On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage BROADWAY SPRING QUARTET by LEO SAUVAGE Although it had a part in bringing Eugene O'Neill the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, Strange Interlude is not among the relatively few titles...
...A series of flashbacks, the formula the adapters use to help him and us understand what went wrong, fails to provide much illumination...
...And the Nederlander really needs a curtain to provide periodic relief from the remarkably uninteresting sets "designed by Voytek with Michael Levine...
...The new London production that recently began a limited New York run at the Nederlander Theater cannot wholly eliminate the turgidity so prominent in some of O'Neill's plays, especially Strange Interlude...
...Broadway was suffering an epidemic of "Actor's Studiosis," and that year's revival marked the official transfer of Lee Strasberg's devotees from the laboratory to a real theater...
...The Viennese atmosphere consists of a couple waltzing during the intervals separating the episodes, while a few men move furniture to approximately the same tempo...
...The play's triumphant opening in 1928 is perhaps attributable to several factors...
...The now adult son is in love with a nice young girl...
...the task was simply impossible...
...we witness their effects, and very effectively...
...Given his intelligent direction, and adaptation, Keith Hack might have had a theatrical event on his hands were it not for a single big error: Sorry to say, Glenda Jackson is utterly miscast...
...This audience, meanwhile, was aware of the importance Europe attached to the analysis of psychological processes, which would soon spawn a fashionable and lucrative profession in the United States...
...The author might have resented Hack's almost humorous approach, but the audience does not dwindle after each intermission...
...The director even manages to incorporate the interior monologues yet distinguish them from ordinary conversation...
...saw the first production of P. J. Barry's The Octette Bridge Club during the 1983 Humana Festival at Jon Joris' Louisville Actors Theater in Kentucky...
...The drama's dominant thought is that a professional boxer forced to clown as a wrestler has reached the lowest depths of skid row...
...O'Neill's main character, Nina Leeds (Glenda Jackson), is angry with herself and resentful toward the whole male sex because she did not sleep with the young man she loved before he got killed in the War...
...The important point is that each woman has a personality of her own...
...Then she convinces her husband's best friend, Dr...
...The rest amounted to nothing...
...For instance, we learn that one has been in a mental hospital, and her friends avoided visiting her because in their Rhode Island town they would have been abashed to be seen entering such an establishment...
...There are a few lapses into sentimentality, as well as an embarrassed and embarrassing apotheosis of human sisterhood...
...It must have been a challenge to turn the fortnightly bridge game of eight elderly ladies into the narrative structure of a play...
...Aran Brown's staging could not breathe theatrical life into this dead tale either...
...Brian Cox is excellent, as are James Hazel-dine and particularly Edward Petherbridge—who has a notably difficult job, since his Marsden cannot resist Nina...
...The child Nina has grows up as the happily ignorant Sam's boy, while hating the true father, who has become a drunkard...
...The structure, not the theme, for the cards they hold in their hands and throw on the table aren't the center of attention...
...I look forward to seeing Jackson again soon in a fitting part...
...At least in length (nine acts over five hours), the work was a particularly emphatic answer to Broadway's then clearly felt need to present serious theater to cultured, mature people...
...Whatever the case, after being banned in Boston the play prospered in New York and during the nationwide tours that followed...
...He obviously hated the kind of woman he was describing...
...Starting in 1919, the action finishes more than 20 years later—which in reality happens to mean the start of World War II, something the author naturally couldn't anticipate...
...Thus the monologues he had devised to communicate their inner thoughts were performed like statements made under the influence of hypnosis...
...Their Anatol (Stephen Collins) pursues genuine love without having the slightest notion—or intuition—of its true meaning...
...She finally resolves to wed Charles Marsden (Edward Petherbridge), an apparently sexless novelist with a longstanding platonic crush on her...
...We had the shady manager (George Segal), the devoted though unhelpful trainer (David Proval) and the usual good girl (Maria Tucci), here the spinsterish secretary of an employment agency instead of the proverbially golden-hearted prostitute...
...In addition, the idea of a stage piece about the romantic and sexual relationships between one woman and three men had a certain shock value in those days...
...In this case we don't need to witness the events...
...Tucci vainly tried to give the role spirit, but her failure was surely not her fault...
...He has no inkling 20 years later either, but he knows he must surely have missed something somewhere and therefore is very sad...
...nevertheless, his Nina Leeds is irresistible to men, and Glenda Jackson does not fit the bill here...
...The sole touches of imaginative fantasy are Robert Morgan's exuberant and occasionally elegant costumes for the four actresses holding down the eight female roles...
