The Past in Present Tense
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage THE fAST N PRESENT TENSE by leo sauvage "A New Comedy by Peter Ustinov"—to borrow the subtitle of the current tenant at the Nederlander Theater —usually promises some interesting...
...Although Stockard Channing and Jeff Daniels give creditable performances as Virginia and Tom, the roles are too superficially drawn to stand up in a serious love story...
...Despite the promise of a " comedy" and the playwright's description of his work as a family drama with a happy ending, Beethoven's Tenth is no more a play than it is a symphony...
...That Irmgard is pregnant by Pascal comes up late in the evening, long after Beethoven arrives and sees in her the vulgar, illiterate peasant girl who once sexually challenged him...
...We are in an ordinary office with a man in a business suit identified only as Nicolas (Kevin Conway...
...In this instance there were many more people (around 30) symbolizing that "little town in California" during World War II: nice people sitting or standing on bleachers facing the audience, and singing in chorus...
...Ustinov has written that he intended to show how "a family obsessed with somewhat mundane problems" is affected by a sudden visit from a Beethoven "in a palpable and indeed boisterous form...
...The seven other cast members have little chance to animate the dummies they are obliged to portray —although Gina Friedlander, under Robert Chetwyn's direction, does get to exhibit a not uninteresting part of her person (it isn't her ankles...
...It deals with the hunt for a supposed lost chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...
...But the real interest of The Golden Age has its origin less in James or even Fitzgerald than in Luigi Pirandello...
...It is not...
...He also mumbles a few sentences in his native language, one of which includes an expletive scribbled by the real Beethoven two years before his death in the margin of a Berlin magazine that had denounced the "aberration of his muse...
...Far more successful is the Pirandello-like character of Isabel...
...Entitled Other Places, it is a trio of recent one-act plays by Harold Pinter, and whatever he writes can be counted upon to find admirers...
...Or does she anticipate that by inviting him to stay in her home she may succeed—as indeed she does—in enlisting his literary enthusiasm to help pull Virginia out of her depression...
...Periodically, a few of them stepped down to become characters with names, but not much individuality, in short or lengthy episodes...
...The questions—reaching this Beethoven thanks to a 1984 hearing aid—come from several men and women who seem to have no purpose on stage other than to serve as foils...
...Pinter to anxiously search for an answer...
...He can be quite amusing, though, writing about who tells lies, when, when not, and why...
...Moreover, director William Leach was not quite at ease with managing the movements of the chorus...
...This demonstrates a rather unpleasant aspect of Tom's personality that the playwright tries to make up for by having the ambitious young intellectual get caught in his own ruses...
...It has already been noted by others that The Human Comedy was a "bourgeois" or perhaps a "conservative" answer to Hair, and may have been inspired by Thornton Wilder's Our Town...
...Too bad...
...Nicolas turns out to be a psychological sadist who, leaving the physical violence to mysterious helpers, vaguely mentions God and patriotism...
...His entrance is preceded by four knocks on the door—those four taps opening the Fifth Symphony used by the BBC during World War II to announce the French broadcasts avidly followed in occupied Western Europe...
...These were cute, sentimental, and definitely sincere, yet decidedly unexciting...
...I have seen this described as a "political parable" set "in an unidentified police state...
...Ludwig van Beethoven—in a soiled threadbare costume aptly made by John Fraser to look 157 years old—magically appears when Irmgard bursts out ex-asperatedly with something to the effect of, "If only Beethoven were here...
...Peter Ustinov's portrait of the composer could be a marvelously revealing revenge if he threw out those unnecessary characters with their tedious intermeddling and gave us a one-man show...
...Well-staged by Alan Schneider, it consists of a strange yet clever dialogue between a London taxi dispatcher (Henderson Forsythe) and a driver (Kevin Conway) who cannot meet a train at Victoria Station because he no longer knows where it is...
...She now lives in the East Side brown-stone left to her by the post-Fitzgerald Mr...
...Since Hair, Gait MacDermot's scores have not succeeded in saving a Broadway musical with a bad book...
...With her past and her present, her tricks and charms, she is a deviously efficient.name-dropper, and even her most adventurous hints take on fleeting auras of truth...
...On Stage THE fAST N PRESENT TENSE by leo sauvage "A New Comedy by Peter Ustinov"—to borrow the subtitle of the current tenant at the Nederlander Theater —usually promises some interesting contribution to a Broadway season...
...At the end, after the appearance and announced death of an 8-year-old boy, it seems that Victor is going to be sent home and that Gila too will be set free after a few more days upstairs...
...Gurney is hampered by his apparent desire to come up with a psychological drama about the vagaries of human relationships...
...Friedlander plays Irmgard, an Austrian "aupair girl...
...The man who enters, a nervous and physical wreck ironically named Victor (Greg Martyn), has obviously been tortured...
...But Beethoven's Tenth provides only a strictly circumscribed fraction of the expected enj oyment...
...The methods of such men were and are quite different...
