On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage MIXED GRILL BY LEO SAUVAGE Although several more or less agreeable productions have recently opened in theaters on Broadway and off, the most remarkable dramatic event of the late fall...
...Probably some orphanage," remarks a card-player...
...Pincus the gubernatorial reprieve that the uncomprehending messenger has delivered to him...
...It had a rather underpublicized debut Off-Broadway in 1972 and is now having a perhaps overestimated Broadway revival at the Helen Hayes Theater...
...He is slated for hanging the next morning, a prospect that gladdens the story-hungry boys in the pressroom as they play cards, make jokes, and phone rewrite...
...He defies his imperious, conventionally-minded chief at the University of Vienna, Dr...
...But the reporters covering the Criminal Court are without exception representative of the worst sort of tabloid journalism...
...The picture we get of the Chicago press is depressing in the extreme...
...Elina Loewensohn as Cecilia, the young patient, deserves special mention: Her wonderfully dramatic face and arresting conviction reveal a highly promising young actress...
...There is little sense of expose left when the Mayor (Jerome Dempsey) is portrayed as a bumbling fool, with a fez on his head and a clownish look on his face, oozing banknotes and sinecures...
...Such a figure is too transparent to come off as cunning, too ridiculous to be judged contemptible...
...He was a gifted playwright and an enchanting songwriter, endowed with a unique talent for blending sophistication and sentimentality in a medium of effortless wit...
...In the course of chronicling Freud's scientific progress Sartredoes not shrink from playing the analyst himself now and then...
...Written almost 60 years ago, this fast-paced play borrowed the slam-bang happenings of the silent screen's Tombstone saloons to animate the slapdash goings-on in the pressroom of Chicago's Criminal Court...
...The reading closes with Freud back in the Austrian capital, preparing to mold his observations and hypotheses into one of the greatest and most controversial theoretical edifices of the modern era...
...By the time Huston got around to making Freud in 1963 (with Montgomery Clift in the title role), he decided against using the solicited work...
...The deadpan humor is there, as is the gloved elegance, but the lightheartedness is strangely fugitive...
...This time it was not precisely a play that Ubu was doing, however, but a film scenario whose existence had been forgotten for more than two decades—a curious fact considering the author and subject are, respectively, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud...
...They should not be treated as contributions to an anthology of great poetry...
...Still, acircus is not exactly theater, especially when the best acts are lost among three rings and the public among varieties of refreshment vendors...
...Underscored, for instance, is Freud's reluctance to acknowledge the extra-scientific implications arising from a young female patient's transference of feeling...
...Josef Breuer, a Viennese psychiatrist and fellow admirer of Charcot...
...Breuer helps Freud financially and the two strike up a long—but not life-long—friendship, later collaborating on Studies in Hysteria...
...When, for example, a bell signal indicates that a fire has broken out somewhere in the city, the pressroom poker party does notmissabeat...
...The evening offers enough witty moments to make us enjoy Oh Coward!, but not to the point of exclamation...
...That dubious judgment by Tyrone Power does not seem to apply to Oh Coward!, an evening of Noel Coward's songs, poems and other witticisms selected by Roderick Cook...
...It is not easy for actors to perform while holding sheets of typewritten paper in a "set" consisting of two high stools in front of a wall...
...Set designer Tony Walton deserves credit for his efficient use of the at-long-last workable proscenium at the Beaumont...
...Among the pressroom crew, the best performance is turned in by Jeff Weiss as Bensinger, the man from the Tribune whose maniacal cleanliness and would-be refinement make him the ideal victim for his rowdy colleagues...
...A complete reading of The Freud Scenario would last over 10 hours, according to Kourilsky...
...From time to time the sound of a heavy object hitting the pavement in the courtyard can be heard through the open window...
...for this world premiere the Ubu group used an adaptation by Richard Kaye that takes little more than two...
...As The Freud Scenario opens, the future founder of the psychoanalytic movement is a young neurologist in fin-de-si-ecle Vienna, oppressed by the chauvinism of his academic superiors and by the city's latent anti-Semitism...
...When a prostitute (Deirdre O'Connell) who is in love with the anarchist arrives on the scene, she is assaulted by a wolf-pack of reporters eager to learn her beloved's whereabouts...
...In the process it offered a daringly ferocious satire of big-city political corruption and small-minded yellow journalism...
...On Stage MIXED GRILL BY LEO SAUVAGE Although several more or less agreeable productions have recently opened in theaters on Broadway and off, the most remarkable dramatic event of the late fall took place before an audience occupying folding chairs in an ordinary room on Mercer Street in Soho...
...Lightheartedness, of course, is part of the very soul of a circus...
...Yet ingratiating as his lyrics are, they can be properly appreciated only in relation to the music he wrote for them...
