On Stage

...Paradoxically, his changes resulted in the impression that the external miseries had been arti-fically heaped upon one family...

...Eventually, the two men become best friends...

...The play, built on his suspicion that Piet betrayed him to the police, unfolds with subtle slowly progressing touches of suspense...

...The vignettes fitted the story unobtrusively and gave breadth to a compelling drama...

...Finally, Steve reveals that he and everyone else in their antiapartheid group believes Piet was the informer...

...In another, the son teaches a reluctant, bewildered and appalled Baum how to act like a father who hates his child and doesn't want him at home so that a bureaucrat will be persuaded to approve the card necessary for the son to get work or welfare...

...In any case, at the Bilt-more, the armed farmers no longer had a scene of their own...

...In last summer's production, Iowa farmers took up their rifles to prevent officials from auctioning off their foreclosed farms...

...I'm glad I didn't meet the playwright before seeing his work...

...At first I thought that the antiapartheid clique was predominantly black, and that Piet was suspect because he was an Afrikaner...

...Fugard fails to make it clear that Steve is the only black participant in an otherwise white circle...

...I like to write ambiguously," writer-director Fugard quietly says, referring to his dramaturgy, and not to the exaggeratedly explicit, somewhat boring lesson in botany that opens the play: Aloes are an African cactus that exist in many varieties, some not yet named...

...It is a strong drama that immerses us in the poisonous atmosphere of apartheid, and leaves us to meditate on the different escapes left to Gladys, Steve and Piet...

...Later, I happened to meet Fugard and I asked him why Steve had been arrested for violating the "banning order," and not Piet for participating as a white man in the same meeting...

...On Stage DRAMATIZING DESPAIR BY LEO SAUVAGE E m ^ioht years after his engaging but not very successful venture into philosophical satire with The Creation of the World and Other Business, Arthur Miller last month brought another play to Broadway, to the Biltmore Theater, where it already has closed...

...In one powerful scene, Moe Baum has to ask his son for a quarter...

...Apart from this instance of Athol Fugard being a little bit too ambiguous, he has powerfully dramatized the South African situation...

...But in the play Fugard never quite shows why Piet would be more likely to inform against his friend than any of the other Afrikaners, nor does he account for Piet's failure to defend himself against the charges of betrayal...

...But the same lines that moved us deeply before were diminished by small modifications in the staging that dissipated their point...

...The apartheid climate certainly heightened her vulnerability, but she seems neurotic enough to have problems anywhere...

...That first New York outing certainly had its faults...

...In the final scene, the whole company sang of love in front of a projected image of the Statue of Liberty...

...An example: The background at the Harold Clurman was composed of rear projections that added an illustrated context to the lives declining in front of them...

...Perhaps because the country's economic mechanism suddenly stopped in 1929, exactly when everybody in America thought it would go on functioning smoothly forever, Miller's latest effort was called The American Clock...

...Her husband, Piet, a bus driver, is drawn into an antiapartheid group during a strike after listening to Steve, a galvanizing black speaker...

...Piet refuses to deny the accusation—"I have nothing to say," he keeps repeating...

...Miller had borrowed documentary snippets from Studs TerkeVsHard Times and inserted them around the Depression-wrought changes in the lives of a Brooklyn Jewish family—apparently Miller's own...

...Preparing to depart for England, Steve comes to say goodbye and get drunk with Piet...

...When Steve violates a "banning order" that, among other restrictions and interdictions, forbids his attending "meetings or special gatherings," he is arrested and sent to prison...

...It is difficult to understand how so many fine effects from the original production could have been abandoned...

...Directed by Daniel Sullivan (who earlier presented The American Clock as a stage reading at the Seattle Repertory Company), that version ran for a few weeks on the new little theater row, recently carved from a dilapidated segment of 42nd Street, a stone's throw from the location of the major theater district that died in the crash...

...The author explained that the members of the group, Piet's former friends, were white...

...Even the script's most dramatic moments only partially survived...

...Miller evidently decided the strife in the Midwest diverted attention from the psychological decay of Moe Baum, a once-prosperous businessman who becomes a penniless traveling salesman unable to sell anything...

