Plays From The Past
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage PLAYS FROM THE PAST BY LEO SAUVAGE From us title one might well conclude, as indeed others have, that The Philanthropist-now lovingly revived at the Manhattan Theater Club on East 73rd...
...And he would blanch at Alceste's belief that the most unpleasant truth must be spoken, although he is not addicted to lying...
...We understand thai Hampton did not want her to be a flirtatious 20th-century version of Celimene...
...The setting is a primitive, superstitious Cretan village...
...The most fully realized character is Mme...
...When in the final scene he makes his first firm decision?lighting a cigarette without hesitation after years of agonized debate between the pleasures of smoking and the danger of cancer-he, as well as McCallum, is applauded...
...A third revival of sorts, offering a bizarre and memorable theatrical experience, came to America for two nights in late October at the New York University Theater near Washington' Square...
...She goes after every male on the faculty in the spirit of a stamp collector...
...Enter Niko, (Robert West-enberg), a ridiculous young American "intellectual" of Greek ancestry with a load of books to read and a pile of money to reopen the long-abandoned mine he has inherited...
...He is not afraid of hurting John's feelings...
...Rodica Ionesco, Eugene's wife, acted opposite her as "The Maid...
...With Braham so ugly, the wishy-washy scholar becomes somewhat endearing...
...Niko will return to the U.S...
...He gives the bundle to Zorba to buy machinery, and the earthy wanderer not surprisingly spends it on women and wine...
...Yet ultimately British playwright Christopher Hampton, who was only 24 when this work opened at London's Royal Court Theater in 1970, used the French classic as a pretext, or a literary alibi, for a witty, satirical, very British comedy of his own...
...then one also immediately realizes that the parallel is illusory...
...The object may be to illustrate how brainy ourprofessorcanbeas long as he doesn't have to make a choice...
...The problem with Zorba is the failure of Joseph Stein to decide whether he wanted his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel to be a coherent, joyful musical comedy or a disjointed, philosophical ethnic tear-jerker...
...Philip and Alceste do have one salient characteristic in common...
...Watching this prologue, one is inevitably reminded of Moliere's Oronte, whose awful sonnet causes a rift between Alceste and his friend Philinte...
...Despite the program's assertion that the time is "the near future," it is obviously the very recent past of 1970...
...His lead character, a professor named Philip (David McCallum), might at first glance seem to be drawn as the simple opposite of Moliere's Alceste, but closer examination reveals that the academic is a bona fide original...
...Hortense (Lila Kedrova), a retired French courtesan who is in love with Zorba and hopes he will marry her...
...These interjections are neither shrewdly inserted nor ingeniously dismissed...
...The men are addicted to blood feuds...
...unfortunately, he is hopelessly in love with her...
...A fifth performance, at the Renaud-Barrault Company's theater on the Champs-Elysees, is scheduled for November as an Amnesty International benefit...
...In general, Kan-der has a positive effect on the show, especially with his bouzouki dance numbers...
...Afteraparty at Philip's flat, Celia wants to stay to wash the dishes...
...Director Andre Ernotte, though, apparently means to have him serve as a lightning rod, drawing the audience's irritation away from Philip...
...Alceste refuses to hide his negative opinion...
...In any case, the main attraction was the players...
...Actually, Virginia Woolf s Freshwater had only been put on twice before anywhere in the world-In London in 1935 and in Paris in 1982...
...He meets an ebullient macho adventurer, Zorba (Anthony Quinn), whose goal in life is to be a free man...
...Philip is not hiding anything...
...He does nothing to encourage her, and she goes off with Braham...
...Niko also loses his heart, in passing, to a mysterious widow always dressed in black (Taro Meyer...
...As the play's catalyst, Braham would seem to require a more subtle treatment...
...Watts' young wi fe, the future great actress Ellen Terry, was played by novelist Florence Delay...
...First, the author digresses into a few 1984-like allusions to the suppression of certain groups in the "outside" world...
...He doesn't try to please everybody either...
...Professor Tom Bishop, chairman of NYU's center for French Civilization and Culture, was Navy lieutenant John Craig, in whose arms Terry is said to have discovered non-Victorian love...
...Celia would like to make Philip happy, but how is she to know what he wants...
...Faithfulness to the novel is no excuse...
...Eventually we glean, with some prompting from Linda Fisher's costumes, that Araminta is an exotic product of Carnaby Street, not an aspiring sex bomb...
...As for Alceste, he dearly wishes to despise the socialite Celimene...
...No actor could give presence or meaning to Niko...
...Philip has become more or less accustomed to the idea of marrying the coed Celia(Glenne Headly...
...The play is set in a British university town...
...His unconstrained wisdom is illustrated by lines like: "Hope is the behind of a woman...
...By the time she reworked it for the 21 st birthday of her niece Angelica Garnett, Woolf s London neighborhood had become famous as a place where writers and artists lived, and the piece was mounted by amateurs of the Bloomsbury Group...
