Tales of Obsession

...On the other hand, I have yet to see a production that allowed itself to cut it So director Sherman and his star, John Rubinstein, have perhaps come up with the best possible solution Rather than trying to improve or attenuate, they give us those last few minutes naked, they are as bad as Wouk wrote them Rubinstein plays Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, the Jewish (why Jewish9) court-appointed defender of Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Jay O Sanders), who has been called before a Navy court-martial in San Francisco in February 1945 Maryk, executive officer of the imaginary minesweeper Came in the Pacific Theater, is on trial for seizing command of the vessel from Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg (Michael Monarty) when the captain became panicky and was sailing straight into a typhoon Three articles in the Navy regulations define the "unusual circumstances" under which an officer may rightfully relieve his commander The trial hinges on whether Maryk can meet the last of these requirements that he "bear the legitimate responsibility for, and be prepared to justify such action " Greenwald doesn't like Maryk personally, and he feels some sympathy for Queeg, whom he has to destroy in order to wm the case If one does not listen too carefully to the words Greenwald uses to express his conflicting feelings, they could be taken as a mce human touch Whatever his compunctions, his beautifully managed cross-examinations of several fascinating witnesses and finally of Queeg himself incontro vertibly establish that, besides being a bundle of persecution complexes and sick vanities, the captain of the Came was not free of cowardice After Maryk's acquittal is handed down, there seems to be no dramatic problem left Not quite so...

...It soon develops that a few strange remarks Greenwald made during the court proceedings—utterances that at the time sounded like not entirely indigestible psychological seasoning on a taut legal drama—were actually significant hints of his true state of mind For example, although shortly before the Maryk case he was still a civilian lawyer with a penchant for social causes like defending Indians' rights in Washington, he seemed on one occasion to exalt the beauties of military discipline Now, at the post-trial celebration given in his honor, Greenwald tells the assembled crowd that his chent should have been convicted Never mind that at this point neither the judges of the court-martial nor the spectators m the house harbor any doubt that Maryk saved his ship and its crew Greenwald knows that he and the young lieutenant have subverted justice and victimized the innocent Queeg We can only conclude that Wouk means to tell us the brilliant attorney is a pathologically obsessed Jew For after specifically identifying him as a "Jewish lawyer," the author has him extol Queeg as one of the heroes who kept Jewish mothers in the United States from being reduced to soap by "Goer-mg " Wouk evidently believes that Luftwaffe commander Herrmann Goer-mg had a greater hand in the Final Solution in Europe than either SS chief Heinnch Himmleror Adolf Hitler, and that mentally disturbed commanders like Queeg contributed to America's World War II victory while clear-thinking, if simple, lieutenants like Maryk jeopardized it I am ready at any tune to see this excellently directed and acted revival of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martialagain On my next visit, though, I'll do something very unprofessional and leave before the last scene...

