On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage GHOSTS OF THE THIRTIES BY STEFAN KANFER In a 1985 New Yorker cartoon by Sidney Harris, men acknowledge the influences on their careers. A baseball player salutes his high school...
...We know it because the dialogue of palavering father and credulous child has been played a thousand times in a thousand dramas on stage, screen and television...
...End of plot...
...For one thing, Chekhov had an instinctive senseof timing...
...At 35, Agnes (Brid Brennan) has the demeanor of a retired nun...
...Or perhaps a work from the O'Neill canon...
...they turned into trees, dolls, patterns, billboards...
...Whatever their minor similarities, Friel and Chekhov share none of the major virtues...
...He succeeds in getting Grandma and Betty (Marilyn), Pud's little dog...
...Here, as with many other themes, Friel takes the obvious and beats it to a fare thee well...
...The Irish playwright Brian Friel is merely the latest recipient of the label...
...It might be a nifty way to foil Aunt Demetria...
...The housewifely Maggie (Dearbhla Molloy), 38, has almost given up on the idea of a man in her life...
...Their combined time in show business added up to more than 500 years...
...Whatevercharm On Borrowed Time retains today is entirely dependent on the players, not the play...
...Yet we never see any of these human tragedies, we are simply told about them...
...In a second set piece, Father Jack resurrects his life in Africa...
...And, like the radio, Friel's work does occasionally crackle to life...
...You can choose just about any vehicle for your talents...
...A baseball player salutes his high school coach, a former manager "and, of course, Chekhov...
...The cast was not first-rate, and you could witness the play's mechanical devices creaking like pulleys for two hours (something, by the way, that you can never do with Chekhov...
...André Heller is a continental impresario, and shows like the Wonderhouse have done quite well for him overseas, where borscht is a soup and not a belt...
...Poverty, the Church, history—all conspire to make men and women lifelong strangers...
...She was preceded by a bell ringer and followed by some substandard prestidigitators and an imitator of mechanical devices...
...Long retired from the circuit, Igor had thought to let his old colleagues pass in review one last time...
...Those works, most notably Philadelphia, Herel Come!, showed glints of hilarity and optimism...
...At last the sound subsides, and so do their animal spirits...
...Brink begins to rub his hands and make his dreadful plans...
...How about something lighter...
...You have a taste for something old...
...The cringe-making whistler assaulted eardrums and provided several unasked- for encores...
...Henritze is about as intimidating as a cardboard Halloween witch...
...She doesn't stand a chance until one day a Mr...
...In a third event, Michael's father Gerry Evans (Robert Gwilym) appears...
...Sexual repression remains the subtext of almost every Irish play...
...Using nothing but a light projector and his El Greco fingers, Rao introduced a limitless parade of shadow figures...
...Pud, too, if he'dcare to come along...
...When the garrulous old man starts negotiating with empty air the authorities, prompted by Demetria, haul him off to the nuthouse...
...Joe Vanek's indoor/outdoor mix of furniture, wheat and wild flowers is the most inventive one-set design of the '90s...
...In their little farmhouse the sisters cluster around a failing radio...
...Although the sisters refuse to acknowledge it, the priest has gone native, exchanging his faith for a different kind of worship...
...The year is 1936, totally recalled by Michael (Gerald McSorley), who plays himself as a contemporary adult, and, inanarrative device, at the age of seven...
...Trytheeasiest possible choice, the sort of play beloved by amateur companies for 50 years— On Borrowed Time, first done on Broadway in 1938, two years after the time of Dancing at Lughnasa...
...we know it will never appear...
...Your name has marquee value, you have enjoyed a long string of hits, your presence is a guarantee of commercial success...
...As a pair of arthritic ballroom dancers, Marion and Robert Konyot did the kind of hilarious prat falls only Buster Keaton could equal...
...Charm and blarney are not Irish exclusives...
...Young ticketholders who wondered about vaudeville's cause of death hadmerelyto witness the appearance of Baroness Jeanette Lips Von Lipstrill...
...But it belongs in a short story or a novel...
...I doubt that there has ever been a purer exampleof Broadwaymoonshine, the kind of uncomplicated fantasy that was in fashion before World War II took the grinaway from death...
...Next to him a mechanic attributes his success to his partners, his equipment "and, of course, Chekhov...
...Heller offered a gallery of fossils...
...Two performers keep up with the star, Porac and Marilyn...
...The giver was an elderly dwarf, Igor (Billy Barty...
...Trynoneoftheabove...
...His act was so old it included impressions of a car that needed a crank to start it up...
...Nothing else happens to enliven the sisters' dialogues or relieve their tedium, and Act Two stands still...
...This is no ordinary visitor...
...Put yourself in George Scott's place at the Circle in the Square Theater...
...Trouble is, only Grandpa and Pud can see Mr...
...Given the wild dance of the sisters, he suggests, which is more primitive after all: the Ugandan rite or the Irish jig...
...Kaufman and Hart...
...At the Plymouth Theater the actors mesh so well they almost cover the flaws...
...It was all too reminiscent of the kind of acts represented by a Woody Allen agent...
...The rest was a series of appearances by 10 geriatric entertainers...
