Dying, With or Without A Pulitzer

...At the end, with supreme inconsistency, she is made out to be suddenly magnanimous?like the male whore—to leave Broadway audiences with a good, uplifting, terminal feeling...

...I have seen Michael Cristofer's second play, Ice, as produced also by Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper...

...It is hard to imagine that either Joe or Felicity could afford to die in so sumptuous a style...

...On Stage DYING, WITH OR WITHOUT A PULITZER BY JOHN SIMON THE Pulitzer Prize, surely one of the most meaningless awards in existence, has just been given to Michael Cristofer for his dismal play, The Shadow Box...

...Par-migian is someone who has enjoyed his life, and improved on it a bit by imagination...

...So the author manages to trample on woman as wife, sexual partner and mother simultaneously...

...First, the obvious underlying implication that terminal illness is a subject ipso jacto awesome and profoundly moving, and that we must prostrate ourselves before a playwright who has dared place it before us not singly, but in triplicate...

...Three: two human grotesques (a gallant one, and a deceived one) out of the provinces of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, in a typically arch situation made poignant by impending death...

...say, one in the kitchen, one in the living room...

...One: a typical lower middle-class family with typical middle-class problems aggravated by impending death...

...They are visited by Beverly, Brian's exwife, a thriving, promiscuous jet-set good-time girl, who still nurtures a secret longing for Brian...

...And Cristofer's performance and persona as Petya in Serban's dreadful Cherry Orchard confirm my impression of him as someone egregi-ously suited to the role of Pulitzer Laureate...

...Two: three typical denizens of Tennessee Williams-Edward Albee country, bitching it up, the nastiness ultimately tempered by impending death...

...The director and the playwright, of course, must share in the blame...

...Call it play-writing by the cottages, or, more appropriately, by the numbers...

...As acted by the lugubriously solemn Josef Sommer, the part becomes even less tolerable...

...For the stage represents one cottage that can be simultaneously occupied by two groups...

...It was even more pretentious and inept than The Shadow Box...

...Patricia Elliott does what she can with Beverly, though she goes rather heavy on the absurdity of the character and tends to become unnecessarily grotesque...

...Only he perceives it as a branch of living, and tries to learn something about the meaning of life to the very end, even if only by means of horseplay with a pretty nurse, or by coaxing, haranguing and ribbing the probably equally doomed Landau into having some last-minute fun with life...

...It is a kind of dance of the seven tales...

...In my book," he says, "the tuna fish is number one: It never gets cancer and it makes a terrific salad...

...What function does he serve—whether he be God, a psychiatrist, or a researcher for the Gallup Poll...

...Vincent Stewart is an appropriate Steve, a youngster of no particular distinction but at least free from affectation...

...Secondly, that nauseating device, "The Interviewer"—a figure who, at the start invisibly through an intercom, then visibly present, asks questions of the patients or, in Cottage Three, of Agnes...

...f you want a considerably better—albeit still imperfect—play on the same subject, there is Cold Storage by Ronald Ribman at the American Place Theater...

...But he is serious about dying, for that is now his business...

...In Cottage Threej a semidemented old woman, Felicity, is tended by her unloved daughter, Agnes, who writes her fake letters from another, beloved but dead, daughter...

...Even worse is the play's dual pretentiousness...

...Slowly but steadily Parmigian's cynical yet at the same time warm and life-asserting humor breaks down Landau's austerity and pompousness...

...He alone survived, and ever since then he has felt that he was living on borrowed time, having somehow to justify his continued existence...

...Verisimilitude, in any case, is not the strong suit of the play...

...Since to crowd three groups into the same living space would tax the designer or director excessively, a cheap, unconvincing strategem was thought up for keeping one group out of doors till the end...

...It is all totally schematic, the dialogue either second-rate vicious-ness or first-rate triviality...

...In Cottage One, an average Joe who led a humdrum life in New Jersey —aptly named Joe—is visited by Maggie, his average, bovine wife, and Steve, their pleasant, guitar-playing son...

...There is the manifest inconsistency of this Interviewer sometimes seeming to be the invisible voice of God, sometimes the embodiment of a prying busybody...

...The eagerly awaited arrival of Agnes' beautiful sister is what keeps Felicity alive...

...I only wish he had not bothered with the paperweight maker's opening monologue, particularly if it was to be played by the always topheavy Paul Sparer...

