Critical Decisions
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage CRITICAL DECISIONS by leo sauvage Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall, which moved up to the Longacre Theater from the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village, is a very welcome addition...
...Lanford Wilson's success in dramatizing this authentic moral dilemma that yields to no easy answers is an encouraging sign for our theater at a time when few such signs exist...
...Her one distinction, as far as we can see, is probably that she was the exception among Harris' grade-conscious, Philistine students...
...Indeed, many successful French productions have done this...
...Throughout the play, the injustice will prevent the sojourners at the church from being alone with themselves, because it inexorably permeates the characters' personal problems...
...Nevertheless, Snyder, by the way she looks, walks and talks, manages to make Vita a full-fledged participant in the action...
...The young doctor will not be easy to replace, and the priest sincerely feels he is pleading out of concern for the Navaho nation...
...I could go on...
...The scene, for instance, where the fatuous Oronte reads his inane sonnet to Alceste, who hypocritically dissembles abitbefore expressing his disapproval, was a comic jewel in the hands of actors like Jacques Charon and Pierre Bertin...
...The only cast member deserving commendation is Carole Shelley, who gives a fresh, interesting rendering of the prudish, waspy Arsinoe...
...Another of the rare bright spots on today's Broadway is The Circle in the Square repertory company, with its tradition of reviving great plays of the past...
...Wilson's church, however, is no island cut off from the outside world...
...The roads are closed because of an accident in a uranium processing plant situated on the reservation...
...The characters are likely to be involved in strange circumvolutory movements for no other purpose than to give each side of the house something like a separate but equal view...
...Doherty tries desperately to keep Don from leaving...
...His constant attempts at humor that borders on the unappetizingly farcical are occasionally punctuated by more normal human reactions...
...That is true despite my distaste for theater-in-the-round...
...Moliere was 40 years old at the time of their wedding four years earlier, Armande 18, and she probably made his life more miserable than Celimene makes Al-ceste's...
...Porter, who has staged The Misanthrope several times, is addicted to an extreme tragic conception of the play...
...I don't mean to suggest the tragic elements of Alceste cannot be accented...
...Crazy or not, he was quickly granted a leave of absence and put his recovery in the hands of his loving wife...
...In fact, she is a fairly conventional wife whose love has been nourished by admiration for the older, more accomplished professor...
...Marion Clay (Tanya Berezin) is the wealthy widow of a famous artist who, as it happens, had elicited quite a few disparaging words from the pen of Professor Harris...
...The play has both character and characters...
...Mason's flawless directorial hand definitely deserves some credit here, too...
...For years, apparently, careless mining of radioactive ore on their homeland has been causing permanent damage to the health of the inadequately protected Navahos...
...yet he has other ambitions, and he has recently been offered what in his eyes is a dream job—doing cancer research in Berkeley...
...I think all sorts of gratuitous difficulties unfairly distract from the work being presented when actors are situated in the middle, rather than in front, of the audience...
...More to the point, mounting Moliere's The Misanthrope, the company's current production, involves enough unavoidable problems of its own...
...One school holds that the central figure, Alceste, is a tragic character, representing the hopeless battle for honesty and principle in a corrupt society...
...It is the two permanent residents of this forbidding landscape, though, who emerge as the focus of Angels Fall...
...He is an art history scholar who after completing his third book on the Renaissance came to the conclusion that he was ignorant of the subject he taught, and that there was nothing worth teaching anyway...
...His professed hatred of any sort of human intercourse, they say, is established mainly to emphasize, for the audience's amusement, the weakness of the male—the collapse of all he pretends to stand for when he is in love...
...In the premiere performance attended by King Louis XIV, moreover, the author and his wife played opposite each other in the leading roles...
...This plot wrinkle may initially seem like a Broadway commonplace, too, but Wilson has no use for the standard preoccupation with shrinks and Freudian cliches...
...Marion travels across the country exhibiting her late husband's art, accompanied by a young tennis champion, Salvatore Zappala(BrianTarantina), nicknamed "Zappy...
...The debate over the correct interpretation of this masterpiece has raged virtually since its first staging in 1666...
...The climax comes when Professor Harris makes Doherty understand that he is also frightened at the thought of being left alone in his corner of the desert, and the utterance of this truth lends clarity to both men's agitated minds...
...Thinking about her role after leaving the theater, I realized with some surprise that she is not given much to say...
...Snyder is almost miraculously convincing as Vita...
