So Far So Foolish
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage SO FAR "SO FOOLISH" by leo sauvage Very little of what the first third of the 1984-85 theater season brought to New York is left, besides money. Including the long-running shows, we are...
...I must have seen half a dozen slices of the same life...
...Nonetheless, its appearance was a major event...
...Actually, Fo's handiwork is a drama in the form of a farce, with an unavoidable message...
...Only one of my colleagues mentioned the political focus, and to him it was "apparent early on" that "the civil servants in view are all power-greedy fascists...
...I probably should not comment at all on Beth Henley's Miss Firecracker Contest, which has crossed town from the Manhattan Theater Club to the West-side Arts Theater...
...Some are doing very well...
...Nobody got up to leave either...
...Behind all the dramatic absurdity and seeming glorification of the non sequitur, the recent guest at the Belasco was among the most powerful plays New York has seen for quite a while...
...Here, the most repugnant episode is a demonstration of coughing, belching and spitting, if not vomiting, given for several minutes downstage, but happily not facing the public...
...The untimely demise of Death of an A narchist notwithstanding, a number of farces and satires are currently on and off Broadway...
...The censors must have been careless, but their mistake will be noticed soon...
...Using theatrical logic, Fo tries to demonstrate that the victim was defenestrated, as they used to describe such episodes in Prague, if not in Milan...
...Before I explain why, let me relate a distant personal experience that illustrates the Italian playwright's remarkable strength...
...This farrago borrowed the names of Alexandre Dumas' main characters, as well as a few accessories, and not much else...
...It took place in East Berlin...
...The Theater am Luxemburgplatz was putting on one of his antiauthoritarian pieces...
...Richard Nelson, the adapter, must have been convinced that New Yorkers would not be able to grasp the Italian's wit, since he added highly American one-liners suitable for a stand-up comic...
...Officially, there is no more certainty about how he fell than there was proof of his committing the crime...
...They complimented Pryce, but criticized him for incorporating Groucho Marx' movements into his own game...
...I must admit that under Mike Nichols' direction the excellent cast almost makes the production tolerable...
...A wonderful revival of Landford Wilson's unfarcicalBa/m in Gilead has left the Circle Repertory for the new Minet-ta Lane Theater, nearby in Greenwich Village...
...One had better not be identified as liking it...
...Yet a lack of funds is not really the main reason stages on and off the Great White Way have lately offered very few inspiring moments...
...Few people got the point, including the critics...
...Did he jump or was he pushed...
...The uneasiness in the theater was palpable...
...Director Douglas C. Walker stressed the play's farcical technique at the expense of its political meaning, perhaps hoping that if we laughed loudly enough at Pryce's antics and Fo's peculiar way of making his point we would miss the point...
...I could feel the audience silently contemplating the possibilities: That guy in the fourth row applauding ostentatiously must be someone high up who knows what he is doing...
...At some point while he was being interrogated about the bombing of a local bank, an anarchist railroad worker charged with the act fell from a fourth-floor window of the police station and died...
...The play, therefore, has aspects of a farcical, albeit very clever, detective story...
...If The Fool alias Antonio alias Roberto is crazy, he is only slightly nuttier than Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik...
...New York lacks good plays—or perhaps the ability to discover, recognize and applaud them...
...What is really apparent is his own failure to see that these corrupt, indifferent officials are simply anxious to escape a situation potentially harmful to their careers...
...After all, Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame are said in Italy to be Communists...
...Maybe Ulbricht wants to make a gesture to Italian Communist Party boss Palmiro Togliatti...
...Including the long-running shows, we are told, Broadway's profits were several million dollars higher than for the same period last year...
...I liked the play and the performance, and I had a French passport in my pocket...
...The misunderstanding I have mentioned could not entirely erase Dario Fo's acute, irresistible theatrical instinct...
...At first nobody applauded...
...Perhaps the attention accorded the superproduction's departure after only a week and a half at the Broadway Theater may be attributed to its costs reportedly having reached $6 million...
...The miracle is the direction of John Malkovich, who has infused a feeling of spontaneity into the actors' every move, although everything must have been rehearsed chronometer in hand...
...This slice of life in an all-night cafe peopled by prostitutes, pimps, lesbians, male homosexuals, drug pushers, and junkies is old-hat, of course...
