the Theater at Mid-Season

...Calcutta...

...seem an event of exclusively artistic inspiration...

...There seems to be a good deal of nostalgia on Broadway these days, perhaps even some of Coward's nostalgic regret...

...The problem was less in anything that had deliberately been done to the script—though there certainly were extensive cuts—than in the fact that the focus, immediacy, and occasional urgency it achieved downtown largely disappeared in the much larger Broadway house...

...It describes itself as "the most talked about show in New York" and recouped its costs during an extensive run of previews before making the reluctant gesture of inviting the press...

...What had been a moderately entertaining evening in its early stages has been turned into a dull and cliche-ridden piece of homosexual agitprop in its latter ones...

...Beautiful Allelujah Days), a Government-funded "inner city social group...

...Perhaps it is easier to be nostalgic about a time never known than about a time half-remembered...

...If there were, I would cringe even more at the Plumstead's idea that it is "only by continually exploring our national treasury of plays, present and future," that such a theater can be established...

...As it happens, I was reading A Talent to Amuse, Sheridan Morley's biography of Noel Coward, during the week a revival of Private Lives opened on Broadway...

...Mineo has largely ignored Herbert's characters, certainly ignored the original theme, increased the sado-masochism, and, principally by the simple expedient of altering the emphasis, distorted a serious play into a purely exploitative one...

...In some not altogether definable way, Our Town does not "date" in the same sense that William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, originally produced about a year later and revived earlier this season by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, seems to...

...What has happened to it—to its theme, its concerns, its presumed reason for being— is far more "obscene" than anything taking place in such plays as And Puppy Dog Tails, which unashamedly cater to a homosexual audience without attempting to put forth a totally spurious pretense to social significance...

...The role of Buck White was, of course, tailored to fit, and much of the dialogue that made up the original, at times explosive question-and-answer session with the audience of blacks and whites, was deleted or revised...

...In addition to Private Lives, there have been revivals of The Time of Your Life, The Front Page, Three Men on a Horse, and Our Town, with Camino Real, Harvey, Beggar on Horseback, and perhaps one or two others still to come...

...But The Boys in the Band is one thing and what is billed as "Sal Mineo's Fortune and Men's Eyes" quite another, a production so totally without integrity—except to the box office —that it makes Oh...

...It was in a mood of nostalgic regret at the decline of such conventions that I wrote Easy Virtue...

...It is, of course, hardly that today, and the occasional attempts director Donald Driver has made at contemporaneity—including a character in hippie attire who emerges from the audience—are, to say the least, ill-advised in a play whose essence lies in the evocation of a mood and a milieu which seem even farther removed from the long-haired, beaded teenagers in the East Village than 1901 does from 1970...

...If its evocation of lost innocence, of joy in the events of everyday life, rings a bit hollow in the midst of racial bitterness and Vietnam atrocities, perhaps that only makes it all the more appropriate as a production by a new company with aspirations to become the American National Theater...

...With its abandonment of scenery, deliberately erratic chronology, and other "non-realistic" aspects, Our Town must have seemed a departure for the Broadway of 1938...

...It is to this need that the Plumstead Playhouse addresses itself...

...Asked what difference it mak' to their friendship, he unleashes a diatribe about homosexuality being "unnatural," a disease, and so on, thus providing the occasion for an even longer rejoinder to the effect that "It doesn't matter who I love, but that I love...

...The four young men in Herbert's play who occupied a cell in a boys' prison were homosexuals—or were turned into homosexuals—at least partially through the inhumanity, cruelty, and masochism of the system and the society they were part of...

...But the songs picked up, the pace quickened, and flashes of genuine drama and humor emerged...

...It really is as simple as that, and any puritanical uneasiness at homosexuality or brief nudity on the stage is beside the point...

...Whatever the case, the Plumstead Playhouse has gotten off to a promising if not an earth-shaking start...

...Unlike one prominent New York critic—Clive Barnes of The New York Times—I would not suggest that the police keep an eye on the play's advertising (which, in any case, has been almost obscenely pristine), but that Herbert alert the Dramatists Guild to what has happened to his play (he has written a somewhat halfhearted letter to Variety...

...The first of them could easily have been called "Waiting for Muhammad Ali, a/k/a Cassius Clay" (as the heavyweight champion was billed), and it wasn't good...

...CATHARINE HUGHES is a free lance writer and critic...

...As black balloons were passed out to the audience (a number called "Black Balloons" was probably the best in the show), I couldn't avoid thinking that everything was, perhaps, just a bit too good-natured, a bit too willing to conform to the pattern of what Broadway has become...

...Our Town, Thornton Wilder's ode to America's yesterdays, has probably suffered more amateur productions and appeared in more anthologies than any other play by an American dramatist...

...The second act was another matter, not simply because Ali, though hardly a polished professional actor, has both style, magnetism, and an acceptable singing voice, but because the play finally achieved at least some of the focus so lacking earlier...

...As a gentleman in the next row observed, "I'll see it again only when they turn it into a musical...

...Buck White, which had a deservedly short run on Broadway, almost seemed two different musicals...

