A Certain Lack of Feeling
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage A CERTAIN LACK OF FEELING BY JOHN SIMON simon Gray, the clever English author of the deservedly successful Butley, is back with his latest London hit, Otherwise Engaged. The three main...
...Whether they love him or hate him, or merely want something from him, others are drawn to his equanimity, his im...
...The apogee is reached with Del-more Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," solidly dramatic poetry to which the music contributes appropriate jollity and bite, and for which Swados has also devised diverting stage movements for the entire company to romp through...
...Simon is similarly pure (Simon pure...
...But it has a sound of its own, rather than mere echoes of Weill, Dessau, Eisler, Kosma, Brel, and whomever else the current crop of theatrical composers is so busy imitating...
...instead, she retires to her customary evening bath...
...There are two musicians, with Miss Swados and her guitar sometimes making a third...
...Jeff comes back, out of sorts again after a brush with the traffic cops, and sorely in need of a drink...
...It only exasperates or infuriates his visitors that they cannot shake this man out of his jovial complacency...
...Especially to his indifference—a precious commodity they do not possess...
...Swados' music is perky, theatrical stuff, more rhythmic than mslo-dious, more functional than exciting...
...Enraged by Simon's lack of outrage, Beth decides not to leave...
...what she still lacks is a truly lyrical vein, but that may come in time...
...But he doesn't...
...on the office couch, as Simon corrects him) and not coming home since tiien...
...Like all the elder boys, it seems, he was hot for Simon, but that sexy boy carried on only with the more dashing fellows, not with a "plop" like Wood...
...Things get hairier still...
...He would gladly kill him, if only he had the nerve...
...Some poems are actually improved by the music: Muriel Rukeyser's "Waking This Morning" and Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant...
...Best of all is the Canadian John Horton...
...Finally Beth, his wife, returns...
...there are eight singing actors, with Miss Swados and her spright-liness sometimes making a ninth...
...The three main features of Gray's not unserious comedies that also include Wise Child (whose tenure on Broadway was all too brief) are abrasive wit, an urbanity that would be mellow if it weren't so cynical, and a subject matter...
...The others pass muster, though Michael Lombard is insufficiently British, and John Christopher Jones excessively brutish...
...perturbability, his very indifference...
...Miss Swados is an original...
...it is very nice work, but there may be too much deliber-ateness in the delivery, too much cheerful self-absorption in the sweetly unseeing eyes...
...under a different name, he was at school with Simon and Stephen...
...Harold Pinter has directed, and no doubt grafted on some menacing pauses and other emblems of Pinterian acrimony, but it all works...
...Swados can pick some pretty bad poems to set: Frank O'Hara's "To the Harbormaster," for instance, or "Dibarti," by David Avidan, whoever he is...
...again he is prevented by boisterous or irate interruptions from the same interlopers...
...in fact, it was he who introduced Simon to Wagner...
...a comfortable house whose upper floor he can rent out: a pretty wife who happens to be away at Salisbury, Cantebury or some such uplifting place, with foreign students whom she teaches English...
...Nightclub Cantata, at the Top of the Gate, is likewise pleasurable, though on a smaller scale...
...Nicolas Coster is a droll Jeff, with the proper amount of naive self-love and sophisticated insufferableness for a minor literary lion whose roar is better than his writing...
...surprisingly, Jeff agrees...
...A famous prose-poetic passage from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, though neatly done, is a bit too cranky and elusive for singing...
...She is clearly gifted and intelligent, though her not yet fully developed talent has bitten off a bit more than it can chew...
...A certain Wood shows up...
...Shelley Plimpton is not...
...which by contemporary standards, for example, does not mean not cheating on your wife, only not cheating on her with friends, so it doesn't get back to her and hurt her...
...Miss Plimpton, whom I have loved since I first laid eyes on her in Hair, has the looks of a sassy china doll, the voice of an undauntable glockenspiel, the personality of an ageless being: as wise as 90, as sexy as 19, as winsome as nine...
...Horton becomes quite touching in places, without ever lapsing out of character or making a cheap play for our sympathy...
...The best results are achieved with middling poetry, neither bad nor too subtle and complex, such as a section of Neruda's "Bestiario," which Swados sets in the Spanish original, and two pieces by the leading Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, in translation, thank God...
...Bird Lament," where, with mouth and guitar, she evokes some rather disagreeable bird cries, is a little too spooky—that sort of thing is better left to Olivier Messiaen...
