On Stage

...He is a competent actor, but displays here a minimum of facial and vocal shading, and never suggests the depth of despair that Arthur Hill so subtly and persuasively brought to the part...

...In addition, the very idea of a sophisticated couple leading a naive one by the nose stems a bit obviously from Noel Coward's Private Lives...

...Quicksilver shifts of mood are executed with absolute mastery, yet this is no black superman, only a decent, damaged mortal...

...Miss Dewhurst's voice, always somewhat rasping, seems now to have broken in two: a pair of voices competing with each other...

...The hero, Dale Jackson, is a severely disturbed black ex-sergeant in a VA hospital, in a long session with an eminent psychiatrist...

...Both the format of a psychiatric session and the derivation from numerous case histories push the material in the direction of the documentary...

...Because of this, and because people who knew Albee could, rightly or wrongly, identify the supposed real-life prototypes of the dramatis personae as men, attacks were soon leveled against the play to the effect that it was all homosexual relationships in heterosexual drag...

...only here and there does the pacing become a mite too deliberately pause-riddled...

...For Rollins' performance alone, the play deserves our gratitude...

...I cannot for a moment believe that the couple would cringe at the mere thought of one of them revealing the truth...

...This always seemed wrong to me...

...Why, then, does Virginia Woolf seem diminished today...

...As director, Albee has stressed the comic elements preponderantly...

...Whatever the origin of the play's quartet of characters may have been, all four function convincingly as heterosexuals...

...nor is it by showing one's hand to a pair of unimportant guests that one inhibits further gamesmanship in oneself...

...As for the new performances, none of them is up to the old ones...

...All in all, then, a production for people who have not read or seen the play before—as all future productions may turn out to be...

...Now, after several revivals, I realize that the son ruins much more...

...The doctor, a Jew with similar feelings of guilt over his family's survival of the Nazi Holocaust in Poland, tries to do his best by D. J.—an honest, conscientious best that just is not enough...

...The confrontation between the two men in a militaristic atmosphere embodied by a robotlike MP is taut, sometimes somberly amusing, sometimes almost moving...

...As a result, cruel repartee no longer has the liberating effect of a tabu being toppled...

...The author based the play on the actual case of a Negro Medal-of-Honor winner who was shot to death by the owner of a store he was trying to rob...

...That would explain Martha's final dejection, her fear of being bereft of games that enable her to ward off reality...

...Aside from this derivativeness, there is also the minor irritation of Albee's carrying on as if he were using fancy poetic language when, in fact, his verbal and grammatical prowess is full of holes...

...If the play has any structural underpinning, it is the fictitious son whom George and Martha have invented for themselves...

...but the play would have us believe that it is vitally important to keep the fantasy or game from being discovered by strangers...

...In a left-handed way...

...Furthermore, it has gradually dawned on me how much Albee has borrowed from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger—including the whole business of a game-playing married couple—and how much his characters, plot and even dialogue owe to Strindberg...

...Another genuine weakness, for instance, is that there is not a single character likable enough for us to care about...

...Moreover, the bitchiness marathon is characteristic of long-range homosexual relationships even more perhaps than of heterosexual ones...

...Revived in 1976, the play has become much less dramatic, whereas I have become The New Leader's drama critic...

...the problems lie elsewhere...

...It was largely favorable, although that is not why the play became a world success and Albee a millionaire, while I, more modestly and somewhat incongruously, became the magazine's movie critic...

...But the symbol does not quite work: One doesn't stop playing games by a sudden fiat spewed out at the end of a long, drunken night...

...He has since been equaled at it, perhaps even surpassed, by his own former protege, Terrence McNally...

...Colleen Dew-hurst comes off best, but her Martha is too coarse, too consistently lower-class to suggest, as Uta Ha-gen's so completely did, the daughter of the president of an Eastern college...

...Laudably, the author resists this, preferring to give us a work of the imagination...

...In the end, Al-bee does wax a bit sentimental about his hero and heroine, yet the pathos feels arbitrarily imposed by the author rather than earned by the characters...