...By the time it ends, Steve, a black an-tiapartheid militant, has taken his family to London...

...His threechar-acters follow their individual paths with relative ease, while the dark evil that weighs down upon a whole society remains unresolved...

...A search of the couple's farm by the South African police jeopardized her fragile mental state, we learn—she felt raped when one of the policemen went through her diary in front of her...

...Judging from the declarative statement of the title, one might suspect that the moral is straight-forward as well...

...But a bald summary can convey neither the tremendous impact of what Fugard has to say nor how he says it...

...And the principal performers are equal to the task...

...Perhaps he also felt this was irrelevant to Rose Baum, the mother, and her struggles to keep her head up and her fingers on the piano, even when the piano is gone...

...My advice is to forget about any didactic message and go see A Lesson from Aloes...

...Nevertheless, the piece asawhole had warmth, understanding and meaning...

...The playwright is responsible for such dubious improvements, but it is the new director, brought in to make The American Clocktick, who stopped it completely...

...At the Bilt-more, however, we faced the same ugly backdrop for two hours...

...Far more significantly, Miller's main problem seems to be that he feared a lack of unity, that he wanted to more closely integrate the collapse of the outside world with the gradual downfall of the family...

...Remarkably, Joan Cope-land, who played thecentralroleof Rose Baum in both productions, managed to overcome the obstacles raised by the badly conceived remodeling of the play...

...Fugard did not create this disturbing play, though, to teach us about African flora...

...Daniel Sullivan left in the middle of these migrations, and Vivian Mata-lon, fresh from his successful revival of Brigadoon, was called in to take over the directorial chores...

...Perhaps being Arthur Miller's real-life sister, and presumably knowing the character at least as well as he does and better than the director, gave her an added edge...

...and Piet, the Afrikaner, is still living on his miserable farm, classifying the various species of aloes he collects, surviving, like the plant, on hostile soil...

...James Earl Jones as Steve effectively displays all of his technical gifts as an actor, and Harris Yulin as Piet gives one of the best performances to be seen anywhere on Broadway...

...Despite what the program said, the play on Broadway was not "the Harold Clurman Theater Production of Arthur Miller's The American Clock...

...It isn't...

...w ? T hat lesson are we to draw from the South African playwright Athol Fugard's ,4 Lesson from Aloes, a new work that had its American premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater and is now at the 48th Street Playhouse...

...Last summer, at Jack Garfein's small Harold Clurman Theater on 42nd Street, I attended a play written by Arthur Miller bearing the same title, on the same subject...

...Weren't all racially mixed gatherings illegal in South Africa...

...Although Gladys is the least significant of the trio, Maria Tucci gives her a somber, symbolic presence...

...Garfein and Sullivan—and Miller, naturally—then took the play to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, followed by tryout performances in Baltimore...

...The Biltmore rendering benefited from the elimination of the jejune singing, but the new conclusion was an unnecessary postscript to a play that had really finished 10 minutes earlier, if not sooner...

...Gladys, an Englishwoman married to an antiapartheid Afrikaner, has returned to a mental hospital...

...In neither scene was John Randolph's acting at fault...

...Whether meant to convey a ray of hope, or provide a crowning sarcasm, the effect was simply childish...

...This time he attempted a very serious, historical work, a kind of SOth-anniver-sary remembrance of the tragic aspects of the Great Depression...

...It first appeared to be a dreadful specimen of "abstract art," but upon inspection it proved to be an enlargement of one of those satellite cloud photographs familiar from TV weather reports...

...Her performance demonstrated what a versatile, talented actress she is...

...That is why they have been shunning him, leaving him increasingly alone with his aloes...

...The corresponding dramas of the family and the farmers thus melted into a shoddy sentimentality...

...Miller must have been around throughout, but it is clear that something regrettable happened on the way to the Biltmore...

...Instead, we were presented with a ponderously concocted coincidence: One of the Iowa farmers descends upon the Jewish family in their Brooklyn home to beg for work, and he tells them of the violence...