate herself to hard but honorable work as an actuary and, eventually, lawyer...
...So Guare's satire strikes me as out of focus...
...On Stage PAPP FAILS THE TEST BY JOHN SIMON Joseph Papp has followed up his disastrous Hamlet at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, starring Sam Waterston, with a no less catastrophic production of Shaw's Mrs...
...The performance is one part camp, one part lower-class Jewish act (even though neither Mrs...
...But there is a Little too much tract here and not quite enough play...
...Papp is not doing us much more of a favor with his other new show at the Public Theater, John Guare's Rich and Famous...
...The action concerns the real education of Vivie: how she finds out the truth about her mother...
...Now her mother is somehow prosecutor at a trial that, along with Lise, has been transported to the USA, where the girl has married Harry, apparently a grocer but really an incarnation of her father...
...Tears, of which Miss Gordon is incapable, are indicated with extraordinary crude-ness...
...Whether his latest outrage was motivated by arrogant stupidity or crass commercialism, we must beware of him...
...It is 1893, Victoria is on her throne, and God in his heaven...
...Yet instead of a neat eclectic synthesis, we get imitative shells without any kind of tune at the core...
...Nicholas Meyers' music to this almost totally sung work is totally derivative—mostly from Kurt Weill, but also from Jacques Brel and other sources...
...Guare is today's not untypical case of a young man on the borderline between a genuine playwright and a clever fellow...
...Kitty Warren is a woman who was a virtuous, brutalized slavey until she discovered prostitution, and so improved her life...
...The cast is undistinguished except for Lee Allen as Harry/Father, who does some perfectly irrelevant albeit absolutely stunning tap dancing, and is altogether a nimble and graceful performer...
...Warren is between 40 and 50, with remnants of former beauty...
...The theme, as he was to put it in a letter to the Evening Standard over 30 years later in 1924, is "that we praise female virtue highly and pay it poorly, and pay female vice highly whilst we deplore it verbally...
...it is not clear why Vivie, rejecting the dehumanizing aspect of sex, must likewise forfeit its more civilized and pleasant possibilities, or why the kind of work she immerses herself in is necessarily free from capitalist taint...
...Though the symbolism is heavy enough to sink a ship, the meanings are more evaporation-prone than dew...
...she will have nothing to do with romance, sex or marriage?Pharisaical practices and institutions forever spoiled for her by her mother and her cronies, and by a hypocritical, exploitative Society...
...Warren nor Miss Gordon is Jewish), and one part rampaging senility...
...Also, there is too much of that notorious Shavian dryness and antisexuality...
...In Rich and Famous, Guare confronts Bing Ringling, a young playwright whose 148th script is finally produced on Broadway, with the rest of the world consisting of his leading lady-girlfriend, who deserts him for TV when his play flops...
...Later, with the help of a rich and powerful client, she became co-owner and overseer of an international chain of brothels...
...Shaw had not yet learned how to blend his earnest message with his magisterial wit, so that we get something rather like two plays improperly joined...
...The play, with incidental songs by Guare himself, fails both as a whole and in most of its details...
...Some years ago Papp directed Miss Lamb's dismal Mod Donna, but the new pop opera is considerably worse...
...what Guare ought to zero in on is the radical chic, the palming off of the same music as popular and (with slight embellishments) classical, and the exhibitionism on the conductor's podium...
...Warren...
...Warren, he could not have been more of a saboteur...
...Needed, though, are two first-rate actresses for the roles of Vivie and Mrs...
...The whole thing ends in a cop-out, with the three performers made to look like three variants of the same person, and all three gallantly throwing away the devil's tool: gold cufflinks with the initials R and F (for rich and famous) that led them astray...
...The direction by Gerald Freedman is unsubtle, but mercifully somewhat less broad than is his wont...
...His tendency is to think in skits, to view dramatic form as a loose-leaf binder...
...Warren's Profession, starring Ruth Gordon...
...And this from the man who controls a huge part of the New York stage, the probable head of our National Theater should there be one in our time...
...he is made egomaniacal and unvirile, and everything he composes turns into something Jewish...
...All supporting roles are played by Ron Leibman and Anita Gillette...
...It is never clear whether Bing is a good and talented chap brought low by the System, or whether he is just a plain ungifted opportunist, like everyone else in Rich and Famous who is not demented—the only Guarian alternative...
...Then there is a character who is Lise's image in the mirror, but doesn't look like Lise, and lots of masks and projections of Richard Lindner paintings, and other expressionist paraphernalia...
...Her words come tumbling out indistinctly off her palate or through her nose, with the defiance of a stand-up comic or an aggressive drunk...
...Still, the play contains fine passages of muckraking and moments of good serio-comic drama...
...Her movements and expressions have a bluff openness about them, to which her intonations add a jolly twinkle...
...There are a couple of inscrutable references to apple pie, too...
...his doting parents, who disown him and switch their affections to his successful school chum...
...As for the details, take, for example, the composer Anatol Tora...
...The former is played to perfection by Lynn Redgrave, who successfully conveys Shaw's predilection for cerebral endeavor over the seductions of sensuality, his celebration of the romance of the antiromantic...
...Gillette and Leibman are competent funsters, and Mel Shapiro's direction tries to whip up merriment, but you need heavier cream than this even for coffee mit Schlag...
...or, "Reveling becomes revelation and then revulsion...
...Moreover, she makes even less sense aurally than visually...
...lines that should be emotionally charged are played for vulgar farce...
...The rest of the cast ranges from poor (Mylo O'Shea, Ron Randell) to very fine (Edward Herrmann, Philip Bosco), and the sets and costumes work handily...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 6
