Tragic Waste

...The chorus leader, George Vos-kovec, is as boring as ever, and his Czech accent is even more misplaced than Smith's Midwestern and Zak-kai's Middle Eastern inflections...

...And still less to an intelligent audience...

...Her singing of the great songs is quite unforgivable, turning passion into sheer triviality...

...These bleachers get rolled about on casters in various ways, providing at least some of the audience with a moving experience...

...Below, actors mostly run around carrying torches that, with flames protruding through the wire mesh, look like marsh fire...

...Robert U. Taylor's sets and Carrie F. Robbins' costumes are barely serviceable, while Kalfin's direction consists largely of old routines that should be put to pasture, not on a stage...

...This is no Clytemnestra, only the girl who sells you cosmetics at Wool-worth's...

...but he is an actor totally devoid of charm and therefore utterly unsuited for the pirt...

...The gap has become too great: let us be honest and admit that it is unbridgeable...

...unfortunately, we who have added much that is new to our dramaturgy while forgetting all our ancient Greek, can no longer appreciate what is best about this untranslatable work...

...The plot concerns a Chicago Salvation Army lass, Lieutenant Lillian Holliday, who falls in love with a gangster, Bill Cracker...

...Most of the costumes and scenery are vaguely Mycenean, but fifth-century Athenian elements do pop up...

...As Agamemnon, Jamil Zakkai (descended from a family of Baghdad rabbis) looks and sounds like a Levantine rug merchant...

...Brustein lauds Serban for reaching us "where all great tragedy should reach us—in our veins, in our blood...

...To their gyrations, Elizabeth Swados has composed something outlandish that never for a moment reminded me of music...

...The chorus is a truly nasty-looking rabble, not one of whom I would want to meet on a dark street or in a play by Aeschylus...

...still later, three girls march around with simulated bits of human innards to represent the feast of Thyestes...

...The orchestra, under Roland Gagnon, does rather well, yet in the absence of real voices, to no great avail...

...slanting ramps along the sides connect the pit and its covering...

...Meryl Streep, as Lillian, does come up with a well-crafted interpretation, even if it is much too cutesy...

...I firmly believe that neither Aeschylus nor Sophocles can hold the modem stage without extensive fiddling around by an adapter or director, except that then it is no longer Aeschylus or Sophocles and hardly worth doing...

...as Aegisthus, he is worse yet, some kind of circus gypsy...

...To be sure, he is not helped by the staging of his most terrifying scene, the sacrilegious walk on the purple carpet, as if it were sheer farce...

...Bob Gun-ton, whom, alas, I did see...

...It is untranslatable not merely because of the nature of its language, but also because the allusions, ideas, attitudes of the trilogy can be made comprehensible to our audiences only by an elaborate set of footnotes that obviously cannot be put on stage...

...Agamemnon acts rather realistically, while Clytemnestra is given some very stylized gestures and unrealistic delivery...

...Dean Robert Brustein has hired Serban to direct the opening Greek play for the Yale Repertory next season...

...Serban doesn't even have the courage of his bad ideas...

...I detested Zakkai years ago, when he played a variety of sneaky rats for the Living Theater...

...All this is as nothing, however, compared to what Andrei Serban, hot from his much-applauded disfigurement of The Cherry Orchard, has done at the same Vivian Beaumont Theater (the criminal always revisits the site of his crime) to Aeschylus' Agamemnon...

...He has defended Serban against Walter Kerr in a letter to the New York Times, contending that the Rumanian "has done more than any director in memory to explore the heart of Greek tragedy and exhume relevant images...

...Jennifer Tipton's lighting, on the other hand, was dramatic throughout...

...It is clearly for sexual titillation that the pretty little 12-year-old Iphigenia (Diane Lane, the only attractive person on stage) is stripped, but Serban hasn't the guts to go all the way and lets her keep on an anachronistic bikini...

...When pushed slightly apart, the bleachers form an espalier through which actors can pace in solemn procession...

...I say nobody because not even Greek scholars could readily follow the mangled lingo Serban tries to palm off as Greek...

...For the homosexuals in the audience, the ephebe miming Orestes is always half-naked, but again only half...

...That seems to me rendering too much unto Dio-nysos and too little unto Apollo...

...There is trouble everywhere: Lieutenant Lillian gets fired for creaming over Cracker...

