Warmed-Over Vice and Innocence

...Reprehensible as it may be to steal from others, it is at least enterprising: a sign of awareness that the outside world exists...

...A dramatist who has to explain his play is in sorry shape indeed...

...For the umpteenth time—if you count Williams' long plays, short plays, long and short fictions, poems and memoirs—we are back in a boarding house in, naturally, New Orleans...

...We also get tired word play, as in Jane's "I am no good...

...Writer either sentimentally reminisces about the house and its inmates from the point of view of the future, or, right in the present, summarizes bits of the play that Playwright was too lazy to dramatize...

...and Jane, an intensely sexual (failed) Fashion Designer dying of blood cancer...

...Two comic, starveling spinsters live off Mrs...

...Receiving no support from anyone, Miss Kagan conveyed perfectly the terrible nervous energy, the brittle facade of a person being whittled away both from without and within...

...A man who would steal and re-steal from himself is the saddest of failures...

...Best of all is the resuscitation of Robbins' choreography by Yuriko, who was the principal dancer in the original cast and is the mother of the current dance lead, Susan Kikuchi...

...The second act is mostly about Jane and Tye having at each other...

...Wire's historic house and garden, and the Photographer on the floor below who throws orgies...

...The others are passable, although the young lovers seem here less doomed by the story than by the blandness of June Angela's and Martin Vid-novic's personalities...

...he is crude, promiscuous and brutal, until he is temporarily shattered by Jane's revelation of impending death...

...The King and I seemed almost innovative a quarter century ago, when the exotic location, distant period, and a plot in which the principals—the despotic King of Siam and the strong-willed British governess hired to educate his numerous progeny—were not lovers, but shared a bittersweetly platonic amitie amoureuse...

...As if this weren't ghastly enough —decked out with every kind of pseudopoeticism, painful attempt at humor and even more painful stabs at pathos—it is further undercut with frequent interlarddngs of recitative...

...we simply know that Yul Brynner will be remembered only as the King of Siam, and are happy to be a witness to theatrical history, even when it is merely repeating itself...

...When he does write a play, it is perforce a rehash, or at the utmost a replay of youthful memories that have been getting thinner and dimmer...

...It worked so much better in that incomparably finer memory play, The Glass Menagerie, where the autobiographical narrator hero concluded with, "Blow out your candles, Laura—and so goodbye . . ." Nothing so pretentious as echoes of echoes, only a simple good-bye—not a spelling out of the obvious: We can see for ourselves that Williams' house is empty now...

...Whatever fund he had for attending to the life of people and ideas around him, he has long since dissipated...

...This house is empty now...

...Sylvia Sidney left Mrs...

...Wire's gruff charity, forced to swallow insults with their soup...

...And when he tries to write about his later -experiences—as in Small Craft Warnings and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel—it comes out lifeless and third-hand, as if seen through the double screen of his former writings and a mind grown soft from self-indulgence...

...Consider, finally, the truly insufferable would-be lyrical closing line: "All that remains is echoes, echoes of echoes—of no voices...

...The writing is consistently pastiche-Williams: "Now they enter into the lighted area of my memory —which is not realistic, as you may know by now...

...Wire bullying, berating and being rather nice underneath...

...The sets by Peter Wolf strain valiantly to be sumptuous, and Stanley Simmons has accurately recreated Irene Sharaf's pleasing original costumes...

...But here we are, still as alert as ever, and Williams, for a long time now, has been giving us stones for bread ?really merely watered-down re-workings of his old situations, characters, ideas, and dialogue, exactly as in all the recent plays bearing his signature, itself most likely merely stenciled on...

...Especially then, in fact, because that is nostalgia, Constance Towers sings and looks Anna Leonowens, the spunky English widow, well enough, but her acting does not remotely approach the energy and grace of Gertrude Lawrence in the original production...

...She played with intelligence, wit, and exquisite timing: Every moment was a gallant little victory over the threat of disintegration, and even in the spells of hysteria the histrionic con trol remained impeccable—such impossible things as an aside to God were made to work with rare good humor...

...Note the flat, anticlimactic last sentence meant to provide a dying fall, but actually dropping dead...

