On Stage

...he Hudson Guild Theater m New York's Chelsea distnct is an appealing showplace Its repertory is reminiscent of the Royal Court Theater in London's Chelsea distnct, where David Hare, the author of the new play at the Hudson, once held the positions of "literary manager" and "resident dramatist " What his credits do not show is that the 34-year-old Hare belongs to the school of promising young English playwrights who have been influenced by John Osborne and often have something to say, though it is not always easy to follow His play is called Knuckle, and both the title and the text are somewhat perplexing Despite the use of the singular, I imagine the title is meant to suggest the pitiless use of brass knuckles The play is conceived and developed as a coldblooded drama of suspense, it is harsh and hard-hitting, leaving no room for the expression of emotions With the help of director Geoffrey Sherman, another Englishman from the same school, Hare fitfully tries to heighten the suspense by occasionally drawing upon the "theater of cruelty" that was m fashion at the Royal Court during the time he spent there "Mickey Spillane'' is the pass word to understanding Hare's intent When directly addressing the audience, Curly Delafield, the mam character, mentions Spillane as a symbol, though not an explanation, of what he is and of the situation he is facing But Hare is not merely concerned with solvmg a possible crime Behind the Spillaman mask there is a social critic, and toward the end of the play we realize that the author is applying his brass knuckles to a certain class of society rather than to individual criminals Professionally Curly Delafield is a gun runner, morally he is a cynic He became both because he had no taste for the hypocritical morals of Guildford, his hometown in Hare's native Surrey An ancient city with the rums of a Norman castle, Guildford's present-day bourgeoisie, avaricious and not above various sexual perversions, is mixed up in all kmds of scandals while maintaining a facade of decency Curly's father, Patrick, is a banker and the epitome of everything that he despises most in Guildford When the story begins, Curly has not seen his father or his sister for 12 years After reading in the newspapers that Sarah has disappeared somewhere on a beach, leaving only her raincoat with two first-class train tickets in the pocket, he decides to return home and find out what happened Curly and his father have obviously been strangers, or worse, to each other On the other hand, his relationship with his sister is left somewhat ambiguous Since Hare is apparently more interested in Sade than in Freud, he avoids hinting at the possibility of frustrated incest But why then is Curly, with his cruel indifference to everything and everybody, so anxious to find out what happened to her7 Though Sarah never appears on stage, she is really the central character of the play She is the person we come to know best as she is progressively depicted in the descriptions Curly extracts from reluctant witnesses About the witnesses, and Curly himself, little is revealed, the author seems satisfied to leave them mysterious No attempt is made, either, to explain the conduct of the man Sarah, Curly and Hare hate most Patrick, the goodlooking, well-mannered, absolutely heartless father He calmly tells his son that if he let the suicidal Sarah walk of f on a deserted beach, nude under her raincoat, it was because he had an important business appointment in the mormng Is this a further indication of the type of people whose existence justifies Curly's running away' More insidiously, Sarah was a nurse in a mental hospital where she knew a sane old lady who had been locked away with the lunatics to facilitate a big real estate swindle by some fine, upstanding Guildford citizens I shall not divulge the plot and surprises of Knuckle, since one is not supposed to do that with a mystery thriller In any case, it would be difficult for me to reveal much, for I lost my way among Hare's digressions, blind alleys and red herrings I will only note that one of those red herrings takes the form of a dog killed in connection with a spiritualist seance Please don't ask me how, when or why The play is nevertheless far from boring With the exception of one ugly incident, Hare and Sherman succeed in maintaining a matter-of-fact style that is not without humor The ugly exception is a rather sick scene where Curly forces a mad blackmailer, who does not drink or smoke, to swallow a bottle of whiskey and simultaneously smoke three cigarettes Though some people in the audience laughed, it is not funny A scene in the father's home provides a more worthy illustration of Hare and Sherman's humor Patrick lives with an elderly-looking, passive companion and housekeeper called Mrs Dunning Whenever we see her and whatever happens, she is busy knitting, nnperturb-ably No less imperturbably, she undresses as soon as a word from her master instructs her to do so Then, with her not at all unpleasant figure clad in a black bra and panties, she goes on knitting while waiting for Patrick to get himself ready Alice Drummond is perfect in the part, but feminists will not like this scene They may find some compensation in a young woman named Jenny, a friend of Sarah's and now the owner of a nightclub As ambiguous and strong-willed as Curly, she refuses to knuckle under to him even when he seems on the verge of knuckling down to some less cynical behavior Fran Brill shows class as Jenny, unlike Daniel Gerroll, whose Curly never quite becomes the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane type he is supposed to be Perhaps Gerroll is too young to pull it off Or perhaps I'm aht-tle prejudiced about finding Mickey Spillane characters convincing...

