Arts vs. Sociology

...The adult Charlie's confrontation with his past becomes an emblem of the grown man waiting inside the child, and of the child that hides in every man until the day he dies...

...Leonard's parade of characters illuminates Charlie's conflicts, but never in quite concentrated enough fashion...

...First, Da himself (Barnard Hughes), whose lack of ambition kept him a poor gardener all his life...

...In a rush to meet the Tony nominations deadline, director Stephen Schwartz trimmed rehearsal time...

...A worthy idea: Although poor people usually don't have much to sing about, it is inexcusable for the musical theater to pretend they do not exist...

...Another recent emigre from Downtown to Broadway, this one a musical, is runaways...

...I have seen them excel professionally in athletics, dance, pop and classical music and knew there was a real possibility for the same kind of dedication in the theater beyond 'cutesiness': beyond cliche...

...This seems to me the weakest, least integrated theme in the play: It stays on the level of metaphor because it is insufficiently developed to make an actual dramatic difference...

...The composers and lyricists of Working, though, (Craig Carnelia, Mary Rogers, Susan Birkenhead, Stephen Schwartz, Micki Grant, James Taylor-that's right, James Taylor) are definitely the wrong people for the job...

...But all this is never more than rhetoric, and not in the Aristotelian sense either...

...Thus the extremely talented cast of kids, some of them actual runaways, bombards the audience with rhetoric about the cruelty of parents, the terror of heroin, the miserable fear of alone-ness, the ruin of innocence, the injustice of a mere child living as an animal, the beauty of fantasy...

...But I think that Leonard, as unwilling as his compatriot to confine himself to realism, has produced a happier marriage of form and content...

...Swados' purposes are as much sociological as they are theatrical: She wants first and foremost to make a point-a destructive approach to art...

...Ray Contreras does an electrifying dance with a basketball...

...sociology, that abysmal science, has made a second inroad on Broadway...

...Then Charlie's former boss, Drumm-who tells us he has learned only one lesson in life: In "a public-house lavatory, incoming traffic has the right of way...

...they do not come out naturally, the product of defeated children trying to express their agony...

...Autobiographical dramas achieve their fullest intensity only when employing such a device-witness Long Day's Journey and Glass Menagerie...

...One bit of state foolery I found particularly repulsive: At the end of Act I, I think, in a scene where all the cast members come out singing, some are made to ride about the stage in toy cars of the sort loaded parents (loaded with money, that is) buy their kids at F.A.O...

...In the words of writer, composer, and director Elizabeth Swados, the idea was "to make a collage about the profound effects of our deteriorating families...

...Brian Murray's Charlie rings a little flat...

...The songs in runaways are everything the text is not: vibrant, lush, complicated and deeply felt in the imagination...

...The best we can do, we realize as Charlie departs with the persistent ghost of his father following, is accept being haunted...

...The action takes place in the mind of Charlie, a fairly successful, divorced writer, and in reality...

...His past begins to unravel itself, bringing forth the people who have shaped his life, if only as examples of what it shouldn't be...

...I have neglected to mention that Charlie is an orphan-a fact that is no doubt meant to be a metaphor of each man's search for his spiritual father...

...This omission is not accidental...

...and Bruce Hilbok's sign language accompaniment communicates the suffering and grace of those who are without a haven in a heartless world...

...I wanted to explore the substitutes people find to deal with the loss of family and how these substitutes are sometimes effective and sometimes terribly self-destructive...

...I know it isn't nice to heap obloquy upon a pint-sized lad barely out of kindergarten...

...Trini Alvarado sings sumptuously...

...He has gone back to the small Irish town of his childhood to sort out the belongings of his Da, who has just died at the age of 84...

...The irony intended is clear, too clear, and not appropriate to the setting?an urban schoolyard designed by Douglas W. Schmidt and Woods Mackintosh...

...I wanted to tap the energy of young people...

...Patti Lupone, excellent in David Mamet's The Water Engine, disgraces herself here as a prostitute who, sob, realizes the spiritual emptiness of her existence...

...The quality of the author's imagination?kind, affectionate, sentimental, and forgiving-delicately holds it together...

...Finally, there is the Young Charlie (Richard Seer) torn between an inertia that duplicates his father's and a desire to leave his family for the great world...

...My answer is yes-but an unenthusi-astic yes, because her aims are rather dubious...

...David Schecter's Lazar is ugly as a gargoyle, mad as the Mad Hatter...

