Drama in the Doldrums

...I wish there were more to be said for Archibald MacLeish's Scratch, which closed after four performances, than that everyone felt a little sad about not liking it...

...And Miss Rear don Drinks a Little makes it clear just how relative...

...Various "best play" awards followed—and eventually this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama—and everyone looked forward to his next...

...serious drama in America is having another of its periodic bouts with the doldrums/1 As the trial wears on, devoid of both tension and inspiration, it is clear that it is not Jabez Stone but Daniel Webster, who in a Senate speech a short time before had gone against his known anti-slavery views to uphold the legal rights of Southern slave owners in an effort to preserve the Union (or, perhaps, in a misguided effort to secure the Presidency), is the one who is on trial: "Whether a man must perish because he has deserved to perish...

...In one, he is a zoo attendant married to a woman who has been in and out of a succession of mental institutions...

...Who knows, perhaps he'll even bless their love...

...The three provide the evening with many, if almost incidental, pleasures...

...Somewhere in the course of nursing her dying mother, traveling to Europe with her sister, and allegedly sexually assaulting one of her high school students, she has had a breakdown...

...When Artie's wife, Bananas, appears from the bedroom, the real complications begin...

...Admittedly, none of this sounds much like a comedy, but Guare has a way with his cruelly calculated shafts...

...With Scratch's blessing—so to speak—the New England farmer has enjoyed seven years of financial and political prosperity...

...Why the Reardon sisters became as they are—indeed, what they really are —has not been explored...

...On the night in question she comes to visit the other two and provides the catalyst by demanding that Anna be hospitalized...

...But it is all rhetoric, pretentious, without apparent conviction and compounded by the casting of Patrick Ma-gee as Webster...

...When he introduces a trio of nuns, a bomb plot on the part of Artie's AWOL son, and the deaf girl friend of a film director friend, things become ever more lively if ever less lovely...

...Ceil (Nancy Marchand), formerly the third of the Misses Reardon, has married, and is now superintendent of schools...

...It is July, 1850, and Jabez Stone's seven-year pact with the Devil ("Scratch") is about to run out...

...Defending Stone, defending himself, and defending his concept of America, Webster proclaims: "Not my country right or wrong, but my country's wrongs to right...

...But, no, she's "not that kind of girl...

...That it wasn't is but another nail in the coffin of serious drama in America...

...Anna (Julie Harris) may be self-protective, but surely she is neither brash nor even minimally levelheaded...

...He can make the tragic seem funny—or, perhaps more accurately, see the humor in tragedy...

...Catherine (Estelle Parsons), the sister who "drinks a little," is brashly self-protective and moderately level headed...

...She is now a vegetarian and cannot abide the presence of fur or leather...

...But I wonder just how much sympathy he has for his characters, how much understanding of their foibles, how much empathy with their fears...

...By the time it all ends, several of the characters are no more, and it seems unlikely Artie will ever again make "shrines out of the future...

...She is cold and unyielding, convinced of her Tightness and the errors of her sisters' ways...

...Frantic, Jabez enlists Daniel Webster to plead his case before a judge and jury made up of damned souls from American history, among them Captain Kidd, Judge Hathorne of Salem witch trial infamy, and Charles Lynch, the Virginia justice of the peace whose frequent hangings gave a name to the practice...

...Unable to find the core of the role, Magee substituted bombast and declamation for substance and emotion, without ever more than briefly suggesting that there was a man behind his message...

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

...in the other, he is in love with the neighbor downstairs and dreams perhaps impossible dreams of the time when the songs he composes will be recognized and he'll be in Hollywood "with all them big shots...

...Zindel takes Miss Reardon little beyond this, though he and director Mel-vin Bernhardt have contrived a seemingly endless and often quite witty number of ways of approaching it...

...All three once taught in the same school and lived sanguinely with their divorced mother...

...Whether a nation, because it has deserved to fall, must fall...

...When Paul ZindePs The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the~Moon Marigolds opened Off Broadway last season, it collected the sort of reviews a young playwright dreams about...

...The three sisters of Miss Reardon, however, are individualized more than they are individ^ uals...

...At midnight Scratch will come to claim his soul...

...This year's Drama Critics Circle award for the best American play of the 1970-71 season went to John Guare's Off Broadway The House of Blue Leaves, a nastily funny little saga set in a dreary Queens, New York, apartment...

...Every so often you begin to wonder if there is even a body in there...

...Only surface details have been added...

...But Zindel will have to do a little better next time...

...There's no point in pretending I liked the play, but equally little in avoiding the fact that both Guare and Mel Shapiro's production are imaginative and unstereotyped...

...Instead, he tells her of the institution he intends to send her to—the house of blue leaves of the title—and of the fact that he and Bunny plan to go to California...

...Another teacher and her husband drop in for a visit and exacerbate the situation with their unwanted truths and private neuroses...

...Anyone who doubts it needs only to take a look at the end-of-season awards gallery...

...She is both pathetic and pathetically funny, begging him not to make her take yet another pill, to "for once let [her] emotions come out...

...nor is it a sufficiently good one, though it confirms the suspicion that Zindel, at thirty-four, is a reversion to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, not an advance on Albee...

...One is always at least a little sad when a man of not only talent but serious purpose and genuine dedication stubs his toe as badly as the seventy-nine-year-old poet-playwright-statesman and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize did on Scratch, a play suggested by Stephen Vincent Benet's short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster...

...It is October, 1965, the day Pope Paul VI came to New York to address the United Nations, and Artie and his girl are going off to watch the Pontiff's motorcade...

...Like many another, Artie Shaughnessy, its unlikely hero, lives in two worlds...

...Jabez Stone, it is suggested, sold his soul, but Daniel Webster "sold his country's soul...

...But on to one or two that fared a little better...

...But times change...

...Meanwhile, as Bunny stuffs copies of the New York Post into her plastic boots as a protection against the frigid early morning air, they talk of their dreams and of her as yet unsampled cooking, and he pleads with her to cook his breakfast...

...Guare is slick and resourceful...

...And the cast, especially Harold Gould, Anne Meara, and Katherine Helmond in the principal roles, could hardly be faulted...

...I suspect that somewhere behind the verbosity and the lack of momentum there was a play, perhaps even an important play, to be rescued...

...Like Williams—and, for that matter, like Albee—Zindel writes women's roles extremely well...

...But now the time has come for Jabez to fulfill his part of the bargain...

...We know almost as much about their essence in the first few moments as we know some ninety minutes later...

...Even so, calling it the "best American play" of the season is a pretty relative distinction...

...And at the fact that All Over, the most recent play by Edward Albee, our playwright of perennial promise, met with an almost universally negative critical response and closed quickly...

...His "next," though reportedly written earlier, is Miss Reardon, given the full star treatment to which Broadway theatergoers are accustomed, and a considerable disappointment to nearly all those who so ardently overpraised Marigolds...

...In a superficially less rewarding role, Miss Marchand is composed, correct, and convincing...

...The acting, however, is impeccable...

...As it happens, Miss Reardon isn't a bad play...

...Sadder still because the vast resources of American history, its conflicts and defeats along with its triumphs, have so seldom been plumbed by contemporary dramatists...

...Perhaps he'll bless Artie's sheet music...

...But, unfortunately, there is no way of getting around the fact that the result of MacLeish's attempt was both portentous and dull...

...Miss Harris plays the psychotic Anna with her familiar fragile intensity, and Miss Parsons is caustically resourceful...