Unhappy New Year
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage UNHAPPY NEW YEAR BY LEO SAUVAGE Christmas 1982 is over, and gone as well are a number of Broadway plays that hurried to open in time for the holiday trade. Two of the new entries that...
...Meadow (Polly Rowles), a domineering middle-age mother, gets through the whole show without disrobing...
...The remaining females are in all ways less alluring...
...Every excuse Helene offers for postponing the visit is clearly a pretense and evasion...
...Chief among them is why Helene Hanff, who always dreamed of going to London, failed to do so earlier...
...Josie is not exactly a prostitute, simply agood-looking young lady from a poor family who feels that the man who "sleeps in my bed" is "entitled to pay my bills...
...All the same, for those who enjoy cultured, well-rendered discourse on literary subjects, a night at 84 Charing Cross Road will certainly not be wasted...
...For about four-fifths of the play, we take Dawn to be a retarded young girl...
...Paradoxically, it is Roose-Evans' one attempt to inject some action into the text, with a silent and effective final scene, that elicits some irritating afterthoughts...
...She ignores her mother, speaks normally, and throws away her opaque plastic wrap to uncover a surprisingly well built woman of perhaps 25...
...Communications-And books-passed regularly back and forth for the next 20 years...
...This was a big success in London, where it opened under Joan Littlewood's auspices, moved to the West End, and won the Comedy-of-the-Year Award...
...Nakedness can of course help create a dramatically valid atmosphere of eroticism...
...Apparently audiences find them entertaining or in some other way interesting, but neither is likely to be remembered for making even a minor artistic contribution to the first half of the '82-'83 season...
...The fact that Dunn's characters have left behind or taken off their towels doesn't make their dialogue any more significant...
...Frank Doel is dead, and Helene enters Number 84 to find the rest of the staff absent and the shelves empty...
...The woman was fond of literature, and despite her perennial claims of destitution, she did not mind the cost of having volumes shipped from overseas...
...Dunn seems to believe she has invested this sextet's small talk with some deeper meaning and exposed the vital human problems beneath their bare skins...
...But producing a credible motivation is the author's problem, not...
...That was in the '60s and early '70s, however, not the late '70s...
...Hanff began the correspondence about the time she moved to Manhattan in 1949...
...If there is any significance to the ugly mother/daughter relationship, it certainly does not emerge in the context of this play...
...Besides being a little too predictable, this tableau raises several questions about the preceding two acts...
...For the spa, it turns out, is not to be shut down as a result of real estate intrigues or to make room for a nuclear plant...
...While nudity usually adds more to a play's commercial prospects than to its dramatic impact, there was a period when acting without clothes on expressed a rebellion against conventional theater and conventional society...
...Granted, I probably would not have liked the play to dredge its heroine's subconscious...
...Two of the new entries that have survived are Steaming and 84 Charing Cross Road...
...Picket signs appear, accompanied by angry shouts, a barricade against the door and a unanimous vote to conduct a sleep-in, or steam-in...
...I hope vulgarity is not becoming a sign of distinction for today's female British playwrights...
...But in Steaming this occurs only when the character named Josie( Judith Ivey) dons black stockings or when director Roger Smith—using a well-worn teaser once associated with old "French postcards" that is now employed by publications like Playboy-reveals her to the audience in an open mink coat...
...Dunn also contrives a strange, misleading conclusion...
...The more perplexing disappointment is Steaming by Nell Dunn, the British novelist turned playwright, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater...
...Finally, it should be mentioned that if Dunn's women are by and large none too sexy, their language is often quite raunchy...
...At least 84 Charing Cross Road at the Nederlander Theater, although not very convincing as a play, does bring us a little closer to what we expect from across the Atlantic...
...Burstyn plays it so beautifully that we don't think to ask until later why the door is not locked...
...Adapted and directed by James Roose-Evans, it is based on an actual exchange of letters between Helene Hanff, a native of Philadelphia, and the friendly employees of a second-hand bookshop at the London address of the title...
...Surely she could have afforded a charter flight to London, especially since her penpals repeatedly offered to put her up once she arrived...
...Then, evidently in response to a talk with Josie beneath the steam, she suddenly changes...
...Some of us might pause before expressing solidarity with this struggle...
...The site will be utilized for a new public library-A facility, Dunn may be disturbed to learn, that a few people would deem more worthwhile than a Turkish bath...
...The silliest, most unpleasant role, as conceived by Dunn and directed by Smith, belongs to Mrs...
...Financial straits are not a valid answer...
...Her mother treats her like a dog, and she behaves accordingly...
...Not that she is mean (or funny, as some of the spectators seemed to think), merely sickeningly stupid...
...They are joined in this action by the non-nude employee (another stereotype played by an excellent actress, Pauline Flanagan...
...The author tends to echo her countrywoman Pam Gems, who in 1981 perpetrated the spectacle she dared to call Piaf...
...Happily, Ivey can look witty even modeling a fur nude...
...She is for some reason afraid of meeting the people, and seeing the place, that live in her imagination...
...Her letters inform us that she worked first as a reader and later a writer of scripts for the Ellery Queen TV series...
...Such extended recital, even by talented performers like Ellen Burstyn (as Helene) and Joseph Maher (playing Frank Doel, the shop's manager) cannot be passed off as a structured dramatic event...
...Hanff ultimately gets to Charing Cross Road, but too late...
...Meadow's daughter, Dawn (Lisa Jane Persky...
...Not being ready to give up all my illusions about the English stage, I must question this prize's validity (as I have, I confess, expressed doubts about numerous others...
...What the Playbill'refers to as "the action of the play" takes place in a decaying London steam bath during "the late 1970s...
...She is by far Steaming's hottest personality...
...Nancy's friend Jane (Margaret Whitton) is less shy, but the kind of person-or, more accurately, stereotype -she is meant to represent remains unclear...
...Nancy (Linda Thor-son), a rather frigid upper-class type who appears to be a lesbian, covers her body most of the time, too, although she does display her breasts in one scene...
...The problem is that almost the entire evening is devoted to reading the missives aloud...
...Steaming enters a revolutionary phase of sorts when the women learn that the bathhouse is threatened with closing and organize a protest...
...Here their interaction, Dawn's catharsis included, is utterly tasteless as well as theatrically inane...
...It consists of the conversation of six women in varying states of undress between sessions in the steam room, and nothing else...
Vol. 66 • January 1983 • No. 1
