On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage PLAYWRIGHTS OLD AND NEW BY LEO SAUVAGE Having seen George Bernard Shaw's Candida in various theaters and countries, I am still unable to say why George Jean Nathan kept calling it "that...
...The characters have to be more human, less desexualized to work...
...The teamwork exhibited in Precious Blood by South, Altman, and actors Alfre Woodard and Guy Boyd is absolutely flawless...
...When they play roles in each other's stories they are someone being mentioned or remembered who is not supposed to be present...
...what is more, there is very little, and that of a very crude kind, in 99 hundredth's of our married life...
...I hope that the fifth or sixth by South will not let us down...
...Nora has some contemptible traits that Candida does not possess, however, and Ibsen is much better than Shaw at dramatizing his heroine's ultimate disenchantment: When Nora discovers that she can no longer bear to live with her husband, it is plain that her dissatisfaction lies deeper than her attack of indigestion from eating chocolates...
...To be sure, there is the principle Jack Tanner states in Man and Superman: "Moral passion is the only real passion...
...Easier to grasp, than Precious Blood, Rattlesnake is also less captivating...
...Critics, hesitant to admit as much, always attribute their lack of enthusiasm (when unable to muster any) to everyone save Shaw himself...
...I make him master here, though he does not know it" She also complains that husband James is out preaching every night, and as a result they seldom have an evening together...
...It is all highly acrobatic and fascinating dramatics, well worth our attention even if not always easy to follow...
...that would be un-Shavian of her...
...The tales are sparely connected through a few short contacts that suddenly light up, but never long enough to lead us beyond the ugly, cruel details into an impossible world of quiet and solutions...
...Instead, it is a blanket desigLEO BURMESTER nation for commercially successful horror films, similar theater pieces, and a variety of paperbacks and late-night TV programs...
...Yet while Altman's contribution is very important to the playwright and to us, it does not overshadow the fact that South possesses a genuine dramatic talent...
...The two characters in Precious Blood act without quite interacting, a task as difficult as it sounds...
...Having the poet portrayed as a nincompoop reduces the work to nonsense...
...Not that she feels sexually neglected, of course...
...The term has in recent years been corrupted, so that it now bears no relation to the Goths-the old German enemies of the Romans who were more open to mysticism and mystery than law and order??or to Edgar Allan Poe...
...Effect is thus built on contrast...
...But nothing beyond this happens before Morrell returns home...
...Woodward's Candida is indeed Shaw's: Intriguing at first because she has befriended an 18-year-old babbling, moonstruck poet, she turns out to be a very conventional woman...
...South's trump card is that he got Robert Altman to make his debut as a stage director with these works, initially at the Los Angeles Actors' Theater and now in New York...
...The author may have merely meant this as a convenient designation: The real titles are Precious Blood and Rattlesnake in a Cooler...
...One night Morell deliberately leaves her alone with March banks to discover whether she is attracted to him...
...Despite Altman's relative lack of experience as a stage director, it is soon clear that here is a master at work...
...Among other things, Shaw has Candida assure Morrell that he arrived just in time...
...Joanne Woodward has returned to Broadway after a long absence to play the title role, the wife of Reverend James Morrell, a strong-minded, strong-willed Fabian Socialist reminiscent of the playwright...
...Shaw presents Candida with what is supposed to be a dilemma...
...Candida, by contrast, lacks any deep turmoil...
...she reminds Marchbanks of the difference in their ages...
...This famous play is simply not very good...
...Similarly, both characters' husbands are stunned and feel unfairly treated at the climactic moment (in Candida, a melodramatic scene where Morell and the poet, Marchbanks, demand that the lady opt for one or the other...
...Equally concrete is John Ravelin's sharply defined apartment setting, complete with water running in the faucets...
...Hers is a very peculiar sort of feminism: "I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out...
...Shaw would like us to believe that Candida is above being sexually manipulative, but, through no fault of Woodward's, it is impossible not to infer otherwise...
...Rattlesnake in a Cooler has only one character, played by Leo Burmester, a superb actor...
