Midseason Potpourri
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage MDSEASON POTPOURRI BY LEO SAUVAGE A "new work" by Arthur Miller cannot be ignored—even when, like Danger: Memory!, it consists of two brief one-act plays in a limited engagement...
...It was printed in 1834, and 20 years afterward Charles Baudelaire tried in vain to have it produced...
...On Stage MDSEASON POTPOURRI BY LEO SAUVAGE A "new work" by Arthur Miller cannot be ignored—even when, like Danger: Memory!, it consists of two brief one-act plays in a limited engagement at Lincoln Center's subterranean Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater...
...Naturally, something like love soon develops between Susan and Jake...
...If some symbolic suggestion is intended, 1 could not discern it...
...As for the text— and the tacked-on "jokes"—what Richard Harris has given us, at least in the Broadway version of Stepping Out, is small beer...
...The "double"device employed here is usually exploited by making one member of each pair the repository of temptation, the other of inhibition...
...We soon find out, however, that there are only two characters in this apparently unorthodox but actually rather conventional play...
...Diderot's comedy tells the story of an 18th-century rogue who invents clever schemes for helping people, albeit in somewhat irregular ways...
...Is it supposed to mean that he can't remember what has gone on under Communist dictatorships during his lifetime...
...There is certainly something symbolic in Leo's continuing profession of Communism...
...Leonora has been a widow for 10 years...
...Memory does not, however, seem to represent a danger for either Leo or Leonora...
...Maybe what's dangerous here is the author's lack of memory...
...Leo dances with her, despite his arthritis...
...The English translation Gabriel John Brogyanyi did for Pamela Caren Billig's Threshold Theater Company bears the title Wicked Philanthropy...
...There is less difficulty in keeping the women separate—not because their lines are differentiated, but because one is Moore and the other is Redgrave...
...It is therefore welcome news that Wicked Philanthropy is to continue its career at the Samuel Beckett on 42nd Street's Theater Row...
...Pausing only briefly to bemoan the fact, I repaired several nights later to the 16th floor of an old-fashioned residential hotel on 73rd Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West, where there happens to be a lovely little theater with a terrace overlooking Manhattan...
...He is not as sharp as his contemporary Beaumarchais...
...But what—I ask because Miller doesn't—if the Puerto Rican is innocent...
...They don't...
...Leaving aside the unsatisfactory ending, Clara might have been interesting for what it is—a demonstration of how a good detective extracts the facts from a reluctant witness...
...The first, called I Can't Remember Anything, gives us two characters for somewhat less than 50 minutes: 7 5-yearold Leonora (Géraldine Fitzgerald) and her contemporary Leo (Mason Adams...
...There is no sexual innuendo to it—Susan /Susan Too scrutinizes the naked Jake just as an artist does a model, carefully...
...Leonora keeps her own home, not far from Leo's, and when he invites her to spend the night, it is merely because he does not want her to drink and drive...
...The works are united only by the author's penchant for treating splinters of big human problems in down-to-earth situations...
...Diderot called it Est-il bon...
...The same sort of vacillation goes on with the two Jakes, but it is not so pronounced, the young man seeming to be less troubled by lusty urges than his friend's mother...
...Gurney's Sweet Sue...
...Géraldine Fitzgerald and Mason Adams are very good in the first play...
...Similarly, Jake is both John K. Linton and Barry Tubb(" Jake Too...
...She leaves anyway, but he won't go to bed until she phones to say she has arrived safely...
...He looks to the future and speaks of death dispassionately...
...So whatever has happened or not happened in the oft-discussed double bed, that special suburban summer has brought about at least one positive result: Susan has become a better greeting card designer...
...With the young man I was often at a loss to tell who was speaking...
...Then there was the availability of the incomparable Tommy Tune as director and choreographer...
...In the course of investigating the murder he is haunted by images of skeletal bodies in German death camps...
...In a remarkable choreographic feat, they are shown gradually overcoming their clumsiness, gaining confidence, and finally giving a rousing performance as a benefit for a North London charity—and for the audience at the John Golden...
...Gurney, who obviously wanted to avoid this cliché, managed to come up with something almost as hackneyed and much more confusing: having the good and the not-so-good impulses (nobody is bad in a Broadway moral tale) constantly shift quarters between the two Susans...
...The man is not the victim—he has fainted because his daughter Clara is, and because he has suddenly become aware of a moral problem that overwhelms him, which police lieutenant Fine (James Tolkan) makes it his business to elucidate...
...Being a creative type, a professional designer of Hallmark cards, Susan has Jake pose nude for a drawing...
...The experience left him determined to do what he could from then on to protect minorities...
...Susan is played by Mary Tyler Moore and—here's the gimmick—she's also played by Lynn Redgrave ("Susan Too," the Playbill cutely dubs her...
...She loved her husband, but can't remember him quite as well as can Leo, who also liked him...
...They used to be good friends, they still are, and although we suspect Leo once fancied Leonora, that is now ancient history...
