Some Rise from Ashes, Some do not

...Ashes is a curious play, a combination of a documentary, a tract, an absurdist farce, and a stark marital drama...

...Out of overeagerness, and because all forms of suffering ultimately resemble one another, one might be tempted to see connections where none have been made...

...Yet if we do not change, tomorrow has no place for us...

...Most of the writing is on the level of such things as, "I felt so?severed...

...There is a strange theme that runs through many of Ibsen's works: Nature coming to claim a person who has somehow sinned against her, or merely tried to escape from her, and taking that person's life...

...It is a difficult play to stage for several reasons: First, because it switches in midstream from naturalism to symbolism, if not indeed impressionism...

...Wilton figures that when Erhart tires of her, it will be nice to keep the affair, as it were, in the family...

...Lastly, the constant changes of scenery from act to act, and especially the mountain clearing of the fourth, require the kind of funds and facilities the Roundabout lacks...

...Although that "whatever is" gives the statement a certain open-ended poignancy, the "laughter of children" is, I'm afraid, pure cliche...

...As you can see: close to reality, somewhat intensified perhaps, and not bad at all...

...The worst offender is Jan Farrand, who makes the good Ella sound like a histrionic hypocrite uttering hoarse barrel-organ tones...

...It is about Colin and Anne, a childless couple doggedly trying every possible device to become parents, consulting one specialist after another—most of them quacks, and all unable to help and undergoing a variety of painful, humiliating or merely ludicrous maneuvers in the pursuit of pregnancy...

...His actors are allowed to strike attitudes and mouth their lines with grand oratorical effects, so that we seem confronted not so much with people in conflict as with statues hurling rhetorical defiance at one another...

...a doctor requesting that a specimen be mailed in remarks, "Even if all the sperms die in the post, we'll merely take a corpse count...

...indeed, in real life, on which the play is largely based, the Rudkins were able to adopt children...

...Lynne Meadow has directed straightforwardly, without either particular imagination or apparent lapses...

...after a long jail sentence, he has been back home eight years, living on the floor above his wife's, the two hating spouses not even seeing, much less talking to, each other...

...The clash comes over their son, Erhart...

...But Truman Gaige is an eminently believable and touching Foldal, and Valerie French is bright and elegant as Mrs...

...The obvious problem here is how to make a connection between the childlessness of two individuals and the public tragedy of Northern Ireland that involves multitudes, and has nothing to do with fertility unless one takes the position that Ireland's difficulties stem from overpopulation, though this does not enter Rudkin's play or, I would guess, head...

...The scenery and costumes are no better than the circumstances permit, which means rather poor...

...Frida is the daughter of the clerk and failed playwright Wilhelm Foldal, the only one who did not testify against Borkman, and his sole steady visitor and friend, although Borkman ends by repudiating him, too...

...They take along the struggling young music teacher Frida Foldal, for the wise Mrs...

...The Roundabout Theater Company is to be congratulated for mounting Ibsen's late, mysterious play, John Gabriel Borkman, but that, alas, is pretty much where felicitations must end...

...He does most things right—including managing properly to maintain a certain ironic detachment from his exasperation—but he lacks charm...

...Aside from this, however, Ashes is merely competent and interesting rather than important and moving...

...Only adoption is left, and this too fails after humbling third degrees by agency officials and agonizing waits...

...The marriage is close to the breaking point...

...Gene Feist's skimpy directorial endowments are insufficient to breathe life into this play where even decency verges on hysteria or hurtles into self-abasement...

...Erhart will have none of these three possibilities, choosing instead to go off to Italy with the considerably older yet vivacious widow, Fanny Wilton...

...Laughter of children is not for us, whatever is," says Colin at one point...

...Is it something about the slight pudginess of his face or the faint oiliness of his voice...

...Colin returns to Belfast for a family visit, gets indirectly embroiled in the "troubles," witnesses the horrible death of an uncle, and comes back to monologize, in the play's closing passages, to a mute Anne about the horrors of civil war...

...after a difficult pregnancy that requires Colin to take arduous care of her, miscarries...

...This summary does scant justice to a violent, somber play, shot through with glints of sardonic humor and an occasional bolt of fierce poetry...

...By way of humor, a school is defined as "the usual seedbed of genital-Christian fascism...