...In a few adroit and mysterious movements Macao tore bunches of paper and presto...
...Brink (Nathan Lane) ambles by...
...Brink...
...Chekhovian" remains one of America's most overused adjectives, especially in the theater...
...The itinerant Welshman can waltz like Astaire and spin daydreams with any leprechaun in town...
...Get nostalgic, write about any family in a minor key, and y ou had better genuflect to the Russian master...
...This is not to say that Dancing is without its pleasures...
...Should we miss the point of the play, Michael spells it out: "In that memory, atmosphere is more real than incident, and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory...
...His self-centered direction is of apiece with his performance...
...Toward the conclusion Friel tells us of the Mundys' fate: the glove factory for Chris, a fatal heart attack for Father Jack, the poorhouse for Agnes and Rose...
...Only the Abbey Theater can achieve this kind of Irish ensemble acting...
...I first saw his new work, Dancing at Lughnasa, in London a few months ago...
...As they begin to chatter and argue the wireless abruptly blasts out an Irish tune...
...By the f adeout Grandpa has come to understand that dying is really a kind of extended vacation...
...If only there had been more melody and less static...
...The star, decked out as aretired farmer, plays the foxiest coot this side of Lionel Barrymore...
...His son and daughterin-law have recently been wiped out in a car crash...
...This sequence, straight out of paperback Jung, is only made palatable by the gifted ladies, and by the canny direction of Patrick Mason...
...Lughnasa (pronounced Loon-uh-suh) is set on the fictive turf of Ballybeg, Ireland, the customary locale of Friel's autobiographical plays...
...The big dancing number, for example, occurs in the middle of Act One...
...And why not...
...Very well then, Scott has disproved the actor's adage that you should never perform with children or pets...
...Brinksmanship turns out to be Gramps' specialty, and he soon coaxes the stranger up a nearby (and inexplicably magical) apple tree...
...There Death is powerless to come down or to exercise his powers...
...Demetria is very anxious to raise Pud in a proper style, i.e...
...She and the 32-year-old Rose (Brid Ni Neachtain), who has an IQ barely in double figures, earn their keep by knitting gloves...
...What do you pick...
...If you don't do it the critics will...
...The ghost of the '30s haunted yet another recent production, André Heller's Wonderhouse...
...Friel'shour hand is off...
...the audience saw Broadhurst Danny Rose...
...In New York his extravaganza opened and closed like a mousetrap, and no wonder...
...By now Paul Osborne's vehicle has become so worn it ought to have patches on its tires...
...Noel Coward...
...The intervening six years have not blunted Harris' point...
...Here all is unrelenting pathos, relieved by spasms of terpsichore...
...But the ultimate quarry is a good deal cannier than his pursuer...
...Friel never misses a chance to belabor the obvious...
...He also has one true hate: the boy's ghastly Aunt Demetria(BetteHenritze), a rural harridan ontheorderofMargaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz...
...wisecracks and Wild Woodbine cigarettes get her through the night...
...and poor Nathan Lane, brilliant in last season's Lips Together Teeth Apart, is reduced to pouting, petulance and foot stomping, the unkindest cute of all...
...He promises the credulous boy a bicycle...
...Alas, not every act could produce such astonishments...
...For a few days nothing expires —not even the fly that a local doctor (Conrad Bain) attempts to finish off...
...Onstage it sounds stilted and out of place, a letter delivered to the wrong address...
...This is Death himself, and he has come to harvest some local folks...
...Other than covering the seats with indulgent fans, that is about all he has accomplished...
...Bain, amainstayofthe soaps, is too small for the arena stage...
...One by one they step to its rhythms, first tentatively, then madly, until even Kate is caught up, raising her skirt and whooping to the wind...
...Presented at the Broadhurst, this bizarre European vaudeville took the form of a birthday party...
...with manners and without love, and she plans to wrest him away from his smoking, drinking, profane relative...
...He will not be the last, or the best...
...Or are they dreadful...
...After all, his late wife is settled happily in the beyond, awaiting him...
...The eldest, Kate (Rosaleen Linehan) is the breadwinner, an overbearing schoolmarm to pupils and siblings alike...
...There is another member of the family: Father Jack (Donai Donnelly), an uncle lately arrived from Uganda where he tended a flock of black lepers...
...the recipient was his wife Olga (Patty Maloney...
...In case anyone misses the point, jungle drums are heard offstage overwhelming the strains of a big band playing "Dancing in the Dark...
...Surrounding and sometimes suffocating Michael are his mother, Chris Mundy (Catherine Byrne), 26, a selfdeceiving romantic who gave birth to him out of wedlock, and her four spinster sisters...
...It reminds me of Chaplin's exchange with a straight man ("How should I play this, Charlie...
...King Lear, maybe...
...A lilting Irish line, that...
...Behind me and to the left...
...Scott, always an indelible actor but seldom asubtle one, is Swift's Premium Grandpa, a hambone in bib overalls...
...Gramps has only two surviving loves: Granny (Teresa Wright), and his little grandson Pud (Matthew Porac...
...Who is more liberated: the African tribes openly worshipping their pagan gods, or the uptight Roman Catholic Ballybeggars...
Vol. 74 • November 1991 • No. 12
