On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage GOING FULL CIRCLE BY LEO SAUVAGE It was not exactly a play that marked the start of the Off-Broadway season at the Circle in the Square Theater on Bleecker Street. Although the program...
...Philip Bosco handles the role with dazzling virtuosity—every intonation, every gesture is just right...
...When Gloria and her mother come in, Valentine has a change of heart...
...The eldest daughter, Gloria (Lisa Hilboldt), is a slightly sympathetic character whose maternally-imposed aversion to men evaporates with the first amorous overture she experiences...
...Clandon regards with horror the time she spent married to a man she threw out 18 years before the action of the play, and has raised her three children without ever mentioning their father...
...One may be skeptical about the effectiveness of this method, which is similar to that of Alcoholics Anonymous...
...Philip also extends a luncheon invitation to Mr...
...Its latest offering is George Bernard Shaw's turn-of-the-century farce entitled You Never Can Tell, absent from Broadway since 1948...
...SOMEWHAT more traditional fare is being offered 50 blocks north at the Circle in the Square's uptown branch...
...He has recently set up practice in a seaside resort not far from London, where Dolly Clandon is his first patient...
...James Theater in London...
...And that is critical, for The Company is what makes the production a dramatic as well as a social event...
...Moreover, Sacharow gets them to function as an ensemble...
...We see his rebellious attitude replaced by the sense of solidarity and mutual confidence that are the center's chief weapons against addiction...
...Crampton (Stefan Gierasch), is fidgeting in the waiting room because he is already owed six weeks rent by Valentine, and he has broken a tooth on a Brazil nut...
...Mrs...
...No distinction is made between character and performer...
...One hopes to see McNeill soon in a role that does not include a history of drug abuse from the age of 14...
...Clandon with implacable irony, never giving her an opportunity to rationally address the feminist agenda...
...In fact, the single regrettable element of The Concept is the final scene, reminiscent of certain "avant-garde" theatrics ofthe'60sbest not revived...
...The members of the family he depicts are not very attractive, though, and the relations among them even less so...
...While he is attending to her teeth, his landlord, Mr...
...Crampton, and it doesn't take the audience longtofigureoutthat the greedy, broken-toothed landlord is actually the husband Mrs...
...Equally splendid is Garber's performance...
...Clandon (Uta Hagen), a brassy suffragette, writes books and gives speeches pushing her feminist views...
...Director Lawrence Sacharow arrived with the idea of having addicts re-enact, before an audience, the experiences they had and the approach being used to help free them of their habits...
...But you never can tell...
...Michele Zampello, another pretty blonde who does not get along too well with Ursula...
...here he seems to be saying that they are all a load of nonsense...
...Arriving to pick up Dolly, Philip glibly asks Valentine to lunch with the family...
...Ursula Carambo, a German blonde...
...It may be that Daytop healing is not complete until the cured addicts fall into each other's arms, asking for and offering brotherly love, but one is not moved by witnessing the spectacle on stage...
...By now they have learned to feel the presence of an audience, to follow carefully rehearsed stage directions, to adapt their attitudes and movements to the eight wooden crates in various configurations that constitute a primitive but appropriate set...
...The title is an allusion to Daytop's therapeutic philosophy...
...these men and women use their own names, they play themselves...
...And when the performers try to include members of the audience in their love-sharing, the effect is to cheapen an intensely dramatic evening...
...Before their appearance in The Concept, none of the performers had any theatrical background...
...As in the 1968 version there are four of each sex, apparently ranging in age from mid-20s to late 30s...
...Collectively, they represent 85 years of drug abuse...
...Their synchronized movements may appear elementary, at times even amateurish, yet they unquestionably w ork from a dramatic point of view...
...he even managed to graduate, yet devoted 10 years of his life to heroin and cocaine...
...The story begins in the office of an impecunious dentist named Valentine (Victor Garber...
...Her younger brother Philip (John David Cul-lum) and sister Dolly (Amanda Plum-mer) are from beginning to end the insufferable products of their mother's jaundiced education: loudmouthed, arrogant, exasperatingly spoiled brats...