...If he is not entirely convincing, he can be enjoyable...
...He was superb, even, or perhaps particularly when he missed cues...
...Philip does not share Alceste's proclaimed deep aversion to the human race, even if he isn't madly enamored of it...
...Philip is the missing item in her book...
...Philip teaches philology, a specialty that saves him from having to take sides on contentious matters such as theater and literature...
...The revelation scene, remarkably well written by Hampton and well play ed by McCallum and Heald, almost attains the level of a Feydeau chasse-croise...
...He is less aggresively distrustful than the peevish 17th-century Frenchman, without being exactly magnanimous or gullible himself...
...Later, he begins to think that Liz might after all be the girl for him, only to discover she has just taken up with Donald...
...Among the peculiarities of the U.S...
...For above all, Philip is a person unable to form an opinion or make a decision...
...Albeit burdened by an interminable dying scene that combines Classical tragic staging with very modern syrupy dialogue, Kedrova is the brightest spot in theevening...
...he genuinely has nothing to say...
...the women are so greedy they cannot wait until one of their neighbors finishes dying before ransacking her house...
...In the stunningly theatrical prologue to The Philanthropist, when his friend and colleague Donald (Anthony Heald) finds fault with a play read by a student named John (Brent Spiner, in an excellent performance), neither author nor fault-finder can induce Philip to express any criticism...
...The part is not easy, and Headly handles it well...
...A crowd of villagers looks on...
...A spectator's initial impression is that Hendrickson is overacting...
...Of theseveral highly amusing scenes she plays with Quinn, the best is the one where she recalls her courtship by four admirals-a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and a Russian...
...Woolf s great aunt, the famous photographer Julia Cameron, was depicted by Egyptian-born surrealist poet Joyce Mansour, and her husband by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet...
...Second, Hampton makes a point of displaying Philip's acumen with anagrams...
...The most successful of the trio, Araminta (Robin Bartlett), presents, at least in this version, a puzzle...
...rather, he has the same trouble saying, No, that he has saying, Yes...
...A third principal is Braham (Benjamin Hendrickson), a best-selling writer who in this production is cynical, overbearing and in all other ways thoroughly obnoxious...
...In the current revival at the Broadway Theater, the wavering is compounded by director Michael Cacoyannis...
...The clever plot develops flawlessly under Ernotte'sguidance...
...Liz (whom Cherry Jones gets just right), is thequiet one-not yet ready to start anything herself, available to anybody who initiates it for her...
...I have only two criticisms...
...Last though hardly least, "James, the Butler" was played by Nathalie Sar-raute, who, much as she may dislike the title, is the Grande-Dame of French letters...
...In keeping with the era of the play, the three young female characters don't care who they go to bed with...
...Still, the examples are too numerous, complicated and boring...
...Quinn plays Zorba with an uninhibited gusto that does not lapse into exaggeration...
...Araminta, thinking now is the time to settle her affairs with the philologist, comes back to do the scrubbing that Celia has abandoned, and Philip follows her meekly to the bedroom...
...Woolf wrote the playlet in 1923, then decided it was "too thin and flat" and forgot about it for 12 years...
...doing something about it, however, is a different matter...
...McCallum is perfect in the role, as is Heald in his...
...Paris drama critic Guy Dumur took on the role of distinguished British portrait painter George Frederick Watts...
...from his sojourn in the old country with his reading matter, but without his cash...
...Nevertheless, it is surprising that she can get all the men she wants while exhibiting so little sex appeal...
...Eugene Io-nesco donned a flowing white beard to portray Alfred Tennyson...
...The day the luckless woman puts on a red dress to show the American his throbbing is reciprocated, she is stabbed to death in front of the church by a man who judges her responsible for the suicide of his cousin...
...John Kander's music and Graciela Daniele's choreography contribute to the impact...
...showing was the fact that it was done in French, with a cast made up of writers and prof essors instead of actors...
...he simply can't see what might be wrong with the young man's work...
...The 1982 Paris performance, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Woolf s birth, featured essentially the same cast that appeared at NYU...
...On Stage PLAYS FROM THE PAST BY LEO SAUVAGE From us title one might well conclude, as indeed others have, that The Philanthropist-now lovingly revived at the Manhattan Theater Club on East 73rd Street-Is an answer of sorts to Moliere's The Misanthrope...
...What the two men share, therefore, is a lack of will power...
...Americans have difficulty accepting a complacent anti-hero in a comedy, which is perhaps why The Philanthropist was not a hit when it first reached New York in 1971...
...Debby Shapiro, whom Cacoyannis has dressed up in purple to play a Greek Chorus, sings well but otherwise doesn't know what to do...
...The farce, focusing on leading intellectuals of the Victorian era, is still thin, but as directed by Simone Ben-mussa, the one professional involved, it was far from flat...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 20