...On Stage PLAYWRIGHTS OLD AND NEW BY LEO SAUVAGE Having seen George Bernard Shaw's Candida in various theaters and countries, I am still unable to say why George Jean Nathan kept calling it "that most delightful of sentimental comedies...
...Her chief desire is to have him recognize how much he owes to her devotion...
...We are invited to believe that she might choose March-banks, and to make that convincing we must be persuaded that she is drawn to him, that he exists for her...
...The pair at the Saint Clement's Theater on West 46th Street are somewhat immodestly billed, 2 by South...
...He doesn't...
...Nonetheless, Candida does not make much sense without them...
...Tait Ruppert's poet represents a glaring instance of misdirection on top of miscasting...
...Cristofer lets Joanne Woodward take only a few steps in this direction...
...Dramatic essays have their place in the theater, but dramatic essayists, if they do not soon push on to new fields, almost inevitably end up turning their ideas into cliches...
...Both of his efforts are monologues that reveal their characters, or several aspects of them at different periods in their lives...
...That does not prevent Candida from having a little seemingly erotic adventure...
...The dreams that are slowly to be transformed into nightmares have been studied as if they were problems of algebra and then laid out like a painting, with some of the strokes and colors carefully removed, some emphasized...
...The puritanical author told his biographer, Archibald Henderson, "There is never any real sex in romance...
...This is not the case, happily, with South's unique 1981 version of gothic...
...Alas, there is no magic is the cooler that serves as the rattler's home, only cleverness...
...This pair of one-acters is a promising start...
...Now we have Michel Cristofer's new production at the Circle in the Square Theater...
...One look at the alternative and we are ready for what author and director probably consider a happy ending...
...Cristofer's staging compounds Shaw's error by allowing no possibility whatever for Candida's not staying with Morell...
...He has an original, theatrical sense of what in literary language used to be called "gothic...
...He does get the impression that an attraction exists, though, and he becomes as insanely jealous as a husband who has caught his wife in bed with another man...
...Barbara Ling's beautifully suggestive lightning provides us with all the rain expected when Broadway rediscovered how thrilling slices of life could be...
...It is the complex story of a young doctor, bored with his life, who tries to become a cowboy...
...Shaw would insist that sexual considerations could never enter a play of his...
...Certainly it was not Shaw's intention to poke fun at poetry-as this production, perhaps unwittingly, does...
...Not that anything mystical is involved: The story has been made folksy and some elements are milked for laughs...
...He was striving for coherent comedy...
...But when in an outburst of presumably moral passion the men challenge Candida to choose between them...
...V JL rank South is a young actor who recently started writing short plays...
...She will be60 when he is 45, 75 when he is 60...
...Nor would it ever occur to him that they might have taken advantage of the occasion-that would be too monstrous for Shaw, let alone the preacher, to contemplate...
...It would have strengthened the structure of the play to allow her to go further...
...Again Altman directs beautifully in a very effective, concentrated Kavelin setting...
...Again the allusion is clear, unless Candida is implying that the age difference would not permit a satisfactory moral relationship...
...Moreover, for Shaw the main character in Candida is the Shavian preacher, not the heroine...
...The heroine has no intention of breaking up anything, certainly not her marriage to a prestigious, thriving preacher...
...Given his adversary here, his victory is a hollow one...
...Like Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (which had quite an influence on London as well as on Shaw in the years preceding his writing this work), Candida has accepted her married life as if it were precisely what she always wanted...
...Since anything "gothic" must deal with death, South and Alt-man provide us with a corpse artistically hanging from the rafters at the finish...
...The characters are abstract in spirit but real in body, and whatever they touch is very concrete: a doll, a pair of shoes, a cushion, a cardboard box...
...Shaw humiliates him only temporarily (though Ron Par-ady appears to be left fatally wounded), in order to make him a more impressive winner...
...The poet adores her as a goddess, not as a woman, yet she is apparently inspired by something more than simply gaining her husband's recognition and suddenly starts teasing and provoking the young man...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 21