...Although the program for The Concept says, "Text by Casey Kurtti," the next line adds, "In collaboration with The Company...
...He comes closest to being the protagonist, because as a newcomer to Daytop last year he initially refused to submit to the regimen of absolute frankness and self-criticism required by "the concept.' Through a series of wrenching interactions with fellow addicts Cohen's resistance is finally overcome...
...Richard Murphy, an Irishman who could easily play a cop on television after impersonating one in real life in order to shake downbars for drug money...
...and Jennifer McNeill, the youngest and fairest blonde...
...He picked four female and four male volunteers for the experiment, and the impact of their performance was such that he decided to bring them into an Off-Broadway theater...
...He helps all of the performers express themselves in theatrical language without resorting to the Actors' Studio Method, which confuses the stage with an analyst's couch...
...For these men and women, however, it seems to have worked...
...Shaw disliked Wilde, and especially that play...
...Mrs...
...Anthony Fischetti, whose erratic cunning collides with Cohen's intellectual dispair...
...This time it has a "text" structured by the playwright who wrote Catholic School Girls, plus players who are Daytop "graduates," but the story remains very much the ex-addicts' own...
...He is not only quite taken with the eldest daughter, but sees the possibility of extracting more than a five-shilling dental fee from this well-heeled, if somewhat disagreeable, bunch...
...She is anything but keen to see him again, and their subsequent scenes together—strictly of the non-love variety—are not beguiling, despite creditable performances by Hagen and Gierasch...
...Lunch is served on the terrace of the Marine Hotel (the only successful set designer Thomas Lynch was able to contrive for the dance floor that masquerades as a stage in the Circle's perverse Broadway showcase...
...You Never Can Tell is not a comedy of manners, much less of ideas...
...Located in the basement of a Broadway skyscraper, the "Off-Village" Circle has since 1972 presented on the whole excellent revivals (if we forget about Andrei Serban's freewheeling experiment with what had been Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro...
...Directed by Stephen Porter, the felicitous production fulfills the author's intention of poking fun at plays with messages—including his own...
...Deborah Davis, a powerful black woman with a gift for leadership as well as conciliation...
...Clandon sent packing 18 years earlier...
...It is interesting to note, finally, that the play was written in 1895, the year Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was presented at the St...
...he makes the recurring love scenes between Valentine and Gloria into the funniest moments of the evening...
...Lawrence Sacharow's direction is superb...
...Besides Carl Cohen, The Company includes Melechi Bellamy, who used to hustle drugs to insure a personal supply...
...The dentist initially declines, because Philip and Dolly are unable to give him any information about their father...
...These people do not have to look deep inside themselves or conjure up comparable situations to know what their parts are about...
...There we meet one of Shaw's most amusing characters, a waiter-philosopher whose fortune cookie-observations on the goings-on around him are always to the point...
...In this resort town, he says, you can't allow yourself to be in company of dubious pedigree...
...Shaw thought this one of his "pleasant" plays, as opposed to those he called "unpleasant...
...A residential rehabilitation center in upstate New York, Daytop Village, was seeking new ways of undoing the damage of addiction...
...Its humor arises, rather, from the juggling of characters, the piling of coincidence upon coincidence with an unrestrained yet premeditated frivolity that occasionally brings to mind the farces of Feydeau...
...Himself a supporter of feminist causes, Shaw nonetheless handles Mrs...
...This is a departure for Shaw, whose satire characteristically plays on specific social conventions...
...The Concept was born in 1968, the year a nascent drug culture emerged as an unfortunate appendage to the violence the Western world was experiencing on college campuses and in the streets...
...Perhaps a few of the eight, otherwise lacking in professional credentials, have heard the first calling of a career right here...
...Carl Cohen is the only one of the eight who attended college...
...Today drugs are a worse problem than ever, Daytop Village is still with us (grappling with the ravages of cocaine and its "crack" derivative, not only heroin) , and The Concept is back...
...Indeed, The Concept never implies that it is the sole solution to the contemporary drug plague...
...She sees all women as perpetually threatened in a world dominated by obnoxious men, and hence is determined never to shed her protective armor...
Vol. 69 • October 1986 • No. 15