...Both sides are right to a degree, I believe, and the reason for this can be found in the playwright's life...
...One of the play's most effective aspects is showing how a still distressed Harris may be able to overcome the symptoms of his own condition by confronting and trying to understand the difficulties of others...
...A dangerous quantity of radiation may have leaked into the air...
...Few actresses would be able to make Celimene's coquettishness and light-hearted elegance shine against such a gloomy background, and Hurt is not one of them...
...His dislike for societal niceties, instead of being something of a pose, as Moliere intended, comes across as a veritable deep-seated hatred...
...To be sure, this is not the first time a playwright has contrived circumstances that bring disparate personalities together in an isolated place...
...Weaver displays at once tight self-control and forceful emotional range in reflecting every fine nuance of this complicated, tormented, yet never capricious or eccentric intellectual...
...At the Circle, therefore, Brian Bedford's Alceste is a somber, sinister, visionary maniac with an unmanageable compulsion to tell everybody the truth...
...His capable hands are badly needed there...
...Richard Wilbur's verse translation, if badly served in this instance, is still by far the best available...
...Happily, too, the intelligence of the writing is sensitively brought to life by director Marshall W. Mason and his cast...
...The second out-of-state couple is less powerfully drawn...
...A scene may be rendered ineffective or incomprehensible because the performer has his back turned to you...
...Professor Niles Harris (Fritz Weaver) and his wife Vita (Nancy Snyder), a young woman who used to be one of his students, are on their way to a desert psychiatric hospital where it is hoped he will recuperate from a nervous breakdown...
...not only does Wilson have something to say, he creates interesting people to say it for him...
...Obsessed, in addition, with the conviction that the interest of most of his students was limited to what might appear on the final exam, he exploded one day at the lectern, shouting "Down With Teaching...
...Here David Schramm's subdued portrait of the would-be poet fails to rise above the generally depressed and depressing mood...
...Although Tobaha thus goes off to California, for him as well as for us there remains the essential question: should he have sacrificed his personal happiness to the needs of his people...
...But for the most part, besides seeming to be in love with Marion, he combines an anxiety about meeting the right adversary on the courts with a fear of falling prey to ants, snakes and various exotic diseases...
...The professor doesn't suffer from alcoholism, childhood complexes or repressed homosexuality...
...It is easy to imagine that Moliere, as actor, must have added a good measure of tragedy in depicting Alceste's ridiculous spine-lessness before his object of adoration...
...On the contrary, the six people temporarily stuck there—two traveling couples, the priest and a young half-Indian doctor—cannot help being touched by surrounding events...
...Others insist that Alceste is meant to be an object of derision...
...As a result his love for Celimene (Mary Beth Hurt), who embodies just about all the detestable qualities of the salon, is not merely silly but sick...
...And John Lee Beatty's set is perfect, simultaneously concentrating and expanding the drama's impact...
...The costumes Ann Roth has made for the men are likewise better suited to Porter's artistic vision than Moliere's...
...If it seems for a moment that Wilson, in establishing this background, is trying to strike one more blow in the trendy campaign against nuclear power, we soon learn that his purposes run quite a bit deeper...
...It is so full of pep and wit that one forgets to jump when a 17th-century Frenchman refers to some of his peers as "discarded gigolos...
...All the same, Alceste is ridiculous, not heroic or even righteous, and this is what Stephen Porter, the director of the present revival, refuses to accept...
...Moliere conceived The Misanthrope as a satirical comedy, yet he hardly could help infusing it with some of the bitterness of his marriage to Armande Bejart, the youngest and apparently most promiscuous actress in his company...
...The scene is a small mission church in the barren country of northwestern New Mexico, not far from the state's largest Navaho reservation...
...Father William Doherty, beautifully portrayed by Barnard Hughes, has virtually brought up the Navaho orphan Don Tabaha (Danton Stone...
...The difference is that they have nevertheless left room for plenty of laughs...
...Alceste's friend Philintine accordingly symbolizes the average man's readiness to compromise himself, and his beloved Celimene represents the socialite's frivolous pursuit of petty advantage...
...On Stage CRITICAL DECISIONS by leo sauvage Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall, which moved up to the Longacre Theater from the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village, is a very welcome addition to Broadway...
...With Doherty's encouragement, Tabaha has studied medicine, and now works at the reservation's only hospital...
Vol. 66 • February 1983 • No. 4
