On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage ATALE " OF TWO VETERANS BY LEO SAUVAGE E * X"* Le Gallienne first appeared on Broadway in 1921. There are probably very few people still around who saw her then, playing Joseph...
...She leads him into a dark room where an apparently dead man is lying on a bed...
...The most enlightening selections consist of passages from A Tale of Two Cities, a novel more often viewed on the screen than read...
...Williams is again following Dickens' path...
...Harriet is planning to sell the house and rent a small apartment for herself and Uncle Jared...
...In that sense it is, yes, quite unconventional...
...His works often had a "Gothic" touch to them...
...Too bad if they learned even less from life in the '70s than they did from books in the '60s...
...She is above all, however, a career girl, dreaming of successful real estate ventures, not excluding the possibilities of grandmother's house...
...The scenes Williams performs, under the title "The Fancy Ball," are taken from the neglected pages dealing with the years before the Revolution...
...Paul, a bored market researcher, seems content to leave his children in the care of his ex-wife...
...After her burial the three grandchildren still hopetoavoid any initiativeof their own by clinging to the house, which has passed on to Harriet...
...She now lives in Connecticut, where she apparently has learned a lot about American families, and especially about American transient marriages...
...The fourth member of the household is Grandie's septuagenarian brother, Jared, a retired professor...
...The doctor pushes the woman aside, opens the shutters and sees the dark blue swellings around the man's neck...
...Muf-fy and Beatrice, and her divorced son, Paul...
...Though I have seen Williams as Dickens twice before, this is the first time he so strongly evoked the feeling of Poe...
...The doctor then describes his expedition to some godforsaken suburb, past desolate houses, past a prison where a bell tolls at regular intervals, to an even more remote house...
...Muffy, the younger daughter, behaves like a somber victim deserving of universal sympathy, yet at the same time wonders if she could have kept her husband by being more active in bed...
...A young doctor tells how a black-veiled woman asks him to see a dying man, but the next morning at a precise hour, not immediately...
...He traveled through England, and later the U.S., reading his works and commenting on them...
...Thirty years ago, in the midst of a career as an actor and playwright that continues to thrive, he had an idea that remains artistically and intellectually refreshing...
...There must be a good number of couples, parents and children sitting in the audience every night who are experiencing, or have experienced, situations similar to those presented...
...To Grandmother's House We Go is probably the first play in a very long while where the so-called "conflict of generations" ends with the elders having the final say...
...Charles Dickens...
...He is EVA LE GALLIENNE unnecessary to the plot, but appreciated nevertheless because Shepperd Strudwick gives him an imposing dramatic presence...
...The people with a compulsion to go to grandmother's house are Harriet's two divorced daughters...
...Le Gallienne is, of course, the grandmother, a wonderful witty old lady nicknamed "Grandie" who owns a house in Connecticut...
...For among the nine works he has excerpted there are several that are either little known or have been objects of misleading interpretations...
...Yes, buta Dickens who knows how to write like Edgar Allen Poe...
...All this is not very original...
...If some people think Hal Holbrook is more amusing as Mark Twain, that is only because Twain must have been a funnier man...
...Or could it be that Saskatoon also has its divorced couples, mothers and grandmothers resembling the ones we see in Grandie's house...
...In contrast to everything that precedes it, the last scene stands out as sharply drawn and almost revolutionary...
...Grandiehas died in her sleep...
...imagined" would be the wrong word??by Glass...
...As brought forward by the actor in an e-motional but trenchant voice, they are a powerful explanation of the French people's hatred of the aristocracy, as well as a justification for the Revolution, though not for its excesses...
...Just seeing the couple together, despite their behaving as if they were truly in love, one can tell they will divorce within a few years...
...It is taken from The Black Veil and here titled "A Call Upon a Strange Man...
...Joanna McClelland Glass, the author of To Grandmother's House, hails from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada...
...We are given to understand that Harriet's sexual impulses are far from extinct, but that she sublimates them by painting apples...
...The author of Oliver Twist had seen his popularity grow further withDavidCopper-field, and he was not reluctant to cash in on it...
...If the children want to see them, she says, they can drop by for an hour or invite them for dinner...
...Beatrice, who has taken to drink and bitchi-ness, is only entitled to have her two little boys with her during alternate summers??spent at Grandie's, naturally...
...It alone is certainly worth a trip to the Century Theater, or wherever Williams will be carrying Charles Dickens' lectern in the next few months...
...What the script intended her to be like is never made entirely clear, but when we look at her looking at the others, we know she is somebody special...
...I suppose, though, that there is some morbid or masochistic entertainment value in their being so typical of current conditions...
...Living with Grandie is the 77-year-old Irish maid (Ruth Nelson) whom everyone calls "Nanny," since she used to care for her mistress' now 57-year-old widowed daughter Harriet, who has returned to become a third resident...
...She is pretty, elegant, and a vegetarian: No turkey for her, no fish either...
...There are probably very few people still around who saw her then, playing Joseph Schild-kraut's daughter in Liliom...
...The play opened at the Biltmore Theatre last month??as Le Gallienne celebrated her 82nd birthday??and it was an occasion not to be missed, if only because of her performance...
...The story takes place on Thanksgiving weekend...
...Inside he is kept waiting alone, until he hears noises of men carrying something upstairs, followed by the sound of female footsteps??those of the black-veiled woman coming downstairs to fetch him...
...he is touring various American cities and recently set up his lectern, an exact replica of the one used by the writer, at the Century Theater on 46th Street for a limited engagement...
...And watching these people display their failures under Grandie's observant, albeit ultimately acquiescent, eyes is not exactly amusing...
...During his own readings, he liked to intersperse moments of gloom and horror even among his more folksy, sentimental pieces...
...The Black Veil is from Sketches by Boz, written by Dickens in 1835-36, when he was in his early 20s...
...On the more literary side, there is a short scene that is as much a masterpiece of Williams' acting as it is of Dickens' writing...
...But Williams reveals more to us about Dickens, especially this time...
...to do a one-man show where he would portray Charles Dickens lecturing on his writing...
...But 60 years later their grandchildren have an opportunity to see Le Gallienne on stage, this time in To Grandmother's House We Go...
...The lasting images from television and the movies show a denunciation of the French Revolution, as if Dickens were looking at it only through the eyes of emigres in London...
...For the rest of us there is LeGallienne...
...In fact, the play was first presented at the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas, where it seemed to be no less at home than it would be in Paris or Stockholm...
...Unfortunately, except for the last and best scene of the play, there is not much in the part to make us aware that the role is being played by an accomplished actress named Kim Hunter...
...Dickens had first thought of giving lectures a century before Williams...
...Williams' rendition of The Black Veil may be a revelation to others, too...
...She says no, and it is here that the role allows Kim Hunter to utilize her substantial talent...
...E JL^mlyn Williams is seven years younger than Eva Le Gallienne...
...He arrives with the girl he is going to marry...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 3