...Si Oakland is simple and direct as Joe, which is fine, and Geraldine Fitzgerald is what Felicity is meant to be...

...Clearly a man who asks to be pushed off the roof before it gets to be too late to make the six-o'clock news is not serious about suicide?especially if he adds, "You'd be famous for five, six minutes...

...and it is most unlikely that Joe, at least, would not prefer to die at home...

...But Rose Gregorio adds unnecessary mannerisms to Agnes, Laurence Luckinbill is cutesy as Brian, and Mandy Patinkin is hardly the kind of hustler one would want to bring home, let alone keep on: He desperately lacks grace and charm...

...It takes place in and around three woodsy cottages for terminally ill patients attached to a California hospital...

...Without question it is the author's distaste for her—if not indeed for all female sexuality—that is being heaped, undeservedly, on the character...

...That incident also represents for him his betrayal of the rest of his family by surviving...

...Wisely, Ribman ends Cold Storage on a note of barely minimal hope, but it is measure of his skill that he can make us feel it as a significant step ahead in human understanding...

...This takes place on the terrace above the cancer ward of a New York hospital, and essentially pits a jolly, middle-aged Armenian fruit merchant, Parmi-gian, who knows what is in store for him, against an unhappy young Jewish art expert, Landau, who has delusions of being on hand for merely exploratory purposes...

...We could not care less about this supposedly touching (though actually nonsensical) trait, until we realize that it is all a trick to avoid overburdening the set designer and director...

...Altogether, Michael Cristofer's poor technique sticks out like a badly broken bone from a human limb...

...Gordon Davidson, who directed this play initially for his Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, restaged it for the Long Wharf in New Haven, and this is the production that, with minor changes, came to Broadway...

...Despite repeated urging, she stays out until the very end...

...Obviously, he is a handy shortcut to metaphysical speculations about mortality and such, but he is also an intrusive and attitudinizing device by an incompetent writer, and it is distasteful to think of dying people subjected to his Big Brother surveillance...

...A graver problem is the underlying antiwoman attitude of the play...

...Theirs is a story of average American failure—of jobs that don't fulfill, houses that prove unlivable, farms dreamt of but never bought, love that tarnishes...

...But Martin Balsam's Parmigian is one of those full-bodied, richly aromatic characterizations I hope to remember till my dying day, when it may prove to be of genuine assistance...

...He is in charge of acquisitions for an art gallery, his interest in art apparently dating back to the Lisbon police station, where he gave away his father's precious last cigarettes to another doomed Jew who made glass paperweights with winter landscapes in them...

...Maggie is a perfect cow, or perhaps, since she is sexless to boot, a perfect ox...

...At the same time, it is homosexual love that emerges as truly exalted...

...Landau, however, is someone whose life was poisoned early on, when he was an eight-year-old Jewish kid in Lisbon and his entire family was captured by the Nazis...

...Joyce Ebert is an unduly gross, irritating and repellent Maggie, full of unpleasantly exaggerated gestures...

...To show off to a dying ex-husband whom she supposedly still cares for, she puts on every bit of jewelry she has received from her various lovers, and dances provocatively...

...Beverly is an offensively sarcastic, drunken, promiscuous bitch...

...he is able to squeeze drops of fun from it even in a wheelchair, although he banteringly keeps asking Landau to push him off the roof garden where they are sitting...

...Then, as she sheds her gems one after the other, she tells contemptuously of the silly fellows who gave them, and by what demarches she earned each gift...

...What is nice about this work?actually a very attractive sketch for an as yet unwritten play that would have more characters and plot—is that the dialogue between Parmigian and Landau is consistently intelligent, witty and purposive...

...As for Felicity, she is the archetypal ungenerous mother, playing uncon-conscionable favorites...

...It is directed competently in Ming Cho Lee's adequate setting, but the acting is uneven...

...In Cottage Two, we have Brian, the intellectual homosexual writer, and Mark, a San Francisco hustler he once picked up, whom his affection and generosity have redeemed and turned into a true live-in lover now sharing his last days...

...Now, Beverly might be a bitch, but in that case the stories, and her general behavior, would not be so self-incriminating and campily sarcastic...

...Thus Maggie, the benighted wife, who has come to stay with Joe, refuses to enter the cottage...