...He suffers from what the doctor calls "impacted grief," which has made this sensitive and bright man suspicious, aggressive, dangerous...

...And Cole drags in too much: war in general, this unjust war in particular, black rage, Jewish guilt feelings, black and white tensions on top of the doctor-patient dash, and finally the problem of privilege—the medal as a source of special treatment and immunity that exacerbates the soldier's sense of guilt...

...The current production, staged by the author, while visually adequate, is otherwise overshadowed by memories of the original one, directed by Alan Schneider...

...But as D.J., Howard E. Rollins Jr...

...Maureen Anderson overdoes Honey's hysteria...

...So far, so good...

...I doubt whether there is a moral in all this, but there it is for the record...

...David Clennon,, although he looks too Wasp and young for the part, is fine as the doctor, whom he balances neatly between professionalism and humaneness, incisive helpfulness and ultimate fallibility...

...Nonetheless, the actress has a formidable stage presence, moves authoritatively, and can flash several potent kinds of smile, one of them downright withering...

...But none of these people has much basic decency, if any...

...The pretended parenthood ploy, to be sure, is particularly pertinent to a homosexual "marriage," adding a note of special poignancy: Childless heterosexual couples can at least adopt children...

...in retrospect, she makes Melinda Dillon, who looked like the weak link in the original cast, appear very good indeed, and it becomes clear that this part is the hardest to handle...

...we can admire the witty and ingenious nastinesses of George and Martha, and occasionally feel a trifle sympathetic toward Nick and Honey as humiliated bystanders...

...Cole has drawn on other sources, too, both printed and oral, especially conversations with doctors and Vietnam veterans...

...yet the play needs its serious, indeed dark, undercurrent if it is not to dissolve into unredeemed triviality...

...Tom Cole's Medal of Honor Rag is an honorable and intelligent piece of work, but ultimately not very interesting...

...On Raymond C. Recht's ominously raked set, which makes the austere VA hospital office tilt into sinisterness, David Chambers has staged the play cogently and alertly...

...For one thing, the bitchiness of spouses to each other, and of more sophisticated people to less clever ones, was a rather new thing for the American theater in 1962, and Albee was and is pretty good at bitchiness...

...When I first saw Virginia Woolf, I was left cold by the device, but thought that only the closing passages of the play were marred by it...

...Richard Kelton would be an acceptable Nick if only he did not have quite so yokelish a look...

...D. J., as he calls himself, has been through hell and survived through dumb luck where all his buddies died horribly...

...and though each, in moments of disadvantage, lays bare some vulnerability, regained equilibrium inevitably brings with it renewed crassness, selfishness and nastiness...

...Like the doctor, however, it cannot quite succeed...

...Since I can no longer think, as I did initially, that the son really exists, the heavy weather made of him intermittently throughout the three acts reveals a faulty, or at least flimsy, dramatic structure...

...So Martha's abject terror when George calls the bluff on their son makes very little sense, yet the entire play hinges on and builds toward it...

...He has a beautiful voice that brings out the poetry of the street idiom, and his diction is impeccable even in excitement...

...The fantasy serves both their mutual delight as well as, according to how they twist it, their need to upstage and outsmart each other...

...Then there is the business of the imaginary son...

...Preposterous...

...Only language at its best could save the play, and that, deserving as it is, it does not have...

...is a revelation...

...given how callous and exhibitionistic they are, they wouldn't give a damn?among a closetful of their skeletons, this would hardly amount to a chicken bone...

...By the way, isn't there something odd about a college play in which students are not mentioned once...

...Ben Gazzara is still less convincing as a professor of history, except that, like history, he repeats himself...

...A handsome man with eyes and body in perfect control, he conveys both brightness and sickness, fortitude and hurt, with utmost delicacy and toughness...

...other playwrights, like Venable Herndon, are not far behind, some of them very clearly modeling themselves on Albee...

...but his invention looks peculiarly contrived and theatrical against all that factual background...

...In a sense, of course, the son-game is supposed to be a symbol for game-playing in general...