On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage EMBATTLED DOMAINS BY LEO SAUVAGE PERCY GRANGER'S Eminent Domain, now at the Circle in the Square, may not be an exceptionally memorable theatrical event, but it is a positive...
...The play is set in a convent, inviting comparison with the other current "Catholic" drama, Mass Appeal...
...We understand from the start that Katie and Holmes have a strained relationship made tolerable by resignation on both sides...
...The Mother Superior (Page) joins in her defense, trying to convince Livingstone that perhaps the child did not come into or pass from the world in any ordinary way, but rather through some divine intervention...
...Plummer and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg are to be praised for steering us through this grisly passage with as much delicacy as humanly possible...
...But Agnes, her tongue loosened by this descent into the unconscious, ends the suspense by quickly bringing her narrative up to the actual murder: It turns out that she commited the deed after all, while in a religious trance...
...They are simply perfect...
...The blow that buried the Bradfords' marriage was their son Wendell's leaving home eight years ago, at the age of 16...
...If it were not for the fact that she must be able to read her prayer book, we would be forced to assume she is completely illiterate...
...Going across campus he is beset by students protesting the refusal of tenure to a younger, more popular member of his department...
...Not even superior acting, however, can conceal the improbability of Holmes Bradford's reaction to his visitor...
...Later in the evening, Victor overhears Katie telling her truth to her drunken husband: Wendell did not steal the money, she gave it to him so he could get away from his obtuse and unhelpful father...
...Perhaps, the playwright seems to imply, other forces were present after all...
...It probably would have been wisest to conclude Eminent Domain here on a Pirandelloesque question mark...
...Unaware of the much used bottle hidden behind the books in his study, she is grateful to him for trying to help her by keeping liquor out of the house...
...Professor Holmes Bradford (Philip Bosco) teaches poetry at a small Midwestern university where the subject is obviously not a major campus concern...
...The professor, it further becomes evident, had not had the curiosity to so much as open the biography in progress of his lost son...
...He hopes to be named to the faculty at Brandeis and apparently honestly thinks the social activity of a big university will be good for her, but she wants to preserve her quiet isolation...
...The weaknesses notwithstanding, Eminent Domain affords a worthwhile evening in the theater...
...Initially he recalls neither Salt's letter nor his dissertation, an odd circumstance that director Paul Austin mistakenly underlines by having Bosco evince total surprise as he answers the door...
...Plied with drink in a local restaurant, Holmes confides that because Wendell could no longer stand the trauma of witnessing his mother's addictions to amphetamines and alcohol, he stole $500 from her and left...
...Livingstone have to be a chain smoker...
...THE BEST THING about Agnes of God, at the Music Box, is the three women who perform it—Elizabeth Ashley, Geraldine Page and Amanda Plum-mer...
...She has had a child who was found strangled in a wastebasket in her room, but denies everything...
...The drama's catalyst appears in the person of one Victor Salt (John Vick-ery), a young Harvard graduate and unbridled opportunist...
...The whole sequence of events is entirely illogical...
...While Salt goes into the bathroom to clean up, he quickly tears the wrapping off the package and puts the volume on his desk, as if he had been studying it for some time...
...Nevertheless, if live theater afforded the same opportunity for close-up shots as the movies, this exorcism-by-psychiatry scene would certainly have sent people flying for the exit doors as effectively as Linda Blair's famous on-screen demon extraction...
...Not being able to locate the poet, whom he has never met, he contacts the professor, sends along a copy of his dissertation, and one night shows up at the Bradfords' claiming to have driven 25 hours straight...
...Ultimately, the persistent Salt succeeds in getting both parents' versions of the son's disappearance...
...Regrettably, the same cannot be said for John Pielmeier's script...
...Plummer's unshakeable earnestness goes a long way toward negating Pielmeier's overwriting, but without this exemplary actress a contemporary audience could never be expected to believe that such a person as Agnes really exists...
...Agnes of God seems to be interested in the Church primarily as an exotic setting for a gory tale: religious belief as a pretext for strange behavior...
...The cast is excellent...
...Granger has invested both characters with an admirable complexity, and Bosco and Miller bring every nuance and half-tone vividly to life...
...Most important, Percy Granger's faults do not obscure the fact that he is agifted playwright...