...the band and the dancers And something more The man who came up with the winning formula is a choreographer who knows how to use dance in a way that goes beyond simply telling a story Michael Smuin, co-director of the San Francisco Ballet, also avoids the opposite extreme of giving us the purely abstract His imagination is theatrical, yet he fills the stage with effects and ideas normally not associated with a theatrical production, and gets strikingly dramatic results For instance, the upstage bandstand is divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts When the trombone and reed sections move away from the center part containing the piano and rising drums, or when they float back toward it, they convey the changes of mood that mark Ellington's songs more effectively than a few well-written lines could have done And no clever play on words could have added to the subtle play of lights that makes those Ladies so sophisticated Indeed, Tony Walton's inventive sets and Jennifer Tipton's lighting perfectly complement Smuin's inspired direction The tap choreography b\ Henr\ LeTang is a crowning contribution to the show It is true that Hines' tap solos could have earned the evening anyway But to his forceful technical mastery?especially his dancmg up and down the stairs in the bandstand area—LeTang adds several small creative touches that make the hoofer's glonous performance an integral element of a top stage event One of those touches takes exactly two seconds While eyes and ears are frantically following the rhythm of his feet, Hines suddenly stops, sits down on the piano bench next to the pianist, and remains motionless, smiling and relaxed for the bnef instant before starting again Sure, it is part of the dance number Yet it has the impact of a full-fledged scene m a play, without any need for a text There are other very theatrical bits, generally lasting more than two seconds, beautifully incorporated in the show I did not think, for example, that Ellington's songs could be rendered in the style of the Chinese acrobats seen recendy in New York Four men m checkered costumes, their bodies cleverly contorted to suggest a Checker cab, roll m as Hines, the driver, sings "I'm Just a Lucky So-and-So " This naturally is not a song for Mao, and Checker cabs are characteristic of neither 1945 Peking nor 1981 Beijing But only the visiting Chinese acrobats had combined so much ingenuity with so much elegance and wit prior to the 1981 New York production of Sophisticated Ladies Aside from shanng the protest of many theatergoers against the abuse of amplifiers—which should be restneted to the psychedelic discotheques, where the suffenng is voluntary—I can find nothing cntical to say about the production Well, almost nothing Either because she is treated too much as a goddess or because I do not like goddesses however much thev ma\ merit their status, I was less impressed by Judith Jamison than the people near me In tact, during a scene based on the song "LoveNouMadl\," I toundBurgeand Battle's dancing acrobatics around a red piano more inspiring than Jamison s undulations on top of it I have no such reservations about Phyllis Hyman's undulating or singing Although she appears as statuesque and sometimes as majestic as Jamison, she very clearly does not belong to any other world but our own T .JL...

...On Stage RHYTHM AND REBELLION BY LEO SAUVAGE peculiar affliction identified as "book trouble," and seldom do the play-doctors called in before the Broadway opening manage to cure it Sophisticated Ladies, now bursting with health and vitality at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, started out in Washington with such a bad case of the affliction that the end seemed near Then someone made the radical decision to rid the production of its trouble by throwing out the book along with the the doctors Freed from the necessity—or the pretense—of conforming to the conventional requirements of a plot and dialogue, the show arrived on Broadway as a highly intelligent form of entertainment, leaving us happily speechless Of course, it always had Duke Ellington's music Under the direction of his son, Mercer Ellington, the band alone would have kept us in our seats, rocking in rhythm as jazz-lovers have done for almost half a century when listening to "Rockin' in Rhythm ' Dancers Gregory Hines, Hinton Battle and Gregg Burgc would have kept us jumping in our seats even with a lesser band What is wonderful here is that we have both...