Squandered starsleo
SAUVAGE
On Stage SQUANDERED STARS by leo sauvage is not easy, and certainly not a pleasure to write about Foxfire at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, starring Hume Cronyn and his wife Jessica Tandy. Both are...
...The "country" music Holtzman has written for this group sounds more like rock...
...Nations either as a ghost alive in the mind of his widow and occasionally of his son, or as flesh and blood in flashbacks...
...He would very much like his mother to sell out and join him...
...In one scene recreating Hector's dying day, he consigns himself to lying for a painfully long time as a corpse on a hard table top-downstage and in full light...
...responsibility must be shared by director Arthur Storch and by Jackson and Wallach for accepting his direction...
...If Schisgal is hoping to win Kudos from the feminists with this characterization, I am not so sure he will succeed, since he simultaneously seems to suggest that Edie might benefit from knowing how to make love to her husband better...
...The therapy consists of obeying the directions on a specially prepared cassette...
...The surviving pioneer is Annie Nations (Tandy), a 79-year-old woman whose surname the writers perhaps concocted to lend the drama some supranational significance—unless it happens to be typical of Southern Appalachia...
...Moreover, Twice A round the Park turns out to be a somewhat different animal in structure as well as ambition...
...It would be helpful for those who have suffered from their marriages and want nothing more to do with sex, the playwright has his characters tell us, if there were a third gender besides male and female-something like the green vegetable in question...
...She wants to keep her log cabin and her land, now coveted by a real estate developer...
...it detracts from the moralistic-folkloric message that seems to have been regarded as the evening's principal justification...
...Fifteen minutes later we discover, through one sentence tossed off in an apparent attempt at dramatic surprise, that Hector has been dead for five years...
...With Dillard's profession keeping him on the road most of the time, he needs his mother to keep house and babysit...
...In addition, for fear of burglars, he leaves on a cassette of a furiously barking dog whenever he goes out...
...His new play, called Twice Around the Park, is subtitled A New York Comedy, indicating that what we are about to see is in the tradition of earlier New York comedies such as Barefoot in the Park...
...In any case, it would appeal to quite a different group than the theatergoing fans of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy...
...After a long absence filled with various other activities, Murray Schisgal has returned to Broadway at the Cort Theater...
...The curtain raiser, A Needfor Brussels Sprouts, is short, lighthearted and slightly absurdist...
...rent in the modern apartment built for him by designer James Tilton still couldn't be cheap...
...Yet the son also has several specific, far more mundane reasons for wanting Mother Nations out of her hollow...
...it is beside the point...
...The Brussels sprouts are part of a philosophical concept...
...Worse yet, the troubled couple is ridiculous rather than funny...
...Although he does not share his spouse's confidence in professionals, Gus has agreed to go along with her for one evening-tonight...
...The minor characters are so empty that all the actors can do is their duty?that is uttering their lines as effectively as possible...
...Finally, after Gus has thrown the cassette to the floor and trampled it, there is some hope for improvement by way of the bedroom...
...Such a protestation might pass as sincere, were it not rather belatedly revealed-to Annie and the public-that Dillard's wife has deserted him and their children...
...To begin with, Schisgal presents, instead of one play in two acts, two one-acters...
...Her children are out of the house, and having always occupied her time with caring for them she doesn't know what to do besides drink...
...Certainly the instructions are intended as a parody...
...In short, Schisgal offers us by turns the opportunity to listen to lengthy stretches of a recording and to witness two idiots-or one and a half, to be fair to Gus-submit to its "expertise...
...The refreshingly incoherent sounding title becomes a burden only when the author, in his most pretentious and thus weakest moment, feels compelled to explain it...
...Nevertheless, a tedious text, even if one is making fun of it, remains tedious without clever pruning...
...For the past 18 months Edie has been going twice a week to a shrink (or therapist, or marriage counselor, or whatever you call someone who gets paid twice a week for 18 months to give advice...
...She, it happens, is the hag herself, and she has come to issue Leon a summons...
...Schisgal is not trying to make a point about gardening or gastronomy...
...The events-I doubt that one could justifiably speak of a story-transpire in Rabun County, Georgia...
...And although her role here calls for no more than commonplace professional qualities, Tandy still manages to impress us with her stature...
...Keith Carradine sings, picks his guitar and sometimes-perhaps because Trainer needs a diversion on stage right to cover the preparations for flashbacks on stage left????leads a four man combo...
...Gus (Wallach) and Edie (Jackson) Frazier live in a high-class co-op on the East Side-having come, I suppose, around the park from the West...
...The action starts with a knock at the door...