...One performance stood out gloriously: the Jane of Diane Kagan...

...James Tilton's set was functional but otherwise uninteresting, and Jane Greenwood's costumes adequate, which is more than could be said for Arthur Allan Seidelman's uninventive direction...

...Now there is nostalgia for you...

...As Painter, Tom Aldredge was charmless and unsubtle as usual...

...Williams, however, as his part-time friend Gore Vidal has reminded us (though we hardly needed reminding), has not kept up with anything: books, events, currents of thought...

...And coyness: "I've considered leaving this house even with no place to go, but where else would there be an alcove with an angel...

...It is even worse than watching a woman we love grow old, because that happens gradually and symmetrically with our own aging...

...Vieux Carre, his disaster this season, is a depressing example...

...Today it all seems merely quaint, what with its innocence and Rodgers and Ham-merstein's making no attempt to introduce anything Oriental into the score, so that the show becomes a thoroughly white musical in yellow-face...

...Simone Signoret has just published her autobiography in France under the title, Nostalgia Is No Longer What It Used to Be...

...The principal other tenants are Painter, a homosexual dying of consumption...

...The current revival again stars Yul Brynner as the tyrannical yet ultimately lovable, backward yet bright and forward-looking monarch...

...That early already...

...Though the years have further coarsened his less than singerly voice, and the nimbleness too has somewhat decreased, the likably impudent self-assurance remains, as does the subtle blend of dignity and absurdity...

...Whenever she was allowed to take over the stage, the rotting carcass of the play came to luminous life...

...We feel that we are in the presence of a performance that will outlive the performer...

...Unusual, too, were the lengthy and elaborate dance numbers staged by Jerome Robbins, notably the entrance of the royal children and the Siamese dance version of Uncle Tom's Cabin...

...She shares her room with her low-life lover, Tye, a Strip-Joint MC...

...As you listen to the still freshly spun-sugar score of The King and I and watch the audience lap it up, you will see Signoret royally refuted...

...Richard Alfieri managed to make Writer even wronger than necessary: cute but totally insignificant...

...Or perhaps unnaturally: Now that Williams has confessed his homosexuality, the plays are allowed to assume a more flagrant deviancy —be it the incest in Out Cry (also known as The Two-Character Play), or the fairly graphic portrayal of minor homosexual acts in Vieux Carre, or only Boston knows what else in The Red Devil Battery Sign, which closed there on its pre-Broadway tryout...

...He is, or was, our greatest living playwright, second only to Eugene O'Neill at his best, and it is infinitely sad to see him deteriorate before our eyes...

...How she makes a living off her nonpaying boarders is not made clear...

...The first act is mostly about how Painter pitifully seduces Writer, playing on his compassion, and about Mrs...

...Wire's ramshackle establishment, working off his room and board by distributing handbills about it around town...

...I just had a flair, not a talent, and the flair flared out...

...Several lesser characters register almost not at all, like the tourists who pay to see Mrs...

...Wire pretty much as she found her, but was at least professional where many other cast members were not...

...Finally, Writer leaves for good with a gentleman friend who is taking him to Hollywood and the first rung of a writing career...

...He is manifestly content to live the rich, sensual life of success, spiced here and there with a little agonizing about failure, being unloved, and the approach of death...

...She is New York and refined, and on the verge of selling herself to a rich Brazilian...

...And metaphysical nonhumor: "Who can I appeal to except God, whose phone is disconnected...

...And there is the Angel, apparently a real angel, sitting in Writer's alcove, an old woman who says nothing and disappears as suddenly as she appears...

...When tubercular Painter says to reluctant Writer, who has just euphemistically referred to not wanting to catch his "cold," "I don't want to catch yours, which is a cold in the heart," Writer bursts into an equally bathetic arietta: "Was it...

...Young, hopeful and penniless, Writer (that is how the cast list identifies him) is living in Mrs...

...What in the contest of Brynner and Lawrence became very nearly a battle of giants, is now a batrachom-yomachy, with Brynner's pleasantly croaking frog having it all over Miss Towers' mouse, roar as it may...