...On Stage TALES OF OBSESSION BY LEO SAUVAGE T he Tony Award ceremonies on June 5 marked the official end of the 1982-83 theater season, and the unconvincing merits of some, if not most, of the winners confirmed that it has not been a great year Two productions that opened just in time to receive nominations—though too late to gather enough support to actually win one of the 19 prizes—are worthy of exploration One is Peter Nichols' Passion, highlighted by Roxanne Hart's expert fulfillment of a rather peculiar leading role, the other the Circle-m-the-Square's superb revival of Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a clever work with an ugly, self-destructive ending Passion, now at Broadway's Long-acre Theater, was called Passion Play when it ran in London, and the use or abuse of bona fide "church music"?including the medieval hymn Dies Irae that is generally sung as part of a Mass for the Dead—indeed lends it some liturgical echoes Still, Nichols' contemporary tragicomedy is clearly bound to the realm of the flesh There are philosophical-metaphysical asides, theological, or at least theological sounding, intermezzos, and esthetic-mystical contemplations thrown in obliquely by an art restorer who works alternately on an abstract yellow canvas and the head of a crucified Christ But the key that is kept dangling in front of us throughout is labeled "sex " It opens the gates of a labyrinth where separate lives and time periods are intermingled with so much guile and dexterity that we are at first seduced To maintain his hold on us, however, the playwright would have to keep his tncks from becoming either too difficult or too easy to see through Nichols little by little develops an irritating tendency to pose as a master of theatrical prestidigitation, certain he can lead us wherever he wants without rendering his plot incomprehensible or losing our interest One begins to feel manipulated and to perceive the author as a kind of highbrow latter-day PT Bamum For all his additional culture and elegance, Nichols is no less showy than the old circus master Passion adheres to a well-known literary method offering the audience direct access to an outpouring of the sorts of thoughts and feelings that usually remain repressed or ignored in everyday conversation Artists have employed a variety of techniques to bare their subjects in this way, the most prominent being the "stream ot consciousness" exemplified in literature by James Joyce's Ulysses and on stage by Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude Nichols intends to tell us the true story of James and Eleanor, a couple married for 25 years, by having them share the stage with the embodied shades of Jim and Nell, the people they once were and deep mside still are Husband and wife both spend the evening trailed by a "ghost" whose private voice conflicts with their public one This is a potentially humorous setup, and the confrontations between Frank Langella's Jim and Bob Gunton's James are in fact quite funny The same cannot be said for E Kathenne Kerr as Nell alongside Cathryn Damon as Eleanor, unfortunately, and Nichols' tale is at bottom not amusing at all The play is an acidic study of adultery as an intrinsic component of marriage, regardless of how much love exists between the spouses The true pivot of the drama is neither the James-Eleanor pair nor their Jim-Nell alter egos, but a girl named Kate She is a symbol of free, almost dispassionate sex, and the British playwright has found in American actress Roxanne Hart the best conceivable European-style, nonneurotic incarnation of this principle Kate sleeps with whomever she wants, whenever and for as long as she cares to, without being a fiery sex bomb, much less a nymphomaniac She has come into contact with Eleanor and James as a result of her past affair with their friend Albert, who dies before the action of the play begins and so remains an unseen, albeit frequendy talked-about, character It was at Albert's funeral, Kate confides, that she decided to go to bed with James—or was he still Jim then9 Later we learn that Eleanor—or was it Nell9—was also at one point sleeping with Albert, who was married to her fnend Agnes, played by Stephanie Gordon, before fleeing to take up with Kate During the course of the evening Kate seems to become intimate with her latest lo\ er\ wite, too, despite the tact that Eleanor attempts to commit suicide because ot her But the permutations and regroupings are onlv one aspect ot the show Nichols does, in addition, tell a tale of a genuine, perhaps mad passion After a quarter century, James remains in love with Eleanor emotionally and physically Yet the moment Kate appears he is irresistibly enticed by her Upon learning about their liaison Eleanor tries to kill herself, and James struggles desperately to save her The sequence is staged with utter lack of taste by director Marshall W Mason, first showing Eleanor as a shadow through a screen swallowing pills in the bathroom, then James in silhouette making her vomit Nonetheless, when in the final scene James and Eleanor receive their friends, including Kate, around the Christmas tree, we see that the adulterous lust has not diminished Again, James immediately forgets about his wife He dreams of undressing Kate, and Gunton and Hart—apparently unobserved by the others—dramatize his fantasy images Thankfully, director Mason's willingness to reintroduce some of the gratuitous "daring" practices that were nearly compulsory in the theater of 15 years ago does not extend to letting the young actress be completely stripped before the curtain falls In general, Nichols owes no gratitude to Mason or to the production as a whole The director certainly does not help us sort out the complex interactions of the four characters inside the two spouses John Lee Beatty's ambiguous settings compound the perplexity, because we have trouble telling where, and therefore when, events take place Most disconcerting of all is the failure to indicate in any way the not unimportant age differences between the dramatis personae Maybe Mason thought that adding a little extra confusion to the play would open a new dramatic angle A JL JL rthur Sherman's production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Mar-tial—coming to New York by way of Stamford, Connecticut's Hartman Theater—is as close to a theatrically perfect rendering of the 1954 work as any we are ever likely to see Paradoxically, the flawless presentation demonstrates all the more clearly the morally dubious purposes of Herman Wouk's sharply written and ingeniously structured script I don't know if the paradox was intended, I should like to think it was For after a series of excellent courtroom scenes, Wouk shows his crooked designs in an almost totally incongruous and shamelessly artificial epilogue The climax of this denouement, moreover, is a speech that could appropriately be included in any anthology of obscure, cheap propaganda No director and no actor could make the epilogue plausible...