...Under Cook's direction, Catherine Cox, Patrick Quinn and Cook himself (accompanied by four musicians in the wings) articulate funny verses as though they were written for a recital...
...That was that until Sartre's death in 1980, when the text was discovered among his papers, then edited by Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and eventually translated into English by Quintin Hoare...
...The Freud Scenario also shows the discoverer of the ubiquity of sex in human motivation as a rather typical Viennese bourgeois in his private life...
...Zaks is apparently intent on simply milking the comic possibilities, and social comment be damned...
...Distraught, she jumps out the window to her death...
...The one honest figure in this incredible mob is a legal messenger named Mr...
...Denis Lacombe, an actor from Quebec who learned mime, tap-dancing and acrobatics at the Montreal Circus School, plays a conductor without an orchestra (but with a multitude of batons...
...Installed in a somewhat more conventional setting uptown, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, is a revival of Ben Hecht and Charles McAr-thur's The Front Page...
...Lacombe has the face of a helpless, carried away maestro, and the body of an equilibrist...
...Prior to his departure, Freud becomes acquainted with Dr...
...at another, he does the same with a telephone he has ripped off the wall...
...Coward wrote some 60 comedies, musicals, revues, and serious dramas...
...At one point he tosses her bucket out the window...
...Not surprisingly, they are also cynical, heartless, despicable human beings...
...The same goes for Sheriff Hartman (Richard B. Shull), whose unprecedented clumsiness enables a famous prisoner to escape...
...Pincus (Bill McCutcheon)— yet it hardly matters, because he is such a perfect idiot that he can't recognize a bribe...
...But his boss, the flint-hearted editor of the Herald Examiner (John Lithgow), knows how to keep him trapped, so Hildy satisfies his appetite for a new life by chasing the cleaning woman (Mary Catherine Wright...
...Only one performer on Broadway has made me laugh so hard, and that is Robert Lindsay in the library scene of Me and My Girl...
...And a fascinating two hours it is...
...he cannot help appearing somewhat artificial...
...This could have been, and probably once was, an indictment...
...That is where Franfoise Kourilsky has established her Ubu Repertory Theater, dedicated to giving staged readings of French plays in English translation...
...Playing their parts as directed and with gusto, most of the members of the cast are passably good and some are excellent—notably Bill McCutcheon, John Lithgow and Beverly May (in the role of Peggy's mother...
...Since Franfoise Kourilsky's Ubu Theater is a repertory company, we can expect The Freud Scenario to be repeated periodically...
...Cook has made an agreeable potpourri, but the often brilliant parts lack the kind of dramatic structure that might have given them significance as a whole...
...Director Jerry Zaks certainly succeeds in bringing back the frenzied cadences and snappy repartee...
...But he lets the satire decline into crude, low-level farce, so that the political and social criticism drowns in a sea of automatic, nulli tying laughter...
...Central to the drama, though not the central character, is the escapee (Paul Stolarsky), an alleged anarchist...
...Whatever the reporters' lines, though, the way they come out depends on the director...
...under Zaks' direction it is merely a wisecrack...
...The Mayor, for his part, is hoping to profit politically from the execution, and is therefore anxious to give back to Mr...
...One of the reporters, Hildy Johnson (Richard Thomas), hides the escaped convict under the roll-top of his desk in order to get an exclusive for his paper...
...But director Henry Al-ford effectively uses the stools to suggest everything from the interior of a cab to the couch of an analyst, and the cast is quite satisfactory considering the circumstances...
...But New York's own Big Apple Circus, which plants its tent (containing a single, intimate ring) each holiday season in Damrosch Park just south of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, offers at least one act that is top comic theater...
...Mey-nert, by taking off for Paris to train at Salpetriere under Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, whose use of hypnosis to treat hysteria made him a charlatan in Meynert's eyes...
...Sartre, the future author of a monumental biography of Gustave Flaubert, even has Freud berating a young woman that he is treating for reading Madame Bovary...
...it's the hangman trying out the gibbet with a sandbag...
...Sartre wrote The Freud Scenario in 1958 at the request of John Huston...
...Each timewehearapained cry from the courtyard—no doubt intended to add more fun to the farce...
...Something is missing or overdone...
...Hildy Johnson, the pivotal character of The Front Page, is supposedly in love with Peggy Grant (Julie Hagerty) and on the verge of relinquishing his place in the pressroom "family" tomovetoNew York, marry her, and take up a more honorable job...
...While Jerry Zaks' general conception of The Front Page appears wrong to me, he has undeniably managed some clever scenes here and there...
...The Second City had eight competing dailies in 1928 (a state of affairs alas inconceivable today), and one might expect some of them to pander to tawdry tastes...
...Richard Thomas, on the other hand, has a distastefully ambiguous person to play...
...Coward's, I think, is an overpublicized and underestimated talent...
...It should not be missed...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 17
