Theatrical Stunts
GOODMAN, WALTER
On Stage THEATRICAL STUNTS BY WALTER GOODMAN The new Broadway version of Dracula manages to squeeze a surprising amount of juice from Bram Stoker's turn-of-the-century chestnut. Even people who...
...They flirt a bit, but only tentatively...
...It's hard to get blood from a chestnut...
...Miss Dewhurst, though always good company, is left stranded by a vehicle that has trouble getting started, sputters along even in high and keeps stalling out...
...They seem to want to draw closer, but can't-and when they do, it is somehow despite themselves...
...Now Colleen Dewhurst has succumbed, permitting ego to beat back intelligence...
...the lights that dim to shadows as a crisis approaches...
...Mamet has learned a lot from Pinter, without succumbing to Pinter's latter-day pretensions...
...See the killing of the Count-after 500 years of unlife, a stake through the heart as he lies magnificently in his classy tomb...
...He has been credited with having a "good ear" for the way people talk, but that is scant credit for so estimable a gift...
...See the grand seduction scene, with flourishes, wherein the Count bears the languishing heroine onto her extravagant bed and then, hovering over her, bares his splendid chest...
...Camp diverts us from serious matters...
...his monochromatic costumes, ranging from white to gray to black, with just a titillating droplet of red...
...The older actor, intelligently played by Ellis Rabb, is the consummate egomaniac-which may only be a way of saying he is consumed by his craft...
...David Mamet's life in the theater is still young...
...If one attributed the endurance of the tale of Dracula, the undead, to qualities beyond the spookiness-if, for example, the producers sought to draw upon the themes of lustful purity, threatening love, vulnerable power, death in life-then camp would not suffice...
...The production settles for less-and perhaps that's just as well...
...Miss Lucy, virtually in the throes of sucking blood from the neck of her solid reliable boyfriend Jonathan, cries, "Don't come to me, John, I am unclean...
...Sometimes we face the audience to whom they perform-the red exit signs glare back at us-in plays about shipwrecked sailors, Russian aristocrats, operating surgeons, World War I doughboys, philandering Britishers, Elizabethan courtiers...
...He is at once sweeping, sinister and hangdog...
...The appeal of the star vehicle, to audience as well as performer, is no mystery...
...Edward Gorey's towering gray sets, with, yes, their bat motifs...
...He delivers resonantly empty phrases and repeats them, testing himself, listening for what he can milk out of the words...
...The younger man, impatient and rather uncomprehending, has a life outside...
...It gives fans an opportunity to go through a star's paces au naturel as it were, or at any rate, unhampered by a play that makes sense or lines that serve much purpose except to be uttered with inimitable or imitable charm...
...The heroine, Miss Lucy, sashays across the stage, flapperlike...
...See the entrance of Count Dracula, played by Frank Langella as more By-ronesque than Lugosilike...
...it is an imposed style, designed not to explore a work's content, but to divert attention from it, to substitute for it, in fact, and so to cover up embarrassment at the work's defects...
...Even people who don't care much for chestnut juice may find themselves lapping up the tricks and the theatrics...
...The pleasures of camp-although, to judge by the audience reaction, they can be considerable-are always superficial...
...Here he resists trying for the big dramatic moment...
...The decision to camp it up was understandable, given the raw material, but it has its costs...
...I am the last of my race," he announces portentously, and he looks it...
...At moments in Dracula, one can glimpse in Langella's large, innocent, hurt eyes (when the balls are not rolling) a sense of character that has nothing to do with grand gestures and dark threats, but that is never permitted to emerge...
...In A Life in the Theatre, playwright David Mamet does what he does best-and very good it is too...
...Forgive me," says Count Dracula, having practically floated into the room, "my footfall is not heavy...
...There are spats, but they don't amount to much...
...In American Buffalo, last season's notable Mamet offering, he lost control and wound things up in a burst of melodrama...
...it puts him at a considerable advantage in the relationship, but also suggests that he will never attain to the professional fullness of the other...
...There are lines like, "I suspect no one-and everyone...
...His language creates a character in an instant...
...See Dracula turn into a bat before our eyes, more or less...
...She brings her notable talents, formidable presence and ravishing smile to An Almost Perfect Person, a comedy clunked together out of used parts by Judith Ross and more or less staged by Zoe Caldwell, in an inauspicious directorial debut...
...The audience is backstage...
...he is certainly the odds-on favorite to take the season's cape-handling prize...
...Sometimes we are a mirror into which the two main characters-a fairly successful older actor and a young one, apparently on his way to being more successful-scrutinize themselves, exercise, assume positions, mug...
...This is a writer's play...
...The play consists of a series of brief interchanges between the two actors, which, mostly by indirection, reveal much about the affectionate envy of their relationship, the backstage bitchiness mixed with onstage professionalism...
...Van Hels-ing, his nemesis, a Dutch scientist who always has a religious symbol handy and waves wolfsbane at every pretext...
...See the fearsome confrontation between the Count and Dr...
...it gives us not only what is spoken-though that is usually a pleasure to hear-but what cannot be spoken as well...
...One of the servants in the house, no model of straight living himself, sums up matters as the dogs howl, the lunatics leap from windows and bats fly-This is a queer neighborhood...
...the spooky music that comes up as the lights go down...
...Sometimes we spy into their dressing rooms...
...The younger actor, played by Peter Evans sending off nervous energy in all directions, is on the move up while the older stares blankly into a future when his body will no longer be able to do quite what is required of it...
...The temptations for the performer are large-to dominate a stage that has been furnished for the exclusive purpose of being so dominated, certain of applause each evening from people who are there to applaud nothing and no one but the star...
...Wisely-for when the older actor blows his lines in the operating room scene and when he cuts his wrist, one gets the feeling that it is the playwright and not the character who is losing control...
...He finds humor not so much in one-liners as in the mutual unspoken understanding and misunderstandings of his people...
...That's good for him and ought to be good for us...
...the howling hounds who begin each scene and perform thereafter as the occasion requires-all the hokey mood-setting devices have been taken out of their trunks and work pretty well...
...The action, like the production, is heavy camp...
...His talents have carried him far, and no doubt he will test them further...
...It's about a New York City widow who loses a campaign for Congress and has to decide whether to settle down with her Irish campaign manager or her married finance chairman...
...the good Dutch doctor makes faces and strikes poses, and a resident lunatic delivers speeches upside down...
...What keeps it alive and moving is the dialogue...
...He studies his body with a critical yet loving eye...
...He is constantly practicing, and we recognize that his life in the theater has left him no life outside...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
