On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FROM STOCKHOLM TO DOGPATCH BY STEFAN KANFER ON THE OCCASION of his 70th birthday, Freud paused to give credit to his predecessors. "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the...
...One day it would have more influence than anything by his Scandinavian rival, Hen-rik Ibsen...
...and Bertha, his young daughter...
...What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied...
...Where once the actor was callow (see the 1980 film, Dracula), he has become authoritative...
...The Father is a shard of neurotic autobiography, reflecting the growing distrust Strindberg had in his first wife, an actress he suspected of being unfaithful...
...And yet...
...The program gave credit to K. C. Ligon for "Dialects...
...Indeed, the Captain has come to detest Laura for her twin obsessions, religion and art...
...Inge's ellipses.] Cherie: Well, natur'ly...
...The most troubled is Cherie, a self-deluded Ozark bimbo alternately terrified and enchanted by her roughneck fiance...
...They are in Strindberg's world...
...I couldn't be familiar...
...Outside a snowstorm whistles...
...As is common in this sort of landlocked psychodrama (see Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Joseph Hayes' The Desperate Hours, and several zillion others), the unlikely group is stuck in one room for the duration as tensions rise, tempers fray and people spill the stories of their lives to absolute strangers...
...The rest of the cast was not quite up to this quartet, and Director Clifford Williams sometimes lost focus, like a man whose attention had wandered from the page...
...Lyman (Ron Perlman), the decaying intellectual who spouts Shakespeare, and Elma (Patricia Dunnock), the unworldly young waitress he ogles...
...But the habit will be difficult to indulge tonight...
...Through some effective body language, though, she aptly conveyed the personality of a woman whose whim gradually crystallizes into will...
...The arena stage did nothing for Hugh Landwehr's undernourished set or Linda Fisher's self-conscious costumes, and vice versa...
...and I guess I din know much about women...
...His heartsick Captain produced rages and echoed griefs that seemed, however strange, to be inevitable...
...A bunch of people have just tumbled in, and they look like trouble...
...too often Langella drowned her out...
...Cherie: Bo—ya think you really did love me...
...Their negotiations are expressed in a regional dialect—a region found only in the panels of '50s comic strips: Bo: Ya see...
...Their disintegrating marriage became a springboard for a newfound misogyny: He dreaded the approaching era when "we shall have these women-devils over us with their right to vote and everything...
...The ambiguous title refers to a man known only as The Captain...
...His wife, Laura, did not make the cut...
...but it is the true voice of experience hardly won, and it is the voice of modern drama...
...Bus Stop presents an anthology of bromides, ranging from Grace (Kelly Bishop), the hard-shelled but soft-hearted street-corner restaurant proprietress, and Carl (Michael Cullen), the lonely bus driver, to Dr...
...If anyone doubts that claim, let him examine the works of August Strindberg—especially the Oedipal conflict he called Fadren...
...He wrote to the Danish translator of The Father...
...The articulator of that voice at the Roundabout Theater revival, Frank Lan-gella, could not have been bettered...
...They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves...
...and I din know how t'act...
...Judging from what came out of various mouths, she seemed to have located this particular bus stop in Dog-patch...
...Plus, of course, the beat-out but still hopeful chorine, Cherie (Mary-Louise Parker), her sullen cowboyfriend, Bo (Billy Crudup), and his philosophical sidekick Virgil (Larry Pine...
...with a gal I din love...
...cause they're diff'rent from men...
...Nonetheless, in most respects this was a worthy production, aided by Richard Nelson's idiomatic translation, Martin Pakledinaz' costumes (which evoked the paintings of Gustav Klimt), and John Lee Beatry'sgrim, expressionistic set...
...Then again, the script is full of collector's items...
...Inge and Bus Stop deserve a prominent place on the list of overpraised writers and overproduced pieces...
...It was aggravatin...
...He went on to acknowledge that he meant his drama only to be "a composite picture of varying kinds of love, ranging from the innocent to the depraved...
...Lyman: That is the gift that men are afraid to make...
...In a dream which often recurs to me at night I feel I am flying weightless, and I find this quite natural, as though all conception of right and wrong, true or false, had ceased to exist for me, so that everything that happens, however strange, seems inevitable...
...The comment was not from a disappointed critic...
...I loathe people who keep dogs," he wrote in his book, A Madman s Defense...
...In the loser department, Lyman runs her a close second...
...and yet...
...Audiences enthusiastically bought that picture in 1955, beguiled by Harold Clurman's lucid stage direction and by touching performances from Elaine Stritch and Kim Stanley...
...Thornton Wilder's tribute was simply dismissed as fulsome: "In an explosion of courage, honesty and literary power, August Strindberg created a drama for the generations that were to follow him...
...Suppose, instead of the woman he imagined as a modern Madonna, he actually married the whore of Babylon...
...Laura helplessly opposes him until she chances on an overlooked weapon: the ability to create doubt...