...The cast, mostly unknowns, deserve to stay that way...

...He was finally forced into retirement by a snooty employer, who cut him off with a small check and a grotesque gift of 30 pair of glasses accidentally welded together during the San Francisco earthquake-a symbol both of Da's blindness and his employer's...

...Melvin Bernhardt directs them all impeccably...

...Joe Mantegna, who at one point is supposed to be a Mexican-American farm worker, looks and sounds like the Frito Ban-dito...

...What they have wrought-whining and shouting that accompanies mushy little platitudes (Life goes so fast/But the work a man does/Is meant to last) cheapens honest labor by transforming it into cliche...

...He does so in "Da," which may not be a masterpiece, but is far and away the best, most moving play now running on Broadway...

...Whatever the case, the actors in the present production-most of whom appeared at Hudson Guild-are superb...

...with its aid, the dead are resurrected...

...The various incidents of Charlie's life, moreover, are bound together by the playwright's mastery of his craft...

...Evan H. Miranda is wonderful as a child fantasizing about being related to movie stars and other nonpeople...

...Nowhere on that list, for example, do I see "I wanted to make a great piece of theater, with characters that the audience can believe in and care about...

...Which isn't to imply that Da is somehow not all of one piece...

...Barnard Hughes gives us a dignified Da, smarter than he lets on, in one of the finest performances of the season...

...Consequently, the actors appear uncomfortable and seem to talk beyond-Instead of at-each other...

...his later impersonation of a truck driver ("We're Gonna Roll, Roll, Roll, Mother Fuckers") nearly drove me out of the theater...

...Indeed, many of the speeches ring hollow altogether, so hard are they trying for agonized lyricism...

...Next, the mother, tough and practical, in the long tradition of Irish stage mothers...

...Director Swados suffers from the same flaw she exhibits as a writer-a tendency to be overexplicit and to go for the big bang...

...The performers-with the exception of Rachel Kelly, who is a rather self-conscious 12-year-old hooker -are remarkable...

...They move awkwardly, sometimes even losing their balance while clambering about David Mitchell's hideous, slick scenery...

...Working has other problems, too...

...Has Swados achieved her stated goal...

...Da" has been strongly influenced by Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, where young Gar's private and public selves, each played by a different actor, battle with a provincial town and a silent, stone-like father...

...Unfortunately, I missed it there, and so cannot report on whether Broadway has improved or harmed it...

...Yet as Charlie rummages about the house, he discovers that memory doesn't obey the laws of matter...

...Words are simply shoved into the mouths of the people on stage...

...But Richard Seer as his younger incarnation admirably takes up the slack with his boyish enthusiasm...

...Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie) and William Inge (The Dark at the Top of the Stairs) immediately spring to mind...

...As a composer, however, Swados displays undisputed power, audaciously combining haunting melodies with reggae and African rhythms...

...Schwartz...

...Matt Landers, by contrast, as a fireman who quit his job at the bank because it wasn't "real" enough for him, is extraordinary...

...And if T. S. Eliot could immortalize grimy London streets in verse, there is no reason why a talented composer and lyricist cannot similarly honor car-hops, waitresses, truckers, etc...

...The most recent dramatist to recall his adolescence publicly is a young Irishman, Hugh Leonard...

...It was previously ensconced at the Hudson Guild Theater downtown...

...And Charlie's stolid pal Oliver, as well as his earliest sexual encounter, Mary Tate, known among the fellows as the Yellow Peril...

...To compensate for Sylvia O'Brien's uninteresting mother, there is Lester Rawlins-whose portrayal of the cynical Drumm, a man trapped in his contempt for other men, is right on the mark-and Mia Dillon, delicious as the Yellow Peril...

...Another of the play's problems is the lack of one unifying incident to change the course of the hero's life and distill the forces tearing at him...

...Working, based on Studs Ter-kel's humane book, is a series of speeches and songs (plot, apparently, is gauche this year) that purport to portray the ups and downs of America's working class...

...But as I listened to him sing and watched him caper on stage, I began to understand why W. C. Fields had it in for Baby Leroy...

...Mathew McGrath, eight years old, was a cute-oh, so very cute-newsboy...

...The current successful run at the Morosco Theater does not mark the first New York appearance of "Da...

...The Freudian tempests of O'Neill and Inge do not dominate his world, and even Charlie's hatred of his foster father is more embarrassment, shame and annoyance than it is a primieval urge to kill...