...it concerned ritual homicide among Midlands fruit pickers and struck me as less than convincing as well as hardly worth the fuss...

...As Anne, Roberta Maxwell has genuine drive as well as edgi-ness, and conveys clearly the effort it costs her to control her seething anger, but she too is basically not quite appealing...

...John Gabriel Borkman was caught embezzling to finance a grandiose land-development scheme...

...As for Borkman, still dreaming of great schemes, he rushes out to the windswept heights followed by the loving Ella, whom he had thrown over for her richer sister...

...Or, "Pigheadedness—it's a certain Protestant integrity that comes over as pigheadedness...

...Sometimes the death is tragic, sometimes an ecstatic fulfillment, and sometimes the person gets away alive...

...Of course, people do talk and think like that, but that is life, not art, not great drama...

...But that's just it: Despite strong or funny moments, the play simply does not rise above the "not bad at all" level...

...He dies in that mountain clearing, and the two sisters are reconciled over his body...

...So grand a political climax has to be earned...

...secondly, because it is hard to feel much sympathy for any of the characters, who are not particularly fascinating in their hatreds and follies, or, in the case of Ella, somewhat self-centered goodness...

...The quasi-documentary structure?short scenes, often in medical or adoplion-agency offices, or brief conversations with representative "others"and the very basis in lived experiences tend to give the play an excessively mundane quality that extends particularly to its language...

...Brand and When We Dead A waken are the most conspicuous examples of the theme besides Borkman, though Rosmersholm, The iMdy from the Sea, The Wild Duck, and even Peer Gym after a fashion, belong here...

...the musical score by Philip Campanella is appropriate but overabundant...

...he, softer, more yielding...

...I can't quite put my finger on it...

...In all the subordinate male roles as doctors, hospital orderlies and such—John Tillinger would be good if he had a trifle more variety and could refrain from deliberate smarminess...

...This is depicted with fairly bitter humor and rather restrained compassion...

...the sundry modes of copulation, distressing physical regimens and embarrassing examinations are shown or clearly suggested, without the least prurience...

...The raspy vibrato of her voice can become excessive, and there tends to be a layer of smugness showing through her expressions, like underpainting that hasn't been completely coated...

...Rudkin had a succes both of estime and scandale when the Royal Shakespeare Company produced his first play, Afore Night Come, in 1962...

...In 1972, Thalia and Melpomene relented, and the tragicomic Ashes was written, to be followed more recently by Sons of Light, described as "a Wagnerian epic of an imaginary island...

...There is worse yet...

...Still, the pair catches Rudkin's intentions: she, somewhat mannish...

...On Stage SOME RISE FROM ASHES, SOME DO NOT BY JOHN SIMON AFTER ITS successful Offoff-Broadway run at the Manhattan Theater Club, Ashes, by the Anglo-Irish playwright David Rudkin, has just opened at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, co-sponsor of the venture...

...Yet assuming hidden connections did exist, the Irish problem could not decently be dumped summarily onto the end of a play that previously had no ostensible relationship to it...

...Both husband and wife want him for their own purposes, and he is now also claimed by the wife's dying sister, Ella, who raised him when the scandal-struck Bork-mans became impecunious...

...Wilton, with just the right amount of cynical worldliness...

...Robert Pastene starts out well enough as Borkman, but later finds no way of heightening his performance above the realistic level, and ends up being rather monotonous on that one, too...

...At the very end, again unconvincingly, the couple seem closer than ever in their aloneness...

...In all the female supporting roles—as an assortment of nurses, adoption-agency officials, and friends—Penelope Allen is adequate but uninteresting...

...Finally Anne conceives, but...

...In the dull part of Erhart, Jeffrey David Pomeranz is, if possible, even duller...

...The Italy->bound trio go off in a nocturnal coach, nearly running over and slightly injuring old Foldal, one of those humble, tragicomic Ibsen people who rejoice even when someone hurts them: He is delighted that Frida will be able to continue her musical education in Italy...

...Here, it seems to me, Rudkin cheats a bit, for he cannot make this failure believable...

...As Colin, the formerly homosexual now happily married schoolteacher, Brian Murray is rather like the play itself...

...Rudkin then dried up as a stage playwright and wrote for films, radio and television...

...Gale Sondergaard's hate-riddled wife is too schematically uninflect-ed, but at least she doesn't overplay...