...Still, I wonder how feminists react to two Rabe women—perfectly acted by Judith Ivey and Cynthia Nixon—who have no problems being anybody's plaything...
...This production will be taken of f the boards...
...A London success several years ago, it came to New York's Belasco Theater and sank in a fortnight...
...One earlyish flop occasioned considerable hand-wringing: Mark Bramble and William Anthony McGuire's new version of Rudolf Friml's 1928 musical, The Three Musketeers, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse and Clifford Grey...
...The superbly engineered interaction of naturalism and imagination gives Balm in Gilead an unexpected appeal...
...At the same time, it is wise as well as clever...
...Politically uninhibited in every direction, methodically opposed to any kind of tyranny anywhere, its sharply honed, ferocious satire reveals the soullessness of bureaucracies unchastened by democratic control...
...David Rabe has assembled a not very interesting fringe of Hollywood degenerates in a room on the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where they give us technical demonstrations of various methods used to sniff, smoke and swallow dope...
...Yet Fo's play, performed beautifully in unambiguous German, clearly did not hew to the party line—indeed, was in direct conflict with it...
...Both instinctively know how to handle not very bright authorities who derive their power from uniforms, titles or the chairs they occupy in the right offices...
...You could almost hear the audience thinking: Something is wrong...
...The intellectual or, better yet, pseudo-literary side is represented by the characters' names: Walt Whitman, Huckleberry Finn, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Tom Sawyer, and so forth...
...Lifting my hands, I started clapping vigorously...
...Whatever the case, to me a far greater loss was the closing of Dario Fo' sA c-cidental Death of an Anarchist...
...Throughout the evening tremendous explosions of laughter began, suddenly died, began anew, and stopped again...
...The central character, played at the Belasco by the extraordinarily versatile British clown-actor Jonathan Pryce, is named The Fool in the dramatis personae, but initally presents himself as Antonio A. Antonio, a "graduate" of various mental institutions...
...Thrown through the window, Antonio comes back as Roberto R. Roberto to investigate his own death...
...This welcome news doesn't mean that a surplus is available to light up the 16 houses currently remaining dark, however...
...It is true that Rabe has a way with words...
...Appearing in various impersonations, he illustrates with insane perspicacity what must have happened to the railroad worker and induces the policemen present on the fatal day to contradict themselves...
...Parnell mixes them together in sometimes funny, sometimes boring adventures, all invented, naturally...
...Within seconds there was a burst of thunder...
...The author apparently wants to remind us of the part sex plays in fantasy as well as real life...
...Evidently, these genres themselves are not bad business...
...He does not have a way with drama or social satire: His characters conventionally stereotype the denizens of their unconventional milieu...
...What I saw that night was not only extremely original and expressive...
...Accidental Death of an Anarchist is another effective antiauthoritarian diatribe...
...Because its adapter and its director mistakenly decided Fo's play needed to be Americanized, it may rank among the most misunderstood foreign works done here...
...Peter Parnell's Romance Language, at Playwrights Horizons on Theater Row (a bit west of the42nd Street honky-tonk it serves as an antidote), is a pretentious, artificially unstagey intellectual farce...
...Most people know by now that it is based on a real occurrence in Milan in the late '60s...
...Neither Sheldon Larry's clever direction nor Loren Sherman's ingenious settings can change the fact that Romance Language is more often sopho-moric than amusing...
...however, the kind of sex he mostly seems aware of is gay...
...For me there was no risk...
...Charlotte Cushman did play Romeo, but in London, not Montana, and her sister Susan, not Emily Dickinson, was Juliet...
...I have little to say about the Broadway hit Hurly burly...
...The applause and the bravos were unanimous, protracted...
...It was unbelievably sarcastic, even disrespectful toward then-Communist Party chief Walter Ulbricht's regime—a regime so afraid of ideas from the outside that before I could enter its domain for a day I had to leave every scrap of printed paper I happened to have with me in a sealed envelope, which I would not get back until my return to Checkpoint Charlie...
...Regrettably, Walker's strategy was successful...
...In any case, my solo gesture seemed to be the signal everyone was waiting for...
...Knowing of Fo but never having seen anything by him, I decided to go and had one of the best seats in the house—fourth row, center...
...The truth is that I am impervious to her brand of black humor...
...The final curtain became an unintentional political experiment of sorts...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 21