...Wood wants to check out Simon, the object of his love, envy and hate...
...She is looking for a publisher for her book, and is more than willing to lay down her body for the cause...
...She has been to neither Salisbury nor Canterbury...
...the play really is about the hidden hostilities under our cultural veneer...
...Parsifal, of course, is the key: the pure knight who finds the Holy Grail, but who always seems such a prig compared to, say, Lancelot...
...Jeff is followed by Davina, a snotty young woman-about-town who is Jeff's freshly cast-off girl friend...
...Though tempted, Simon rejects the body, but takes on the book...
...Only with the ill-advised "Isabella," from the memoirs of a death-camp inmate, does Swados come a cropper...
...Then Jeff, a boozy, boastful and insecure litterateur, comes by to chatter about his literary and love life...
...Hardly has he put the first record on his expensive turntable before people start calling on him...
...Judith Fleisher, the pianist, and William Milhizer, the percussionist, play with unusual eloquence...
...Why is there so much ugliness in our theater...
...His epigrams range from soothing to stinging, depending on the demands of the occasion, but they fail to pacify or amuse...
...is a man who has everything: a good job in publishing...
...This may seem odd...
...The entire cast of four boys and four girls is extremely adept and winning, but Shelley Plimpton stands out...
...These days, they have plots, perhaps even topics...
...and a love of Wagner he is about to indulge with the new recording of Parsifal his wife just gave him...
...Again Simon tries to play his Wagner...
...The hero of Otherwise Engaged...
...Then I owe you more than I can say," remarks Simon as he blissfully and Jeff nervously settle down to face the music...
...She can put a song or skit across with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of charm...
...he turns Stephen into the sort of bore who at least realizes how boring he is, and derives a certain clumsy dignity from it...
...Conceived, composed and directed by Elizabeth Swados, a young worn, an who has been active as a composer in the avant-garde theater, it is mostly poems by various hands, a few of them her own, set to music and furbished with a little pantomime or choreography...
...All he needs now is four hours of peace for listening...
...Still, it is a trifle distracting...
...It is an interesting concept, and the author has handled it with skill and sagacity...
...She also has sparkling extramusical ideas, such as "Pastrami Brothers," an apt choreographic spoof of a team of inept acrobats, with simple music, no words, and lots of cheek...
...In an amateurish production of a dated play, The Crazy Locomotive (1923), by the Polish avant-gardist S. I. Witkiewicz, the feminine lead, described by the author as "very pretty," was played by Lin Shaye, whose unattractiveness is surpassed only by her ineptitude, yet she is steadily employed...
...It's rather like writing a play about a hurricane from the point of view of its eye, where all is stillness...
...The supporting cast does handsomely, considering that none of them is a London import...
...Next, Simon's older brother, Stephen—a respectably dull chap with a homely wife and five children, who is desperately bucking for the job of assistant headmaster at a second-rate public school—drops in for some griping and oheering up...
...As he did with all former drop-ins, Simon talks—with beautiful syntax and style, and a chilly sympathy that is mostly style, too...
...And the gestures, continuous and almost spastic, strike me as exaggerated, though I understand their meaning: They are those of a midwife helping a perfect phrase to be born, and of a conductor guiding its rhythms and emphases...
...But it is finally a mite passive and static—a hero who does not change, and obviously never could...
...merely to a hotel with her lover whom Simon despises, but for whom she is about to leave him, anyway...
...Perhaps Tom Courtenay's performance as Simon contributes an excess of quietude...
...Well, those four hours are not forthcoming...
...occasional brief affairs, mostly with young women seeking jobs or publication...
...To begin with, the hippie with woman problems who rents the upstairs pad and who will keep popping in to solicit a fiver, a bottle, a coffee-maker, or some other implement of seduction...
...called Simon ("out of laziness," says Simon Gray, but I wonder...
...This clumsy chap is now in love with a promiscuous young girl who, the day before, came to Simon for a job, but ended up having sex with him (on the office floor, as Wood puts it...
...But this man who has everything lacks one thing all the same: being left alone...
...a subject matter that matters they do not have...
...She does well, too, by a couple of her own amiable lyrics...
...Simon, exhausted, must have his Parsifal now...
...so he goes home to kill himself instead, leaving a suicide message on Simon's telephone answering machine...
...don't all plays have a subject matter...
...that the American theater has used her so rarely and poorly speaks volumes against it...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 5