...Despite the prevalence of people like Salt in the world of 1982, the young hustler we see on stage often verges on caricature...
...His wife, Katie (Betty Miller), is a painter who stopped painting after her latest bout with drugs and alcohol...
...The playwright's sharp eye for character unfortunately begins to go somewhat astray at this point...
...First a sober but angry Holmes grabs his tennis racket (?) and charges out of the house...
...Even so, the more we find out about this young nun, the less credible her character becomes...
...When Victor eventually insists on having his opinion, he finally tries to skim some of the manuscript, but now finds himself unable to do so because of the raging contradictory emotions it evokes...
...This facet of her personality is accorded such importance that one of three pieces of furniture on stage is a large standing ashtray, hardly common in a convent...
...Livingstone has no difficulty diagnosing Sister Agnes' condition as a state of psychotic hysteria...
...They follow Holmes to the tennis court, where he abruptly ends the argument by taking off his clothes in the snow...
...The two men with whom Agnes could possibly have had contact, a priest and the convent gardener, both seem unlikely candidates...
...Austin and set designer Michael Miller nearly overcome the albatross of the arena stage that Circle in the Square Artistic Director Theodore Mann insisted on maintaining when his new uptown theater was built 10 years ago...
...Livingstone, a lapsed member of the Church ("I can smell an ex-Catholic a mile away," Page growls), is not persuaded...
...the missing link to his bestseller is information about the mysterious poet's personal life...
...Yet it has some marvelous moments, and the consistently strong dialogue is often witty...
...Then he invites Victor to spend the night on the couch and suddenly becomes so casual about his presence that he forgets to tell Katie about it...
...On Stage EMBATTLED DOMAINS BY LEO SAUVAGE PERCY GRANGER'S Eminent Domain, now at the Circle in the Square, may not be an exceptionally memorable theatrical event, but it is a positive contribution to a Broadway season that has not produced an interesting new American play since Bill C. Davis' Mass Appeal last November...
...Would Elizabeth Ashley have been disqualified for the part if she were a nonsmoker...
...Though she did not enter the convent until she was 15 (she is now 21), she is presented as completely ignorant of the secular world...
...Next, it turns out that although one would never know it from the script, Katie has been waiting for just this sort of impulsively brazen act to rediscover her truant love for her husband and at least temporarily forget about her son...
...As for the identity of the father, it is left deliberately unsettled...
...As the play begins, this wound is freshly reopened by the news that Wendell, whose whereabouts are unknown, has just published a volume of poetry so brilliant it may win a Pulitzer Prize...
...A traditionalist who in 1975 is struggling to uphold a pre-'60s model of professorial authority, he frequently locks horns with colleagues and undergraduates alike...
...Eminent Domain is not a play about absent-mindedness...
...It happens that he has written a dissertation on the work of Wendell Bradford, and with Wendell becoming famous he wants to turn it into a popular book...
...One comes away from his work inclined to discuss, a rarity these days where Broadway productions are concerned...
...Livingstone falls to her knees during the proceedings, either because she feels she is witness to some holy event, or she realizes too late that the Mother Superior was right in trying to keep Sister Agnes in the convent and away from outside judges and psychiatric wards...
...Perhaps rarest of all, Eminent Domain is intellectually stimulating...
...Psychiatrist Martha Livingstone (Ashley) is appointed by the court to examine a young nun named Agnes, (Plummer...
...The work has its flaws, the most serious being a contrived denouement...
...He has an agent and has already contacted a publisher...
...One final note on Agnes of God: Why does Dr...
...That uses a discussion between a priest and a seminarian to dramatize issues which affect the lives of every human being...
...Granger chooses to tack on two not very plausible surprises that lead to a rather weak happy ending...
...The play briefly becomes a whodunit when Livingstone hypnotizes Agnes and she reveals that it was the Mother Superior—now anxiously and suspiciously looking on—who brought the wastebasket into her room...
...Once Holmes has got it straight who this fellow is, he hastens to explain that he and his wife are unwilling to talk about Wendell...
...He is rescued only by the extreme and masterful understatement of Vickery's performance...
...If a particular reason existed for Holmes' not reading the dissertation upon its arrival, he fails to mention it, and it is impossible to believe he simply forgot...
...Naturally, she has no idea of how children are created...
Vol. 65 • April 1982 • No. 8