...Why such fastidiousness here and not elsewhere...

...higher up, a catwalk with people on it can light up and become a living frieze...

...Why obtrude those pantomimes at the expense of large chunks of text, and do what's left partly in a language nobody understands...

...I did not see Christopher Lloyd as Bill—he had injured himself and was, presumably, in quite another sort of cast...

...Such dumb shows occur throughout: The sacrificial killing of Iphigenia is later spelled out in great pantomimic detail...

...Substitute "exploit" for "explore" and "inhume" for "exhume," and I agree wholeheartedly...

...When upon the success of The Threepenny Opera (1928) a producer requested a quick follow-up, Brecht and Weill were too busy with other things to contribute more than the songs...

...We see no ohoric dancing to speak of, merely much ohoric sashaying about...

...whose unmelodious voice issues forth in a dull, middle-American accent (in English—Zeus only knows what it is in Greek...

...Serban cuts the play to ribbons, then stages what is left partly in Greek, a language neither he nor his actors know, and partly in an English that, as chanted by the chorus, might just as well be Greek, too...

...Inconsistency is rampant...

...if great actor-reciters were to speak the poetry in the best possible translation—not Edith Hamilton's simplistic one—something could be salvaged, but it would be a poetic, not a dramatic, event...

...The casting is wretched...

...pushed over all the way to the sides, they reveal the large inner stage bounded at the far end by the facade of Agamemnon's palace with a doorway and window where actors can appear...

...Why, then, aren't all the performers men...

...and whose nondescript 'bearing belies the intermittent grand gestures...

...Although her play, Happy End (1929) , imitated Brecht, Miss Hauptmann was his exaot opposite: very beautiful and quite untalented as a writer...

...The book has been adapted rather freely by Michael Feingold, but the changes and additions are no improvement on the original...

...If ever a show cried out for a concert version, with the silly Guys-and-Dollsy plot summarized by a narrator, and the songs given everything, this is it...

...writing the book fell to Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's mistress, who used the pseudonym Dorothy Lane...

...He has covered the pit of the Beaumont with a triangle of metal mesh-work, enabling the actors to move both on and underneath it...

...This is visually stunning, even though it plays havoc with the sight-lines and with the already doubtful acoustics of the hall...

...But that would require fine singing actors of a kind not available to this production that originated at Yale, was recast and restaged by Robert Kalfin for his Chelsea Theater Center, and has now reached Broadway...

...The supporting cast is mostly dismal, though Grayson Hall is certainly creepy enough as the Fly, and Alexandra Borrie has a nice voice...

...Beyond this steel triangle pointing toward the audience is the vast stage proper, but this area is first blocked from our view by two sets of bleachers with spectators in them...

...It is all nonsense, and not very funny nonsense...

...Serban begins the play with a pallid bit of pantomime that has the chain of murders—from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the slaying of Olytemnestra—enacted in a languid dumb show...

...In the Oresteia, at any rate, there is an absolute minimum of action, the work being primarily a ritual translated into poetry...

...The actors don or doff their masks quite arbitrarily...

...Agamemnon and Aegisthus are played by the same actor, Clytemnestra and Cassandra by the same actress, ostensibly because three actors played all the parts in Aeschylus' day...

...There are processions of all kinds: some slow, some fast, some with torches, some with jars containing small burning candles...

...it would be easily worth double the price of admission not to have to look at his face...

...Of course...

...Clytem-nestra-Cassandra is played by Ser-ban's favorite actress, Priscilla Smith, whose insignificant nose and puny eyes do not help her commonplace face...

...Tony Azito, who plays a sneaky Oriental, has my vote for the worst performer in New York today...

...In any case, as I see it, Serban has nothing to offer to either...

...The latter hardly matters, since the words of Aeschylus are not respected in other ways either...

...It was undoubtedly a great religious, philosophical and political, as well as poetic, experience for Greek audiences...

...What matters about Happy End is solely the score, which includes "The Bilbao Song," "The Sailors' Tango," and, above all, "Surabaya Johnny," three of Brecht and Weill's greatest songs, though a couple of their others here are quite marvelous too...

...Bill has to contend with recalcitrant gang members as well as a mysterious female crime overlord, the Fly, who truly runs his gang, and, of course, the police...

...as is his understudy...