...There is nothing in the least offensive about it, unless it is in the failure to provide convincing drama, and the play is perhaps best summed up as unexceptional and unexceptionable...

...The second took place after Ali, portraying a black militant leader, arrived for a meeting of B.A.D...

...Because of the producing organization's long-term ambitions, one of the batch has attracted more attention th^n usual for a revival...

...And Puppy Dog Tails, on the other hand, is a play for the tired homosexual, a "son" of The Boys in the Band...

...And, of course, so did Muhammad Ali, prowling about behind the podium, answering the questions with lines which often seemed especially relevant to his own experience with the American system...

...Our Town is, I suppose, representative of "the nation's most distinguished dramatic literature," but the thought that that literature alone would constitute the repertory for a national theater, as the Plumstead program suggests, is more than a little daunting...

...But simulated rape and masturbation are one thing and the rape of John Herbert's play quite another...

...There seems to be a gooddeal of nostalgia on Broadway these days . . ." Our Town doubtless falls into the category the Plumstead calls "our national treasury of plays," and the production, which also will be seen on television, is a good, though not by any means a great one—as Our Town is a good but by no means a great play...

...It no longer shocks...

...The Plumstead Playhouse (the name is taken from a Philadelphia warehouse that was converted to a theater in 1749) was launched about a year and a half ago in Mineola, Long Island, about thirty minutes from midtablishment of a National Theater," asserts a note in the program of a largely re-cast Our Town, which played a limited engagement on Broadway, "a theater which will represent this country in somewhat the same manner that the British National Theater represents England and the Comedie Franchise represents France...

...Nixon's recent comments on the arts notwithstanding...

...It made for some unaccountably muddled relationships...

...Sal Mineo's Fortune and Men's Eyes" has as its central concern the depiction and exploitation of homosexuality per se...

...It was both more effective and entertaining theater and a considerably more striking indictment of the "Mighty Whitey" challenged in one of Oscar Brown's songs...

...At least they flow logically from the production concept...

...The words, the sentiments, or at least some of them, were still there, but much of the impact had gone...

...One had gotten a little tired of playwrights trying to deal with homosexual themes under heterosexual guise...

...Big Time Buck White began life as a play by Joseph Dolan Tuotti, and was first performed at Budd Schul-berg's Writers Workshop in Watts, then had a five-month run Off-Broadway a little over a year ago...

...I would like to feel more optimistic about its achieving those "National Theater" ambitions—or at least about someone achieving them—but, unfortunately, there is no indication of a commitment on the part of either the Government or the foundations to the need for such a theater, Mr...

...John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, as written and as produced Off-Broadway in 1967, had as its central concern the indictment of the prison system and what it does to men...

...As such, they revealed something of that system and that society...

...Perhaps it is merely a better play...

...The producers needn't have worried, really, since virtually all the reviewers accepted David Gaard's Puppy Dog for what it is, an occasionally amusing, briefly poignant homosexual wish-fulfillment play about what happens when an old high school classmate, presumably straight (or, as one of the boys in this band puts it, "harnessed with a vile aberration"), comes to visit his friend, gets caught up in a homosexual triangle, then turns on the friend when he fears he himself may have homosexual tendencies...

...Mineo's quartet reveals nothing about anything, unless it is about how one sells tickets in New York...

...A remark of Coward's forty-five years ago concerning his play Easy Virtue comes rather close to describing the current mood on Broadway: "The narrow-mindedness, the moral righteousness, and the over-rigid social codes have disappeared, but with them has gone much that was graceful, well-behaved, and endearing...

...As a result, the cast, which was a good one, was continually in the position of reaching for big moments and big laughs that simply weren't there...

...In terms of what it has to say about how the "long American dream" of the white man has been the "long American nightmare" of the black, it lost quite a bit in the transition to a musical...

...Cliche aside, the role of the stage manager could have been written for Henry Fonda, and he plays it with relaxed grace and appropriate twang, introducing and reflecting on the life and times of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire (population 2,642), at the turn of the century, recalling its births and deaths, triumphs and troubles, in a period when it was considered a problem if your teenage son smoked two or three cigarettes a year, and when it was still possible to reflect, without the fear of scorn, "Wasn't life awful and wonderful...

...At the curtain, the two roommates are back in each other's arms and hoping to live happily ever after...

...Apart from Coco's fashion show, elegantly presided over by Katharine Hepburn, there has been little else...

...As for Buck White itself, there was no getting round the fact that it lost most of its earlier power and abrasive-ness...

...It occurred to me as I left the theater that I could not imagine being in the least outraged at the production —indeed, I probably would have found it a reasonably effective piece of homosexual theater—had I not known the play for what it was—for what, indeed, it still is:not a particularly good play, but one which, when played straight (in the straight sense of straight) constituted a strong and at times moving indictment of the North American penal system...

...He has taken a play that legitimately shocked through what it revealed of society and its indifference and turned it into one that panders...

...I can't get excited about a nude rape scene in an onstage shower (complete with running water) or even about a closing masturbation scene to the rhythm of an offstage flogging...