On Stage

...Second, of the three open doorways that we see, the one stage left represents the house across the street, yet Colin stands or sits alongside it even at the times we are told he is a squatter somewhere else...

...Certainly not to David, who reluctantly employs her for three hours a day because do-gooder Jane thinks Sheila has to get away from Colin during the brief time she does not spend at their kitchen table...

...The action takes place in the living room of a summer house outside London, appropriately designed by Michael H. Yeargan with a piano at one end and a breakfast table at the other...

...Benefactors sees the pair as egocentric intellectuals convinced they know what is best for the masses...

...His absent-mindedness, it soon develops, is a characteristic of the entire family, leaving the bewildered guests to find not only good explanations for arriving but some practical method of escape...

...Although the speech threads through practically the entire first act, it remains a pseudo-philosophical digression in a two-act play ultimately more concerned with the problems faced by a married couple unable to make a difficult decision than with urban scheming...

...Broadway chroniclers have found only one complimentary headline in their files about that earlier production: "Nothing to Sneeze At...

...Many years ago, refining Lee Strasberg's "method,"Elia Kazan had the actors in a Tennessee Williams work go through their slice-of-life performances manipulating nonexistent blinds and turning the knobs of absent doors...

...Moreover, like his characters, the author appears unable to make up his mind about where he stands...

...Except for Waterston, who cannot carry off that admittedly dreadful starting monologue, but does later improve, the actors do all that could be expected of them under the circumstances...

...Still, they lack the strength or will to throw her out...

...So it is not surprising that Broadway eagerly awaited the arrival this season of a new Frayn production—praised in advance as deeply moving and a serious drama of ideas...

...David (Sam Waterston) is an architect in charge of designing a public housing project for a low-income section of London...

...As for Jackie (Deborah Rush), a shyly shivering young girl, she has most likely been invited by the father, except he seems not to remember her...

...Thrice restarted, the rather dreary monologue is about the Basuto Road development David envisions...

...They do not know one another, or that they are in for a somewhat feverish bohemian weekend...

...Anthropologist Jane, for instance, works mostly in the kitchen serving her husband and their guests...

...But the play's the thing that has caught the public's attention, possibly because today especially it proves not all theatrical hurly-burly need be vulgar and crude...

...Perhaps her turning on him is an expression of loyalty to David...

...Now, at the Music Box Theater, Hay Fever is enjoying its warmest American audiences after receiving its most favorable American notices...

...Or perhaps she has been aroused by her political ally's insinuation that David is sleeping with Sheila...

...Sheila is no good to anyone...

...Glass doors open on a garden full of flowers...

...Written when the century was 22 years old and the playwright himself was just a few months older, it suffered a worse fate the first time out in New York: Critics and patrons alike proved allergic...

...Third, Jane and David's kitchen, crowded with every implement imaginable, includes a desk toward the rear that may or may not be meant to suggestthe office of the Basuto Road project...

...He may also be looking for a way to exchange his wife for Jane...

...Far less clear to me is why Benefactors, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, is a solid hit...

...Judith Bliss (Rosemary Harris) is a retired actress, though she refuses to accept that she has really left the stage for good...

...Colin's surname is Molyneux...

...Annals' cluttered set adds to the uncertainty we experience...

...Among the guests, Charles Kimbrough's diplomat has lost a little of his stiffness, and the character played by Deborah Rush may have found an antidote for her shyness...

...Perhaps she doesn't like the way he treats his wife...

...That impression lasts until Jane suddenly decides to go out and agitate against her husband's project...

...Sheila (Mary Beth Hurt) is a former nurse trapped in a loveless marriage to Colin (Simon Jones), who dabbles in journalism...

...TX Benefactors, Noel Coward's second play, Hay Fever, opened in London to poor reviews, although it did draw full houses...

...She eats her meals, leaves her children, and eventually sleeps at Jane and David's house...

...Not much has been changed from the original at the Music Box, and least of all the dotty personality of the formerly great actress as portrayed by the stellar Rosemary Harris...

...In their kitchen, where meals are cooked and dishes washed with meticulous exactitude, everyone eats and drinks from obviously empty plates and glasses...

...Confirming what she had shown in Noises Off, Rush—whose legs are hidden in Hay Fever—once more demonstrates that she is an extraordinarily talented actress...

...Then, back in the kitchen, she tosses boiling stew into Colin's face...

...Son Simon accounts for the fashionably lacquered lady (Carolyn Seymour), whom he believes he is in love with...

