On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage ACTS OF MADNESS BY LEO SAUVAGE ROBINSON JEFFERS' 1947 adaptation of Euripides' 431 B.C. Medea has come back to Broadway at the Cort Theater, and it is certainly welcome in a season that...
...So does adoring a marvelous child murderer...
...She is mad—sometimes with love, sometimes with hatred—and she is also sly, shrewd and cunning...
...Jeffers thought this denouement too much for the late 1940s, even though Antonin Artaud's "theater of cruelty" was popular at the time...
...Our impression is that she is looking forward to death, and that since Jason is now too weak to kill her, she will perish by her own hand...
...Her portrayal requires, in Jean Cocteau's words, a "monstre sacre," an actress who can combine sharply honed craft and dramatic genius to convincingly "compose" for us a character with whom she has nothing in common...
...To punish Jason, Medea contrives horrible deaths for his new bride and father-in-law...
...He anxiously seeks advice from Sam, who coaches him on both matters...
...Then she can be quite good...
...Fugard, as writer and director, is more at fault than his actor...
...Hally declares that he wants to be called "Master Harold...
...A NEW PLAY by Athol Fugard?the author of A Lesson from Aloes, Sizwe Bans...
...Master Harold,' though, is for some unexplained reason set in 1950, and at that time a similar incident could have occurred in any bar in Mississippi or Alabama...
...Hally seems to emerge straight from a play by Jules Feiffer or Woody Allen...
...Nor, clearly, does he really mean what he is saying or doing...
...Aided by the masterful acting of Zakes Mokae, the dramatic tension of this conclusion reaches way beyond anything else on Broadway this season...
...Hally had to precede Sam and obtain permission for the black man to come in and carry the cripple home on his back...
...And I think Medea is marvelous...
...Anderson confirmed that the sarcastic and snide remarks Jeffers wrote into Medea's part were not meant for laughs...
...Judith Anderson, the Australian-born actress for whom Jeffers originally conceived his version of Medea, plays the Nurse in the current production...
...She is an unreal, perennially plotting monster in a realistically conceived tragedy...
...She then discovers that the only human beings Jason is capable of loving are his children, notwithstanding his having readily abandoned them earlier...
...This, he hoped, would enable him to gain the throne...
...Medea is a very difficult role...
...andthe Boys seems more Americanized and less uniquely South African—and so less original...
...Euripides ended his tragedy with Medea fleeing in a winged chariot, a conspicuous triumph of evil that probably explains why the playwright and his play were not popular with contemporaries...
...Her feelings about her own two sons and her marriage, she said, "very much feed my interpretation of Medea...
...is Dead, The Island and Boesman and Lena—is always something to anticipate with interest, even excitement...
...Actually, it seems more like early morning or late evening, for not a single customer is present, only two black waiters...
...Medea gets off to a good start, achieves a powerful ending, and on the whole provides an interesting theatrical evening...
...She finds the 1982 audience "disconcerting," too...
...Ben Edwards' towering set construction stands in the center, its steps leading to the high, frightening doors of Medea's house?or hell...
...I do not know whether Zoe Caldwell (who, incidentally, is Robert Whitehead's wife) belonged to the faithful at the late LeeStrasberg's Actors' Studio, but there are scenes in Medea where she acts as if she did and they are intolerable...
...Hally's father is a crippled drunkard who has lately been hospitalized...
...I truly adore her, and I believe she really lived...
...They marry, and she becomes violently jealous of her new stepson, Theseus, whom she tries to poison...
...There is not much to say about the rest of the cast...
...In the entire play, there is only one clear reference to apartheid...
...Caldwell was interviewed by Berk-vist, too, and what she told him is extraordinary...
...Zoe Caldwell's fits of strange acting in the title role, and the noisily enthusiastic responses they provoke from many of the spectators, make for some very unpleasant moments...
...The middle section of the play revolves around his phone calls to and from her at home...
...Medea has come back to Broadway at the Cort Theater, and it is certainly welcome in a season that has been dominated by mostly poor commercial offerings...
...With no one else available, he turns against his friends...
...If I play a part, I've got to believe that that person lived...
...For some 25 minutes they talk about an upcoming ball-room dancing competition...
...Happily, there are stretches where Caldwell forgets about the method and the madness and remembers she is an actress on stage...
...He comes in ostensibly to eat lunch at the table Sam has laid, and to do his homework...
...The two characters are almost folksy stereotypes...
...Although we have no witnesses, neither were Euripides' bitter and derisive verses...
...This is true even in the magnificent final third...
...Judith Anderson is majestic in her supporting role, and Pauline Flanagan is perfect in both diction and demeanor as the leader of the three-member Chorus of Women of Corinth...
