On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage DARK AND SHALLOW VISIONS BY LEO SAUVAGE I suppose that when the British playwright CP. Taylor wrote Good, he thought he was illustrating in dramatic form what Hannah Arendt defined...
...JL^eth Henley's second Broadway play, The Wake of Jamey Foster, survived only a few performances-in my view, deservedly...
...He doesn't know where he stands, what he wants, who he is...
...When the other woman sent a cake along to express condolences we were left guessing for a tediously long time about whose face it would land in...
...Good tells us nothing about how good men might have been made into Nazis...
...Yet that is exactly what happens before the evening ends...
...His relationship with his family is, to put it mildly, confounding...
...Cathy caught Leon with the easily available Collard, then locked herself in the bathroom and stayed there until each of the other women recounted the worst experience of her life through the door...
...Her favorite word had five letters: arson...
...What all this suggests, of course, is that we do not yet have any criterion for when black humor will be deemed witty and when tasteless...
...Several people who saw The Wake of Jamey Foster told me they considered the "Smile...
...Neither do we, actually...
...Collard, incidentally, arrived with a present for the elderly Cathy's newborn, only to be told that the infant had died a few weeks earlier...
...Aside from the bottle and Marshael, Brocker told us, his passion in life was feeding his pigs until "they explode...
...Moreover, Haider's descent into the depths proceeds without his being pushed very hard, and with very little resistance on his part...
...The three were Marshael's brother Leon, her brother-in-law Wayne, and a pig breeder named Brocker Slade who formerly had been and soon again would be her lover...
...He has a hand in the book burnings at the university in Frankfurt, Goethe's city...
...Only a little less confusing is his liaison with a blond Gretchen named Anne, whom Felicity Dean manages to imbue with some humanity despite Davies' obliging her-As he does all the supporting performers-to act like a marionette...
...Nor is he an example of the obedient, uncritical but otherwise "normal" Germans who constituted a considerable-Albeit not respectable-percentage of Adolf Hitler's followers...
...Taylor does not do any better with his characterization of Morris, the Professor's Jewish psychiatrist friend...
...The opposite fates of Beth Henley's two plays merely confirm what we already know: That it is difficult to predict what the public, or even the critics, will like-let alone why...
...and Morris' initial refusal to be alarmed may indeed accurately reflect the reactions of certain German Jews to Hitler's first years in power...
...Similarly, although many spectators at Jamey Foster apparently did not appreciate the "jokes" about Cathy's mysterious baby, at Crimes the audiences enjoy the wisecrack about one sister-detected by her infertility?having a "shrunken ovary...
...Here Davies for once proves of some help...
...Leon showed signs of being in love with Pixrose...
...Another was Leon's wife Cathy, who for reasons unexplained looked like his mother and behaved like his daughter...
...Knowing the importance his superiors attach to large Aryan families, he fears for his career...
...She proclaimed herself a virgin, then added that she once had a dream in which she gave birth to a baby half human and half sheep...
...Other incidents: The three men played cards with a deck displaying naked women on the back...
...Still, he hardly seems the kind of man one would expect to emerge as a high ranking fascist...
...The scene is Germany in 1933...
...Could it be that there are limits to the device known as "black humor," that beyond some point the audience does not find "going for the jocular" in a grimly morbid fashion at all funny...
...Taylor's protagonist, Professor Haider, is a young, ratner liberal scholar specializing in Goethe...
...Gary Waldhorn does his best to play a basically well-balanced person who never quite grasps what is going on around him...
...As it turned out, Marshael didn't throw it...
...He has a wife and children, his students love him, and his best friend isa Jewish psychiatrist...
...This expansion seemed to be Marshael's principal quarrel with his adultery...
...Rounding out the dismal crew was Pixrose, a 20-year old orphan displaced from her state institution after it happened to burn down...
...The final scene finds him in the black uniform and boots of a full SS officer, on his way to Auschwitz in the line of duty...
...Nothing else good, though, can be said about Good...
...If anything, Haider is typical of the spineless, self-indulgent, slimy characters who helped lend the Third Reich what little pseudo-intellectual varnish it had...
...Taylor wrote Good, he thought he was illustrating in dramatic form what Hannah Arendt defined philosophically as "the banality of evil...
