On Stage

SAUVAGE, LEO

On Stage PICK OF THE PACK BY LEO SAUVAGE In a season that is on the way to leaving its mark as one of the least creative in New York theater history, Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies at the Royale...

...Oneof the two security people sees the man she is looking for enter the Krogers' home the very first weekend, and Barbara Jackson recognizes him as the fellow in the photo...
...They find a demented tyrant calling himself Louis Quatorze, a starving population and a special God who makes the people accept the tyrant...
...If you are not in a bad mood when entering the theater, what you see will not strike you as either silly or boring...
...Stewart looks as though he worked for British Intelligence, and he does...
...That would be unlikely if there were a good reason for the continued surveillance, andthere isn't...
...the play leaves the question open...
...the young attache is exaggeratedly submissive to the old diplomat...
...Happily, similar flaws do not mar Clifford Williams' direction or the acting...
...Barbara Jackson will be increasingly upset not by hearsay or neighborly domestic quarrels or the perfidious insinuations of an Iago named Stewart, but by the dawning of an unbelievable, morally repugnant truth and her own response to it...
...Ralph Koltai's setting, on the other hand, is nothing to write home about or in The New Leader...
...Nicely directed by David McKenna and well played by Henderson Forsythe, Lenka Peterson and Keith Reddin, Cliffhanger has the added charm of showing people who are in love although over 65...
...Stewart, for instance, is supposed to settle any doubts in Barbara's mind about her aiding him when he tells her that Peter Kroger fought in the Spanish Civil War...
...She wonders whether Helen is hiding as much as she herself is at this point...
...Kroger could be a spy and nonetheless feel like an "Aunt Helen" to young Julie, who was growing up under her eyes...
...This strategy was deadly boring: Harrigan n 'Hart could not survive its second act...
...diplomatic attache and his wife arrive in an unnamed African country carrying all the necessary paraphernalia—for example, a suitcase filled with rolls of toilet paper...
...The closest they came to that, which was not very close, went back to Peter's buying a car exactly like Bob's...
...The playwright, we are further told, planned a so-called docudrama, something he is clearly not very good at...
...Its strength derives from probing friendship and friendship betrayed...
...Charming this play is nonetheless, primarily because it tells a horror tale without horrifying...
...She suffers as well because she is helping Stewart and now his two agents alternating at the post secure evidence against her friends, and the surveillance is extended from week to week...
...The two families have become best friends...
...Peter is a dealer in rare, antiquarian books...
...Kroger "Aunt Helen," and Barbara, a happy housewife with a talent for painting and sewing, is making Helen an evening gown...
...Peter and Helen Kroger (Colin Fox and Dana I vey), a Canadian couple, moved in about five years ago across the street—that is, behind the stage where we can't see them...
...A young U.S...
...All eyes were not only on Rosemary Harris, alwaysagreat actress: all minds were on Barbara and her anguish...
...The Krogers— most often Helen—drop in frequently at the Jacksons, who are seldom invited to reverse the situation...
...The Jacksons don't like the idea of having a stranger in their house all day, even a woman...
...The U.S...
...On Stage PICK OF THE PACK BY LEO SAUVAGE In a season that is on the way to leaving its mark as one of the least creative in New York theater history, Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies at the Royale is a welcome interruption...
...He too, though, leaves open the possibility that the Krogers might not have been feigning their love for Barbara, Julie and Bob...
...Even the Communists who managed to survive Franco's legionnaries and Hitler's bombers, far from automatically becoming Stalin's agents, often had to cscapc his sccrcl police- hunting for possible dissidents...
...After all, the Krogers' lies did not necessarily cancel the possibility of genuine affection...
...During the first act Harry Groener and Mark Hamill, playing Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart, gave us an attractively nostalgic image of 1880s theater...
...Besides, the agent would only be coming for the weekend...
...Implausi-bilities that might be ignored in a psychological context are weaknesses in a spy story...
...Bob is a Royal Air Force Engineer...
...Does this mean their friendship is made of lies too...
...A provocative new work by Albert Bermel, whom veteran readers will remember as a former NL drama critic, was done this month in a limited run at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse...
...The musical Harrigan n 'Hart at the Longacre Theater was interesting to the extent that it pleasantly revived a slice of American stage history...
...Natasha Katz' lighting is above criticism...
...What a pity Whitemore made the shift...
...She desperately wants to believe innocent explanations exist for whatever the couple is doing or hiding, while it becomes more and more difficult to deny that there are none...
...Nor had they exploited their British friends in Ruislip for their spying purposes...
...As the play goes on it dissolves into undramatic bits of what the Playbill tells us are true events of 1960-61...
...We learn that Peter was obsessed by images of the Great Depression and then, in an apartment with seven or eight like-minded young people, heard someone lecture on Marx and Lenin...
...On our side of the stage we have Bob and Barbara Jackson (George N. Martin and Rosemary Harris) with their daughter Julie (Tracy Pollan...