...Is she trying to exploit Tom's idee fixe to further her prestige and make some money...
...The third item on the bill, A Kind of Alaska, deals—on the basis of scientific studies, I am told—with a girl who since the age of 16 had spent 29 years in a coma, and now wakes up...
...Tom (Jeff Daniels) is convinced that Isabel Hastings Hoyt (Irene Worth) possesses Fitzgerald's missing pages...
...Whatever happens takes place in the modern home of a pedantic, obnoxious London music critic named Stephen Fauldgate, a dead caricature to whom George Rose manages to give a bit of life...
...In any case, Beethoven has happily learned English wherever he has been since 1827...
...He is seated behind a desk and after sifting through several papers taken from a drawer, asks for someone to be sent in...
...I did not notice anything to justify that description...
...is said to have been suggested to A. R. Gurney Jr...
...When Gurney seems to forget to pursue the conventional love story episodes of his plot and focuses on the ambiguous Isabel, we forget to be bored...
...The fraction is the character of Ludwig van Beethoven that Ustinov creates in executing his own keen monologues and sarcastic replies to silly questions, using to the fullest his extraordinarily rich range of movements...
...Hoyt with a shy, alcoholic granddaughter, Virginia (Stockard Channing), and much genuine or imagined memorabilia...
...And it was outstandingly performed at the Royale Theater by an excellent orchestra under the baton of a dramatic lady in black, Havana-born Tania Leon...
...Isabel is a witty old American lady, who in her 20s—and the century's—was a witty young American "flapper" close to the Jazz-Age's "moveable feast...
...The theme of The Golden Age at the newly rebaptized Jack Lawrence Theater on West 48 th St...
...Ustinov tells us she has been "in love" with Beethoven since spending her childhood with his "death mask over her cot...
...While we may get the music on a record, I will miss watching Tania Leon conduct...
...by Henry James' TheAspern Papers...
...Nicolas Slonimsky, in his Lexicon of Musical Invective, has listed some of the insults heaped upon Beethoven in various languages for over a century: "crude," "ludicrous," "monstrous," "repulsive," and (MusicalRecord, Boston, June 1899) "stupid and hopelessly vulgar...
...If the pages in question exist—none of this bears any relation to reality, but that is beside the point— does Isabel have them or doesn't she...
...There was reason to hope he would get something at least salvageable to work with in the case of The Human Comedy, William Dumaresq's adaptation of the film script and later novel by William Saroyan...
...John Tillinger's at times no less Pirandello-inspired direction, and most of all Irene Worth's absolutely beguiling, perfect interpretation of Isabel, ultimately succeed in making The Golden Age an entertaining, if not a golden, evening...
...Perhaps Ustinov intended this as a kind of posthumous homage from the composer to the wartime BBC...
...It is worth seeing only because of a very great performance, under Alan Schneider's direction, by Dianne Wiest...
...From what we know today, Nicolas cannot be the chief of a Nazi camp bordello, the "psychiatrist" in charge of Soviet dissenters, or the leader of a Sal-vadoran death squad...
...For a good many years—since 1970 to be exact—the Manhattan Theater Club has been presenting fairly interesting plays, plus a few that make one wonder how they reached this dramatic haven founded by A. E. Jeffcoat and directed by Lynne Meadow...
...Accordingly, without much transition and even less explanation, poor Virginia emerges as another manipulator quite able to back Tom into a corner where he discovers he loves her more than Fitzgerald's mysterious chapter...
...He does not want to move his parked taxi either—all of which may mean that he lives in a world that for him at least no longer exists...
...The opening playlet, Victoria Station, is a rather pleasant, still not outdated piece of "theater of the absurd...
...Presumably their final rapprochement is meant to provide a conclusion that is satisfying for everyone, including the theatergoer...
...He tells Victor that Gila (Caroline Lagerfelt), Victor's wife, is being kept upstairs with men who rape her...
...Where the Club went wrong with its present offering is easy to understand...
...Understandably, she does not like the music critic, who, as the egocentric boss of the family, broke up the singing career of his wife Jessica (Mary Jay) and is now busily preventing his young son Pascal (Adam Redfield) from becoming a composer...
...Isabel plays cat-and-mouse with Tom, while Tom, for the sake of his quest, is not above playing cat-and-mouse with Virginia...
...The center piece is Onefor the Road, also directed, I'm sorry to say, by Schneider...
...Alas, the libretto proved to be so bad that nothing could rescue it, which is unfortunate because this time MacDer-mot's music was remarkable...
...It is of subsequent developments, however, that the playwright was inspired to write, "humanity, honesty and humor are the winners in the end": Irmgard and Pascal leave the Fauldgates to move in together nearby, thus stimulating the music critic and his unfortunate wife to hold hands, temporarily...
...These are the "somewhat mundane problems...
...I have not the slightest idea what the whole story is about, and I don't believe I am obligated to Mr...
...Arrogantly nonsensical and brazenly tasteless, One for the Road is trash...
Vol. 67 • April 1984 • No. 8