...Of course, a story that embodies the intellectual and moral avant-garde attitudes of 1928 cannot help seeming a bit outdated in 1985...
...At certain moments Lithgow handled the part, well, a little too heavily...
...In the interval things have happened to them...
...it was the complex mentality of one woman, Nina Leeds...
...Curtain...
...Anyone entering the Circle in the Square should forget whatever he or she knows about the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, including the 1891 play A natol that is supposedly the original of the Ellis Rabb/ Nicholas Martin adaptation on Broadway...
...She would have responded in exactly the same manner if the man she loved— or thought she loved—had died in a car accident before she could decide to lose her virginity...
...On Stage BROADWAY SPRING QUARTET by LEO SAUVAGE Although it had a part in bringing Eugene O'Neill the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, Strange Interlude is not among the relatively few titles this country has contributed to the roster of internationally recognized dramatic masterpieces...
...Edmund Dar-rell (Brian Cox), a physician who uneasily but compulsively desires her, to commit coldly premeditated adultery and impregnate her...
...It was among the more interesting and original works staged there, so I was pleased to see both qualities quite evident in the production directed by Tom Moore mounted at New York's Music Box...
...If you are interested in Schnitzler, you would be better advised to rent a video cassette of Max Ophuls' internationally celebrated filmLaRonde, based onReigen, another of his plays, than to visit The Loves of Anatol...
...We see the players in 1934 and again in 1944...
...There is an ugly confrontation between Edmund and his son, and an exasperating scene where the doctor very reluctantly refuses Nina's offer of matrimony...
...But in general he gave a very appealing, delicate and winning humanity to the hopeless, thoroughly down-and-out pugilist who was once the fifth-ranking title contender in his class...
...Nina subsequently has three gentlemen at her disposal and elects to marry Sam Evans (James Hazeldine), the simplest, most naive of the trio...
...Nina tries fruitlessly to destroy the relationship, apparently less out of conventional mother-in-law jealousy then because she hates witnessing true romantic passion...
...Harlan "Mountain" McClintock (John Lithgow) is the heavyweight whose body and soul are put to rest in this theatrical Requiem Mass...
...Still, under Tom Moore's deft supervision all eight actressess seemed perfect: These bridge-playing, talkative old birds succeeded in giving a shot of youth to a lagging season...
...Her regret over that omission was probably one reason the play was suppressed in Boston...
...Nina gets a clandestine abortion...
...Max takes them out one by one, and Anatol magically produces the lady each reminds him of...
...At the same time, O'Neill's heaviest lines become lighter and simpler, occasionally to the point of sounding ironical or sarcastic...
...Admittedly, she does catch many aspects of the complex, often unpleasant woman O' Neill imagined—or remembered...
...Modern soap opera or old-fashioned melodrama...
...He and the woman next enact a vignette vaguely connected with the said item...
...Then Sam dies of a heart attack, and Nina indicates that she is at last ready for Darrell, who has been cured of his alcoholism but not of her: A medical researcher elsewhere, he comes visiting occasionally more to see his old lover than to have a look at their joint offspring...
...Every member of the cast made his own psychoanalytical additions to the playwright's efforts to give the characters a dramatically convincing psychological profile...
...I first saw Strange Interlude in 1963...
...Largely ignoring the Old World wit and poetry that established Schnitzler's reputation, Rabb and Martin offer us a bad specimen of artificial neo-Roman-ticism that attempts to discover profound human significance in theseven amours of an unhappy Austrian Don Juan...
...Either way, the play's fifth hour is virtually intolerable —intolerably irritating, not intolerably dull...
...Instead of having an actorindicat-ing the shift to internal reflection by stepping forward into a beam of light to show he is thinking, Hack uses a slight movement of the head, a nuance in tone, and it works...
...By contrast, Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight, at the Martin Beck Theater, offered the audience a series of cliches that remained cliches, even if Marjorie Bradley Kellog's cleverly suggestive settings did help them throw some light on the milieu of boxing...
...Normally it does not help a play if important details are discussed, rather than performed...
...Both actions no doubt contributed as well to Strange Interlude's troubles in Boston...
...It is unlikely that better casting would have saved The Loves of Anatol, however...
...Nonetheless, Keith Hack succeeds in rendering it less noticeable...
...But O'Neill's subject was not wars...
...Anatol brings his old friend Max (Philip Bosco) a box full of little items linked to the loves of the title...
...Not until she is already pregnant does Sam's mother (Elizabeth Lawrence) tell her a secret: Sam doesn't know it, but insanity runs in the family and she should avoid having children...
...Although none of these sketches is really boring, none rises to the bittersweet artistic level of its source...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 3