...and the play, as long as it remains satirical, is harshly to the point...
...They were heartily abetted by an excellent ensemble of tap dancers performing D.J...
...Afterward, still with his wife's assistance, he is ready to kill a student trying to blackmail him to get a passing grade in ethics...
...These lower the play to the level of cheap cliches...
...Intelligence is interested in the person and has observed him entering their narrow street on Saturdays...
...Surely George Orwell's London must know that there were non-Communists in Barcelona and Madrid...
...Three other productions deserve mention...
...She doesn't like people spying for the Russians, of course, but it isn't hatred of these unmasked enemies that is breaking her heart...
...Stewart asks for permission to station a female agent at the window of Julie's room from 9:30 a.m...
...They shouldn't...
...Unfortunately, Michael Stewart's book and Joe Layton's direction also attempted to mount a tearjerking melodrama about the painfully inhibited, probably homosexual attraction between the author-director and the actor-dancer-female impersonator 10 years his junior...
...The one problem is Yaffe's effort to analyze a character who has gone to 10 psychoanalysts and has been provided with too many different and opposing characteristics to be analyzable in two hours...
...Being in the wrong profession didn't automatically make one a false friend...
...Giagni's choreography in settings by David Mitchell and costumes by Ann Hould-Ward that were quite colorful...
...It presents an elderly professor of ethics killing his department dean and disposing of the body with the help of his long loving wife...
...Entitled Thrombo, it is a short, sharp satire on the United States in the Third World...
...Barbara cannot bear the very idea that Helen's seemingly open-hearted relations with her and displays of fondness for Julie could be insincere...
...it's the sort of literary mystery that is appreciated on college campuses...
...Julie calls Mrs...
...Pack of Lies should not be viewed as simply a spy story, however...
...At least not until the day a certain Mr...
...She was born in Brooklyn, we soon discover, and is the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants...
...In addition, it stretches the imagination to have a British couple sufficiently impressed with the country's security service to let agents stay f or weeks in the family castle...
...We are left to guess what agents Thelma (Kaiulani Lee) and Sally (June Ballinger) are watching for over the following weeks—assuming they are doing their job, for the window is often unattended...
...Although theme and development are badly shaken toward the end by two unnecessary —and therefore particularly irritating —digressions into hackneyed magazine realism, the British import retains a substantial amount of truth...
...It was a clever way to complicate the work of British agents trying to follow Peter's movements, Stewart notes...
...Stewart (Patrick McGoo-han) makes his appearance and Barbara starts thinking about coincidences...
...1 had trouble following Bermel's mystical message, though, when the young wife lets herself starve to death, not out of solidarity with the hungry population but as a challenge to this Third World Louis XIV...
...Having agreed to pretend nothing has changed, she is distressed to the point of physical illness by each little step forward in the investigation...
...Since no suspense is involved, it may be revealed that the Krogers turn out to be Soviet spies and, incidentally, are Americans rather than Canadians...
...Maybe five years ago the Krogers needed to befriend a nice respectable family in Ruislip as a cover for their activities, she thinks, but subsequently found themselves genuinely attached to the Jack-sons...
...She feels betrayed and at the same time sees herself as a betrayer...
...that weekend, to watch where the man goes...
...We're also told in her monologue that her family had to leave the U. S. after the Rosenbergs were arrested...
...Rosemary Harris is magnificent...
...That merely further agitates Barbara...
...They have told a great many lies about themselves...
...It concerns the Jacksons and the Kro-gers, neighbors in the middle-class London suburb of Ruislip...
...When Helen gets slightly drunk at a Christmas party at the Jacksons she talks about "woiking," inadvertently giving away her non-Canadian origins...
...Yet they are good citizens, Bob is a kind of civil servant, and Stewart says it is important...
...He pulls out a photograph of a man the Jacksons have never seen...
...Where Whitemore went wrong, breaking the tension and spoiling the impact, was in suddenly deciding to switch the focus to the motivations of his spies in two superficial monologues...
...Indeed, in her eyes the real liar of Pack of Lies is Barbara Jackson...
...It may sound inappropriate to use the word "charming" for James Yaffe's Cliffhanger at the charming Lambs Theater...
...to 5:30p.m...
...Because Peter works at home and visitors may disturb him, the Jacksons find nothing odd about this...
...I have rarely witnessed such a deep silence for so long in a theater: Nobody coughed, nobody shifted in his seat, dropped anything, unwrapped a candy...
...Almost thesame can be said of Patrick McGoohan, who is perhaps too much the secret agent, and of Dana Ivey, whose exuberant manifestations of friendship sometimes sound false...
...About two thirds of Pack of Lies is an impressive drama using the Jacksons' discovery that the Krogers are enemy spies as background for the classical problems of friendship...
...ambassador is a fool...
...George N. Martinis very good...

Vol. 68 • January 1985 • No. 1


 
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