...Whatever Susan or Jake says might just as well be said by their "Too" counterparts (they even finish each other's sentences...
...Is he good...
...I suppose he was thinking of the authorities, not the critics...
...Gregory Mosher's direction doesn't help in either, and—especially in Clara —can be downright embarrassing...
...Albert Kroll (Kenneth McMillan) cannot or will not remember anything about the friends his murdered daughter kept...
...Through the medium of the instructor (Pamela Sousa), Tune teaches the seven women and one man to tap-dance...
...Billig's Threshold Theater is a small company, but there is no small merit in presenting to the New York public an almost unknown comedy by the Encyclopedist who contributed so much to the ideologies of both the American and French Revolutions...
...He finally succeeds, but only after Kroll's memory is prodded by a ghostly visitation of Clara...
...She consents to put up Jake, the college roommate of her son Ted, in her suburban home for the summer, even though he arrives unannounced...
...The son is in a religious retreat in Sri Lanka, but the music on the record is not Buddhist or Hindu, it is a samba...
...Unexpectedly, the second one-acter, Clara, is a detective story...
...Over at the Music Box Theater, the Playbill lists four names and publishes four photos for the cast of A.R...
...The moral— if not the physical—obstacle to its consummation is the much-mentioned Ted, whom we never see...
...As you might expect, it is easy to get lost in Sweet Sue...
...The lieutenant spends the whole act trying to get Kroll to reveal the convict's name...
...Leo is a retired scientist...
...Since Stepping Out focuses on the private lives of a varied group of people who meet in a church basement to learn tap-dancing, it could be seen as a sort of amateur counterpoint to A ChorusLine...
...I'm really serious," adds Jake Too...
...Not until 1955 did it enter the repertoire of the Comédie Française...
...After he leaves, both Susans examine the sketch and pronounce it "very good...
...Thetwo Susans and Jakes are supposed to illustrate the coexistence of conflicting sentiments in the would-be lovers...
...the other is simple parental regret at having let his daughter sleep with a convict at home...
...It incorporates a variety of subplots, that show the unavoidable influence of Molière...
...a respectable run of several months) from that huge hit...
...Both are clever actresses and, with some help from John Tillinger's otherwise indifferent direction, they almost make recognizable individuals—or parts of an individual—out of their roles...
...His Stepping Out was a great success in London, where it played for more than two years...
...Unfortunately, Tune's direction appears strictly limited to the choreography, with no time or interest left over for what the characters are doing when they are not learning to dance...
...Bit by bit, Fine learns that the man is a Puerto Rican who had been in jail for murdering his girlfriend...
...Est-il méchant...
...In neither case, though, does Gurney's writing endow the doubles with personalities of their own—hence they add little to the characters, who are pretty short on personality to begin with...
...In some lines, however, the political philosopher comes through as well as the fighting playwright: "It is easier to burn a play than to write it...
...I'm serious," says Jake...
...Since she can never remember to get her phonograph repaired, she must use Leo's when her son sends her a record...
...He still likes to work out mathematical formulas, although they give him more trouble than they did a few years ago...
...There I saw for the first time a comedy Denis Diderot wrote in 1781, three years before his death...
...Leonora, on the other hand, cannot get over her largely forgotten past and has lost interest in the present...
...Art, however, furnishes a more lofty resolution...
...Or does Miller want to show us that the character, while suffering some loss of mathematical acuity, is nonetheless faithful to his "ideas...
...Gurney leaves the ending open...
...That is one source of his guilt...
...His moving account of it, in fact, led Clara to a career in social work and, we are to suppose, to her death...
...It is spoiled by Miller's lacing it with his irrelevant ethicalethnical preoccupations...
...Unlike Gurney, the British playwright Richard Harris sticks to the one character-one actor formula...
...Susan is a good-looking divorcee in her 40s...
...If you feel like it—I didn't—you can speculate whether Susan slept with her son's friend at the end of the summer, or whether they simply had a beer together before he left...
...That had to be the main motive for bringing it to New York's John Golden Theater, but there were probably two other reasons...
...All they do is brew a muddy concoction of dreams and realities...
...Lieutenant Fine, we are reminded several times, is Jewish...
...Is he mean...
...Delightful as it is, Wicked Philanthropy does not alter the judgment that Diderot's writings about theater are more important than his writings for the theater...
...James Tolkan and Kenneth McMillan are as good as possible in the second...
...She had been a social worker specializing in the rehabilitation of paroled criminals, and one of them, Fine discovers, visited her at Kroll's house and slept with her there...
...It opens with a man lying motionless on his belly in front of the first row of the audience, and a pool of blood spreading upstage from one of the wings...
...Kroll, who as a white Army officer had commanded a segregated black battalion near Biloxi, is obsessed by the memory of a lynching mob that had menaced some of his men...
...This no doubt made its backers hopeful that it might pick up some crumbs (i.e...
Vol. 70 • February 1987 • No. 2