...The first glimpse of his set offers a much more vivid picture of what life was once like for people of the Nations' generation and circumstances than the two hours of cliche dialogue that follows...
...I found Schisgal's main course, A Need for Less Expertise, by contrast completely indigestible (though to judge from the volume of laughter and applause in the theater, the public did not...
...Anyway, Rose believes that to adequately prepare for his next commercial he must wear a plumed hat and play an opera record as loudly as his stereo will allow...
...So whether or not his upstairs neighbor is an "old hag," as he claims, it is not surprising that he frequently hears annoyed stamping on his ceiling...
...Annie's son, Dillard (Keith Carradine), has moved to a city in Florida where he works as a guitar-playing country singer...
...Otherwise, A Need for Brussels Sprouts is an amusing sample of what self-styled European avant-gardists used to call "boulevard" or-more pejoratively?digestion-promoting" theater...
...This police procedure seems of dubious legality, but who cares...
...But the augmentation provided by the playwrights, director David Trainer and composer David Holtzman not only fails to add the necessary substance...
...And though Margaret leaves after she finishes writing the ticket, she soon returns-minus stick, cuffs and pistol-for a happy ending that will obviously relieve any need for Brussels sprouts...
...His acting is no revelation...
...Leon Rose (Wallach) is an actor on the decline who now appears mostly in TV commercials-A venue, I must point out, not as unrewarding financially as Schisgal insists that we believe it is...
...Indeed, granted that Rose has been forced to move from the swanky East Side to the earthy West Side (once around the park...
...Cronyn and Cooper intend to pay homage to-I quote from the Playbill, because I would not put it exactly this way?the last of the indomitable pioneers who carved out of the unwelcoming mountain soil not only a living but a tough, joyous way of life which has almost vanished now...
...Nor does Hume Cronyn have an easy night...
...After two long acts of indomitable pioneering resistance, Annie Nations decides to give in...
...Under the pretext of exposing-with unrelenting thoroughness-the silliness of "marriage experts," he offers a plan whereby patients may cure a chronically ailing conjugal arrangement more or less on their own...
...Dillard's behavior, for instance, is meant to reflect the unavoidable consequences of a new generation's advent and the disappearance of the old ways...
...The adherence to the genre proves superficial, though, restricted to a few geographical references, the mention of a too seldom enforced city regulation on noise levels, and the presence of a "lady-cop" in an NYPD uniform...
...Both are rightly considered to be among the most gifted, skilled and intelligent performers on the American stage today...
...The playwright wishes here to demonstrate that his satire has depth...
...The one he offers her is that a woman her age would be happier in the city with her son and grandchildren than living alone on an isolated mountain top...
...Both are written for two characters who bear the mark of Schisgal's usual witty verbiage and dramatic shortcomings, and are performed by Eli Wallach and his wife Anne Jackson-A pair of perfect Schisgal translators if there ever was one...
...Edie is also bored with herself...
...Gus makes a good living in a business whose nature remains vague, except for its obliging him to be away often...
...Gus, meanwhile, has been having plenty of extramarital adventures...
...Although they bear up well enough, the only name worth recalling from the ashes of Foxfire (aside from Tandy and Cronyn, naturally) is that of designer David Mitchell...
...Rose opens it to meet a redheaded policewoman named Margaret Heinz (Jackson), fully armed with nightstick, handcuffs and revolver...
...And watching good actors like Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson make themselves ridiculous is hardly amusing...
...One other person figures prominently in Foxfire...
...In less than an hour, the luckless actor and the weary cop have told each other their life stories, both dominated by several unhappy marriages...
...Theaudiencehasa hard time adjusting to the different situations...
...He and his wife are unhappy mostly because they are bored with each other...
...We watch what Gus and Edie do and say, and don't do and don't say, while the tape plays, is stopped, and starts again...
...Cronyn, however, who collaborated on the script with Susan Cooper, a British specialist in "fantasy novels for young adults," has written a part for himself that not even an actor like Hume Cronyn could look good in...
...Thenceforth, we have constantly to deal with Mr...
...The curtain rises on Annie talking with her husband, Hector Nations (Cronyn...
...A full-length play could not be fashioned from this tale alone, of course...
...They have been married for 26 years...
...I do not feel obliged to express an opinion on Carradine as a troubadour...
...Dillard wouldn't mind the tidy profit that could be turned on the sale of his birthplace either, a motive the script makes clear without dwelling upon it...
...In one tasteless sequence, Margaret provokes laughter by frisking Leon twice between his legs...
Vol. 65 • December 1982 • No. 24