...Sometimes they keep it in their bosoms forever, where it withers and dies...
...What comes closer to the truth, I think, is that he was an equal opportunity hater...
...His] is not the voice of reason...
...The use of "ya" and "you" in the same sentence is a particularly choice indication of Inge's tin ear...
...The time is midwinter, the place, a street-corner restaurant near Kansas City...
...He has three loves: his military career...
...As those two engage in a stilted flirtation (at one point, Inge actually has the doctor and Elma do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet), Cherie and Bo go hot and cold, depending on the mood of the playwright...
...In a paean that was deemed rather exaggerated then, Thomas Mann suggested that Strind-berg's literary influence was second only to Tolstoy's...
...A first-rate cast might have been able to impersonate this folk band, but the Circle in the Square did not provide it...
...Their characters] are not reasonable men...
...Essentially, the play is yet another "stud" drama, where a raw youth enters the scene and affects the lives of everyone around him...
...Alone of all his fellow writers, Strindberg could recreate this blurring of reality and fantasy in his prose fictions as well as his works for the stage...
...Now, at the remove of some 40 years, it can be properly reappraised...
...In recent years, Strindberg's admirers have attempted to minimize his hatred of women by noting that he said, in a letter to his brother, "You will know that, as a poet, I blend fiction with reality, and all my misogyny is theoretical, for I could not live without the company of women...
...An alcoholic who carries his own supply, the PhDe-generate has eyes for minors in skirts...
...Preposterous, he says, dismissing her hints with a wave of the hand...
...He had a point...
...But his greatest affection is saved for the mellifluous sound of his own voice, booming out stale aphorisms in the manner of a road company Oscar Wilde: Lyman: Two people, really in love, must give something of themselves...
...their anger is at best an expression of the hopelessly absurd facts of existence, at worst a scream of paranoia...
...I began to feel kinda scared...
...That decade had more than its share of dross...
...In the role of Bertha, Angela Bettis had the right combination of bewilderment and sorrow...
...A few years later, Bus Stop became a Marilyn Monroe vehicle...
...Indeed, to read the text today, or attend a revival, is to let the air out of a standard theatrical legend—that the '50s represent one of Broadway's golden ages...
...Neither a pleasant nor a believable premise—or, for that matter, a pleasant or believable play...
...Elma (trying tofollow): Yes...
...Suppose, she suggests, he is not the father of his child...
...thereafter a series of inferior writers left their footprints all over Tennessee Williams' turf...
...Indoors a different sort of tempest is brewing...
...I half expected the entrance of LiT Abner and Mammy Yokum, and they would have been an improvement...
...As his mate and foe, Gail Strickland needed a stronger voice in opposition...
...Irene Dai-ley, playing the Captain's old nurse, gave substance to a minor but telling role...
...it was a confession made by the playwright himself, William Inge...
...Suppose someone else undertook that biological role...
...Even so, it has a power and a magnetism born of the author's own mental illness...
...They live in a different world from Shakespeare and Montaigne...
...Fearing that Bertha will come under her mother's sway, he plans to have the child attend a boarding school far from their provincial home in north Sweden...
...Bo: Why, Cherry...
...Bo: Every time I got around one...
...ABOUT THE mid-20th century work revived this season at the Circle in the Square, it was once observed: "Bus Slop, I suppose, has less real story than any play that ever survived on Broadway...
...Instead, it offered sincere players drably directed by Josephine R. Abady...
...That ends the list of affections...
...Therein lies the conflict between man and woman, a war beginning with small apprehensions, escalating to madness (at one point he literally attempts to devour his own child), and a fatal decline...
...It can be suitably summed up," said one critic, "in Hamlet's exclamation, 'O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!' Any other comment seems superfluous...
...During the versatile Swede's tortured life (1849-1912) he gathered followers as well as detractors, but it was not until the centenary of his birth that he won worldwide recognition...
...The genre reached its apogee in 1947 with Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire...
...Where once he relied upon his looks, he is now willing to become bulky and bullet-headed for the truth of a role...
...Carl and Grace, being that way about each other, have a habit of sneaking upstairs to her apartment for a little respite...
...Produced in Stockholm in 1888, The Father provoked violent reactions...
...His interpretation will be the definitive one for this generation...
...Yet, if the play is an acrimonious, almost hysterical screed, it is also a work of art...
...This is all a trick, a ploy, a method of draining his self-confidence and weakening his resolve...
...science (he is an accomplished amateur geologist...
...Then they never know love, only its facsimiles, which they seek over and over again in meaningless repetition...
...Yes, quite...
...The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious," he declared...
...Yet, in this era John Mortimer, the British playwright, barrister and father of Rumpole of the Bailey, has not only agreed with those encomia, he has gone further and no one has disputed his conclusion: "The movement of modern drama has been, surely, the flight from reason into the terrifying abyss of Beckett, or the irrational fears of Pinter...
...I'd lived all my life on a ranch...
Vol. 79 • January 1996 • No. 1