...Sam has been Hally's confidant since childhood, a "surrogate father" as any newspaper reader—or theatergoer?will not hesitate to call him...
...and the Boys, which opened to delirious acclaim at the Lyceum Theater, are devoted to interminable exposition that is sometimes slightly amusing, sometimes almost boring...
...It is not surprising that an immature, unstable adolescent like Hally, afflicted with an alcoholic father and a self-effacing mother, responds to an upsetting phone call by victimizing the family servant who has virtually brought him up...
...Sam reminds Hally of an occasion in his childhood when the two of them went to retrieve the young man's father from a local pub where he lay in astupor...
...Mokae plays Sam's part absolutely superbly, Price is much better as a blindly enraged madman than a traditional Broadway simpleton, and Glover fits in with the two of them like a Greek chorus...
...Therefore, he makes the perfect object for the boy's fury...
...Four or five tables have about a dozen chairs stacked on top of them...
...I have never been to South Africa, but Price's acting, and even his manner, must be more typical of the Bronx than Port Elizabeth...
...The older one, Sam (Mokae)?dressed by costume designer Sheila McLamb in an elegant uniform more suitable to a large restaurant or nightclub—sets up one of the tables downstage...
...Greek mythology depicts Medea as an "un-Greek" barbarian Asiatic sorceress, known less for her unhappiness than her crimes...
...The South African playwright's intentions are unclear until he suddenly turns the last third of the evening into pure theatrical magic...
...Enter Hally (Lonny Price), son of the tea room's white owners...
...What a pity we have to wait so long for it...
...If Fugard meant to dramatize the corrupting influence of South Africa's tradition, education and general atmosphere, Hally has too many personal problems to be an effective national symbol...
...Fleeing Corinth, she is granted asylum by King Aegeus of Athens, whom she had met when he was a guest at Creon's court, in return for her promise to cure his infertility (or perhaps impotence...
...Not that such a person or situation could not exist in South Africa as well...
...Theseus barely survives, and Medea leaves Athens to return to her native Colchis, where presumably she finally dies...
...Medea loves them as well, yet in her spiteful passion kills them anyway...
...When Hally's mother calls to tell him that his father is back at the house, his extreme anger and distress change him completely...
...In fact, Fugard has hinted in interviews that Hally's story is substantially autobiographical...
...But his aim was to make the on-stage conflict more human, not to make us chuckle...
...She shakes and trembles like a full-fledged psychotic about to be taken to Bellevue Hospital...
...One can imagine the same scene even if Sam were white...
...In an interview with Robert Berkvist of the New York Times after the show began its pre-Broadway run at Washington's Kennedy Center, she said she was "amazed" to hear laughter in the hall...
...Though the language of Hally's explosion against Sam is racist, his motivations are obviously not...
...This is an extraordinary theatrical moment...
...He has Medea simply disappear behind the big doors after showing Jason the bloody corpses of his sons...
...Assuming that a mythological sorceress must have had the same problems as a modern wife and mother, plus an American feminist's outlook, makes for awful acting...
...Regrettably, the first 60-70 minutes of 'Master Harold...
...His colleague, Willie (Dan-ny Glover), mops the floor, then polishes the chairs and puts them do wn in a line...
...The main reason is probably that the two familiar waiters are the only people he feels at ease with...
...The scene is a tea room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, "on a wet and windy afternoon...
...Whitehead seems lost, however, when it comes to controlling individual performances...
...He was not afraid to use harsh language or outright vulgarity in his efforts to introduce realism into ancient Greek tragedy...
...His release, Sam informs the son, is due today, triggering Hally's desperate effort to get his weak-willed mother to prevent it...
...Indeed, race seems beside the point here...
...But contrary to what Fugard may have intended, we learn nothing special about the human condition in South Africa...
...When Sam tries to calm him by recalling their closeness in the past, Hally spits in his face...
...Director Robert Whitehead (who was the producer in '47) has staged the movements of his cast in the best European ensemble tradition, carefully arranging the placement of each actor in relation to the others...
...So was I. I felt molested and angry...
...All the same, compared to his other works, 'Master Harold...
...She has already committed several atrocious ones before the play begins, as Whitehead recalls in a note in the Playbill...
...I handle those little boys on stage so easily because I handle my own boys exactly that way...
...During their opening confrontation, she herself bitterly reminds her ungrateful former husband Jason that out of love for him she murdered her own brother and betrayed her homeland...
...Willie wants to enter, but he has trouble with his dancing and, perhaps as a result, with his girl...
...According to mythology, Medea in fact goes on to further evil deeds...
...She goes on to recount how, once she managed to bring Jason and their two young sons to Corinth, he deserted her to marry the daughter of King Creon...
...A somewhat moronic high school student, he has trouble with his parents and his studies...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 11