...But the play spends more time showing us how David and his wife Jane (Glenn Close), an anthropologist, both suffer when they try to help their neighbors living just across the street...

...At last they manage to extract themselves from Judith's airy, complicated parlor games—and from the play itself—by sneaking down the staircase to the athlete's car as the Blisses cozily seat themselves around the breakfast table, paying as little notice to their guests' absence as they at first did to their presence...

...But from the action it is possible to grasp that David' s patronymic is vaguely German-Jewish...

...As in most Western European cities, repairing the devastation World War II caused has been followed in the British capital by a preoccupation with eliminating urban blight...

...Yet, again as on the Continent, private interests, political chicanery, bureaucratic bumbling, and/or architectural incompetence have turned many renewal undertakings into esthetic and social disasters...

...The American theater has on several occasions explored similar situations, and the fact that Sheila finally seeks psychiatric help is not exactly a major innovation for playgoers on this side of the Atlantic...

...One indeed may wonder where the seriousness lies and what ideas are embodied here, or even whether Frayn's old-fashioned do-gooders do well enough on stage to justify a poorly put together work...

...The indispensable Clara (Barbara Bryne), the cook, completes the household...

...Neither is terribly original...

...His superb farce, Noises Off, was also enjoyed in New York and in Paris as much as in London...

...At the age of 22 Coward already had an uncanny talent for combining almost-real monsters with almost-unreal human characters...

...She is a paragon of tolerance, devoid of any feminist awareness...

...Having punished him for meanness while ennobling his revolt against bureaucracy, the author next abandons well-intentioned Jane and David to their hopeless mediocrity and has Colin write an article attacking what he terms the arrogance of " foreign bom" developers...

...Her husband David (Roy Dotrice) is a writer about whose work we learn no more than that it keeps him in his study, well away from his flamboyant wife, whimsical daughter (Mia Dillon) and erratic son (Robert Joy...

...Actually, Benefactors itself is a combination of two plays, one based on socio-political, the other on domestic-psychological dilemmas...

...True, the present version—deftly directed by Brian Murray, with a brilliant cast that features a superb Rosemary Harris—is absolutely flawless...

...Each has been invited by a different family member...

...From the moment the curtain rises on a Saturday afternoon until it wisely falls on Sunday morning, we are entertained by watching the Blisses entertain four guests...

...Other writings of his in different genres have resounded internationally, too...

...The benefactors realize their own married life is being poisoned by this permanent intrusion...

...I do not know what Frayn intended, but the implication is a leading one, pointing to yet a third dramatic theme whose presence adds to the existing confusion...

...After Colin badly loses his election, receiving a pitiful 183 votes, we are asked by Frayn to sympathize, for loathsome as he is, Colin represents the opposition of the urban poor to crushing high-rise projects...

...Maybe its purpose is to tell us that not one of these do-gooders will ever grow up...

...Judith's guest is an impressively athletic male admirer (Campbell Scott...

...The cast of characters provides only first names for the couples...

...He seems to be opposed to concrete housing projects mainly because he despises David...

...The one mildly unexpected twist comes in the second act when we discover that Colin, who gladly benefits from the benefactors' weakness, really is their enemy...

...And according to a highfalutin monologue David begins in getting the evening under way, the playwright means to deal with this phenomenon...

...First, it is difficult to know where the characters are speaking from when, mixing stream of consciousness with forced audience participation, they try to involve us in their troubles by addressing us directly...

...Hurt succeeds in making Sheila almost interesting, if not quite attractive...

...Director Michael Blakemore and designer Michael Annals, both so masterfully at ease with Frayn's chaotic Noises Off, alas manage to increase the jumble of Benefactors...

...Frayn's British touch consists in giving Colinadualrole:Heisnot merely a husband who abandons wife and family to occupy the unfinished project as a squatter, he becomes as well a parliamentary candidate running under a sort of English "Green Party" banner to protest the type of urbanism David symbolizes...

...This pleasant home belongs to a couple who are artists in both the good and the pejorative sense of the word...

...Finally, beside the desk there is a mysterious pile of baby toys that lie untouched from start to finish, though some 20 years are said to pass...

...Daughter Sorel, rather differently impressed, has asked a stiffly mannered diplomat (Charles Kimbrough...

...Nonetheless, in the scene that has Jane supposedly throwing boiling stew in Colin's face, clearly conceived as a theatrical highlight of the play, Simon Jones perfectly mimes the pain...

...This resulted in an elegant, orginal, witty transition from the then conventional drawing room comedy to what would later become known as the Theater of the Absurd...