On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage MYSTERIOUS TIME MACHINES BY STEFAN KANFER ONE OF MY favorite New Yorker cartoons shows a man on crutches, waiting for a traffic light to change. In the first panel, the signal reads...
...Why is it so hard to be a Jew...
...Appealing for alms, she was refused by the local charity, headed by Sybil...
...Although the middle-aged Sylvia Gellburg (Amy Irving) remains a beautiful woman, she has become a paraplegic without any apparent medical cause...
...and Jane Adams (who deserved her Tony) might have stepped from a Whistler of the period...
...Everything is in-and-out and around-the-block...
...The drawing skewered a cinematic and theatrical convention: The Cripple Cured by the Right Words...
...Sylvia wants her husband, Phillip (Ron Rifkin), to do something, anything, about this atrocity...
...A realistic drizzle falls over everything??including the first 20 rows of the orchestra...
...Priestley saluted England c. 1910: It was "very much an era of hopeful debate, and if socialist belief heated the debate it also enlarged the hope...
...She has justkilled herself, and he is trying to find out why...
...For to plunge headlong from curtain to curtain without an interval is to turn theaters into grind houses, and to transform the Big Apple into Celluloid City East...
...We are, rather, witnesses to fading powers that, in truth, were never very strong to begin with...
...Sylvia's sister, Harriet (Lauren Klein), is the sort of good-hearted, clueless yenta who has peopled Neil Simon comedies for two decades...
...Both young men display a self-confidence that is, properly, as deep as the veneer on the dining room table...
...The younger generation could not be bettered...
...But there is more to the plot than the mere assigning of blame...
...What saves the play is the extraordinary conception of director Stephen Daldry, the 32-year-old West End Wunderkind...
...The opening scene appears to be a city after the Blitz, complete with shattered buildings and displaced persons...
...That belief and hope hovers over An Inspector Calls, Priestley's 50-year-old festival of hokum, brightly revived at the Royale Theater...
...Ironically, two generations later Broken Glass puts us back in the '30s and bombards us with instructions and corrections...
...In the first panel, the signal reads DON'T WALK...
...Medea was intermission-less, as was the revival of Picnic, the musical Passion (to be reviewed in the next issue), and the Miller play...
...Taking each member of the party aside, the Inspector flashes the photograph of a young woman...
...And Phillip's staccato speeches might have come from the pen of Clifford Odets on a bad night: "Are you a doctor or what...
...In his hands, the story occurs almost simultaneously in the England of two wars: the First, which is imminent, and the Second, which is under way...
...Dukes' bedside manner is exactly the right blend of unctuousness and genuine concern...
...Using only her upper body, Amy Irving expresses a wide range of emotions...
...She was a labor organizer...
...Phillip demands...
...The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem wouldhave difficulty mouthing those words...
...Goole presses on, asking embarrassing questions, pointing out inconsistencies in their stories...
...Conroy, Klein and Martin flesh out what are basically stick-figure roles...
...Gradually he peels back the layers of middle-class smugness to arrive at some unsightly truths...
...In the 1949 movie version, the key phrase was changed to "Nigger, get up and walk...
...More often he has expressed the obvious in an echo chamber...
...With neither good looks nor youth nor impressive voice, this accomplished actor can register anything from affection to acute embarrassment to mirth to cardiac arrest...
...They are led by the always extraordinary Rifkin...
...As the family crumbles under the weight of revelations, the set reflects its distress, deconstructing before our eyes...
...Sheila found the salesgirl insufficiently humble, and had her fired...
...Along with the rest of the family he has been celebrating the engagement of his sister Sheila (Jane Adams) to a rising young executive, Gerald Croft (Aden Gillett...
...A preference for uninterrupted narrative has recently gained favor...
...A few years back, Arthur dismissed her from his factory and she went to work at a ladies' clothier...
...Is she speaking body language, protesting the fact that husband and wife have not slept together since the birth of their only son, more than 20 years ago...
...Perhaps the most celebrated recovery in the theater comes in Arthur Laurents' Home of the Brave, first presented on Broadway in 1945...
...I assumed the tale of the walking wounded had been retired long ago...
...Hyman explores all possibilities, endlessly interviewing Phillip and Sylvia and, in the process, revealing some conflicts in his own life...
...Broken Glass shows Miller at his most sententious...
...This trend leans away from the theatrical and toward the cinematic...
...The real mystery here is why Broken Glass was produced on Broadway...
...Whodunits tended to be more violent: a suspect confined to his wheelchair??until the detective goads him beyond endurance...
...Miller is fortunate to have a first-rate cast to convey his preachments...
...The title of Broken Glass, his new play at the Booth Theater, has a double meaning...
...To sustain this illusion, Daldry and his audacious designer, Ian MacNeil, have produced a set that functions as a time machine...
...On occasion the playwright has been fluent and moving...
...We have been gracefully projected backward from our own time to the '40s, and then to the era of Edwardian cant and caste...
...The invalid surprises everyone (except the detective) by leaping up and attempting to escape through the French windows...
...As it develops, everyone in the group knew the deceased, and two of them knew her intimately...
...Why don't you give me a straight answer about anything...
...being a Jew is a full-time job...