...Three female characters beside Marshael appeared...
...At one painful juncture, the author apparently decides to add some "personality" to one of his dummy dramatis personae...
...gag utterly tasteless...
...Leaning far over the coffin, he said, "Smile...
...One was her sister Col-lard , who boasted about her low IQ and gave proof of it by using the same four-letter word whenever she opened her mouth...
...His mother is afflicted with advanced senility, his fine World War I military record is well known, and a novel he wrote on the subject of euthanasia has attracted the attention of several prominent Nazis...
...While Beth Henley's ideas are not easy to identify, her prevailing comic theme is-death...
...since this detail could not be discerned from the house, they took care to inform everyone...
...Yet what is interesting to me about this debacle, and I think makes it worth talking about, is that the new play differed very little from Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning and still running smash, Crimes of the Heart...
...Later, we were given to understand that it was aborted...
...And the time it takes him to recognize Haider for what he is renders the Jewish doctor utterly ridiculous...
...Jamey's widow, Marshael, was angry, not sad...
...Before he ran afoul of the bovine, he had nurtured an affair with a woman whose baking showed on his waistline to bad effect...
...We could thus foresee a happy ending for Brocker Slade and Jamey Foster's widow...
...The result is a heel-clicking SS officer named Freddie confessing to a "secret vice": He loves listening to jazz records...
...Regrettably, the "play with music" that the Royal Shakespeare Company has brought to Broadway's Booth Theater does no such thing...
...It quickly becomes obvious, too, that he is receptive to flattery...
...In her latest creation, the body of Jamey Foster, having received a fatal kick from a cow, sat on stage until the last scene in a coffin with a frequently lifted lightweight cover...
...He participates in some active fashion that remains obscure in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives," when Hitler killed off his original, troublesome SA leaders, and in the 1938 "Night of the Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht), the first large-scale pogrom against German Jews...
...The arsonist-orphan mentioned a six-year-old brother suffering from brain damage...
...Professor Haider is not a victim of circumstances or a puppet, unless we alio w that puppets can manipulate themselves...
...The Professor is put in charge of a center where sufferers of incurable diseases and the mentally ill are eliminated...
...True, some of the facts of Haider's life are a bit more foreboding...
...Having some awareness of his own lack of decency, he is always ready to justify his concessions with a string of cliches...
...The man we see on stage is a vain, superficial, hypocritical Akademiker, pathologically rather than pathetically devoid of will power...
...We were even edified with a detailed description of the physiological process...
...On the other hand, the public is tremendously tickled when one of the sisters in Crimes of the Heart remarks that as she poured herself some lemonade after shooting her husband in the stomach (because she "didn't like his face"), she magnanimously thought of offering a glass to the wounded man on the floor, too...
...But we are asked to believe that after organized Nazi squadrons have broken Jewish windows, synagogues and skulls on Kristallnacht, Morris continues to be complacent...
...Jamey Foster's big humorous moment came when one of three males attending the Mississippi wake took flash photos of the corpse...
...Either she decided such an outburst would not be proper, or no cast member volunteered to be at the receiving end...
...The hilarious high point of Crimes of the Heart comes when the scions of a Mississippi family exclaim their beloved grandfather is at the hospital in a coma...
...Whatever the playwright may have intended, Professor Haider cannot be seen as one of those Weimar intellectuals who could have remained honest, good human beings in a different context...
...The best part of the play is the music-A selection of popular songs from the early '30s plus excerpts of Wagner and Schubert, performed live by an excellent quintet...
...I think this was meant to express a rebellion against the hypocrisy customary when death terminates a decaying conjugal bond...
...Freddie's other problem is his inability to beget children...
...As drawn by Taylor and portrayed with almost ludicrous exaggeration by Alan Howard under the direction of Howard Davies, Haider seems a desperate mental case practically from the beginning...
...He cleverly intertwines the melodic counterpoints with Taylor's contrived dialogue, thus adding a welcome theatrical touch...
...And, oh yes, when the hearse took away the body, Marshael refused to follow it...
...It also set up a scene that had Marshael listening to the pig breeder singing beneath her balcony...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 21