...For the Inspector is not an official policeman...
...Bosco, last seen as a Mafioso in Breaking Legs, is the very model of provincial self-importance...
...The physician turns out to be an embodiment of Isaac Babel's observation, "Put a Jew on a horse and he's no longer a Jew...
...Granted, Miller remains a marquee name, and at 78 he has turned out a full-length play with bona fide stars...
...The unemployed woman then became Gerald's mistress...
...On an inclement evening in 1912, the stern Inspector Goole (Kenneth Cranham) calls on the Birling family of Yorkshire...
...And its call for a collectivist world, where we would all be our sister's keeper, is as ingenuous as its twittery ingenue...
...Their son Eric (Marcus D'Amico) seems a pleasant chap, a bit tipsy just now, but who can blame him...
...But films have every reason to keep their audiences in the dark...
...Or is Sylvia making some cryptic statement about that unseen son, who has rejected Jewish tradition by choosing the most gentile of all colleges, West Point...
...why the Tony awards committee nominated Miller's mishmash for Best Play is theirs...
...It is hard to imagine a more dispiriting locale...
...A disabled veteran, wounded only in his mind, stays bedridden??until a doctor yells, "You lousy, yellow Jew bastard, get up and walk...
...How he does it is his secret...
...But to say more would be to spoil a surprisingly pleasant evening...
...Is his patient's physical state an expression of her husband's moral paralysis...
...Whereupon the man throws away his crutches and blithely crosses the street...
...The results could be ominous...
...As written, An Inspector Calls is almost as monitory as Broken Glass...
...From the start of his career, Miller has been restating the quintessence of Ibsen-ism: the importance of individual ethics in a corrupt society...
...Predictably, Sylvia Gellburg develops a monumental crush on him...
...They all cluck dutifully: Pity about the girl, so young, so lovely, so innocent, and so unfamiliar...
...Daldry's bravura production is immensely helped by his choice of players...
...After he threw her over, she had a clandestine affair with Eric, who ditched her when she became pregnant...
...Priestley's schematic plot seems to have been pieced together from a kit...
...Hyman replies...
...They get precious little help from Santo Loquasto's glum set, William Bolcom's glummer incidental music, and John Tillinger's glummest direction...
...In his coffee-table history, The Edwardians, J.B...
...It's hard to be anything," Dr...
...No," Phillip answers himself, "it's different...
...An Inspector Calls has but one troublesome fault: It refuses to break the action with an intermission...
...In lighthearted films those words could be something like "home run," promised by Babe Ruth to a little boy languishing in a hospital??until the Sultan of Swat delivers the goods...
...Phillip's confrontations with his harrumphing employer, Stanton Case (George N. Martin), are shadows of Willie Loman's humiliating wrangle with his boss in Death of a Salesman...
...Live drama, by contrast, has always been a social enterprise, with audiences participating in the play??hence Ralph Richardson's observation that the art of stage acting is to keep people from coughing...
...We are in Brooklyn, 1938...
...Masking his insecurities, the handsome equestrian strides around in riding boots and makes much of his trophy wife, Margaret (Frances Conroy), a flashy blonde shiksa...
...Then again, everything is predictable in this intermissionless melodrama...
...Outwardly all appears well: Paterfamilias Arthur (Philip Bosco) is a bit stuffy, but otherwise affable and prosperous...
...By that point, the theme of American anti-Semitism was considered paltry and out of date...
...But Phillip cannot see beyond the precincts of Brooklyn, where his energies are wholly consumed by the effort to stay afloat in an anti-Semitic banking firm...
...Listen, I don't want you seeing her anymore...
...As the story unfolds, the weather improves, fragments of walls fit together and shadowy areas come to light and life...
...The paralysis occurred when she first read the news stories from Germany: In the Third Reich, helpless old Jews are being forced to clean the sidewalks with toothbrushes...
...Indeed, during one especially painful moment he manages to make his ears glow...
...His wife, Sybil (Rosemary Harris), has a grand manner and a grander wardrobe...
...Cranham impersonates that servant with a bit more force than is necessary??the ideal Inspector was Alistair Sim, who underplayed him in the 1954 film...
...He is in fact...
...and the soldier rises to challenge his tormentor...
...He is not a policeman at all...
...In his autobiography Miller's great admirer, Elia Kazan, recalls his first feelings about Death of a Salesman: "Here is an antisystem play that is not 'agitprop.' We are out of the '30s at last??the audience does not have to suffer instruction or correction...
...It refers not only to Kristallnacht but to a shattered marriage...
...Yet we are not in the presence of a durable, aging giant on the order of Verdi or Chaplin or Picasso...
...Ah, but I reckoned without Arthur Miller, purveyor of dramatic devices by appointment since 1947...
...and Harris is elegant and slightly remote, deigning to come down from her pedestal for a word or two with the civil servant...
...Miller turns Sylvia's misery into a mystery, featuring Harry Hyman, MD (David Dukes) as the sleuth...
...In the second, it changes to WALK...
...Theatergoers are accustomed to discussing plays and players at regular intervals, a traditional rite that producers are now trying to exorcise...
...Movie performances are frozen in time, and their onlookers have no part in the proceedings...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
