Playing with Politics

...It has a Scarecrow Liddy...

...Thus we find Martha Mitchell cropping up in High Shame: An Eastern Western and in Pirate Martha...

...Chilling because it supposedly takes place on a day when the Senate has voted to impeach the President...

...The difficulty with this sort of thing is twofold...

...reading in a theater simply is not dramatic...

...In Are You Now, as in Watergate Classics, you agree with the sentiments on those placards, but leave the theater with little more than that agreement...

...And to sustain such satiric competition for a full evening requires something bordering on the impossible...

...Others are given briefer moments on stage, and it is particularly unfortunate that Miller and Hellman, far worthier intellectual and ideological adversaries, make only the shortest of appearances, eloquent though they are...

...In Larry Parks, the first of the major figures to be called and the first to break under the relentless inquisitors, Bentley presents, on the one hand, a man passing through his own dark night of the soul, insisting that what he is being asked to do "is not the American way," and, on the other, representing an archetype of the time: the young idealist who thought the Communist Party "would fulfill a certain idealism, a certain feeling of being for the underdog...

...The "$64,000 question"—as the Committee itself termed it—of the era was of course the one from which Bentley's title is derived: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party...

...Then there is Philip Roth's brief sketch, "The President Addresses the Nation," in which Robert Brustein, artistic director of the company and dean of the Yale School of Drama, impersonates Richard Nixon with a startling, chilling lightness...

...Instead, it sputters about, up and down, occasionally good, more often bad or indifferent, at its best when it departs farthest from its central thread: the parodying of a series of classics, ranging from Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus Nix) to Hamlet (The Tragical History of Samlet), Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (Dick's Last Tape) to Cole Porter's Anything Goes...

...There is, incidentally, far too much of the latter to be effective theatrically...

...He praises them for their action, of course, and he does not blame anyone...

...Are You Now should be judged on its own terms...

...Didn't Carol Channing have a suspicious resemblance to one of those blondes gentlemen of the Twenties were said to prefer...

...There is seldom an area of gray...

...They twist and they misinterpret, deliberately reducing or attempting to reduce the witnesses to men who will no longer be able to live with themselves or, alternately, toy with them like cats who will receive their bowl of milk if only they admit to the error of their ways, if only they name names...

...Too often, they are asked not to embody the play's ideas but to parade them like placards...

...Even Lorelei...

...Wasn't Molly Goldberg on radio in the Thirties and Forties...

...then there is the almost inevitable repetitiousness...

...requires something bordering on genius...

...And Molly...

...Within a frame that resembles marquee lights, the witnesses come on, acquiesce to save their skins, or decline to acquiesce...

...As so often in this kind of theater, the heroes and villains are too clearly defined...

...This is so deftly done, so brilliantly right in its every aspect, that it makes up for much of the rest...

...That is not, however, an excuse for not trying, and it is surprising that so few attempts have been made...

...Bendey concentrates primarily upon Larry Parks, the actor who at that time had achieved stardom in The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, Elia Kazan, Abe Burrows, Lionel Stander, and Paul Robeson...

...They are almost universally sarcastic, supercilious, condescending, one-dimensional, and blind...

...The investigators of the future might wonder if their time machine had gone out of whack...

...a Julie, and a Tin Attorney General, and its tone is suggested by "There's a land that you dreamed of, now kiss that dream goodbye," to the music of Over the Rainbow...

...Eric Bentley's Are You Now or Have You Ever Been has altogether different problems, not the least of them that perennial of political theater: the old game of good guys and bad guys...

...She is the author of "Plays, Politics, and Polemics," published last year by Drama Book Specialists...

...Topical, certainly, with Watergate Classics, a curiously unsatisfying revue which is interesting more for why it fails than for what it contains...

...It is possible to count on one hand the "theater of fact" drama that has been theatrically and politically effective in the past decade...

...However, Mr...

...In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine come to mind, but they are exceptional, which leads one to wonder whether the theater of fact, at least as usually constituted today, is not inherently a contradiction in terms...

...No words are attributed to anyone which he or she did not speak or write...

...And what a view of American life future investigators would get politically...

...to explore its personal tragedies in any depth almost equally so, though it is difficult not to speculate on how much more forcefully the climate and the implications of the events of the time might have been conveyed had Bentley instead concentrated on a single individual or small group of interrelated cases...

...Meanwhile, panels on either side of the stage offer photos of the actual figures they are impersonating and documentary extracts...

...In a sense, the major problem of Watergate Classics has been the competition from Washington: Even in the midst of the national anguish labeled Watergate, one at times has felt called upon to laugh aloud with incredulity at the latest revelation...

...PLAYING WITH POLITICS CATHARINE HUGHES If today's American theater were to be put in a time capsule and suddenly turned up, say, a hundred years from now—a generally horrendous prospect—it would reflect a strange picture of American life...

...however, a couple of redeeming sketches toward the end and, not surprisingly, they owe little to any classical antecedents...

...Bentley has written at length of what he calls the theater of commitment, and commitment to revealing the HUAC scourge is evident in virtually every line of the play...

...It may be that the distance that is required to view both the time and the participants in perspective has not yet been achieved...

...The result is a process of selection, of editing, of rearrangement, which in itself is fair, not to say essential...

...Are You Now focuses upon the investigations of show business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958, the period Stefan Kanfer has called "the plague years...

...Comforting the already converted may be politically satisfying to the playwright and soothing to the psyche of the audience...

...The main problem with Are You Now seems to be the problem of form...

...But it isn't especially effective...

...For that matter, wasn't Grease about the Fifties...

...A time of fear, of cowardice, of some quiet courage and refusal to be caught up in what bordered on mass hysteria, it is perhaps still too close to us to be effectively dramatized...

...Some of them regained their positions in the theater and films, and others had their careers permanently destroyed by the blacklisting of the day...

...Facts may, of course, be far more dramatic than fiction, and passion, commitment, and confrontation are the very essence of theater...

...Jay Broad's staging of the play compounds this...

...Nixon will not give up his office...

...Initially, there is the dramatic straitjacket it imposes...

...For art—be it comedy or tragedy—to compete with real life on this level Catharine Hughes is a free lance writer and critic...

...And one sits in the White House...

...In Watergate's more bizarre moments, there has been something of an aura of the theater of the absurd...

...But that is to ask the playwright to write (in this case, more accurately, to construct) a different play, one that would belong to another form more nearly than to the "theater of fact...

...The atmosphere was perhaps best characterized by what was possible in a decade in which Representative John E. Rankin could assert: "This Committee is the grand jury of America . . . What this Committee is trying to do is save the country...

...Yet theater of fact rarely succeeds, if only because it winds up presenting characters who are either monochromatic or representational, rather than flesh and blood...

...There are...

...What were all those old musicals—Irene, The Pajama Game, Can-dide, Gigi—doing around...

...They harass and they sneer almost to the point of denying that any other emotions and approaches were ever in evidence during that entire decade...

...the American people did not elect him in order to have him impeached...

...Though here, at least, the view would have the virtue of occasional, if selective, topicality...

...The dialogue you will hear is taken from this record...

...others refuse, firm in their determination not to betray friends and associates who, they are convinced, were no more traitors, no more culpable, no more worthy of vilification, than were they themselves...

...The members of the Committee and its investigators provide the demonology...

...Agreed, Martha is inimitable, but once around is enough: the characteristics, once established, offer little scope for satire, only the occasion for repetitions of her phone calls and foibles...

...For many, most of them innocently or naively involved, the climate was fear, the forecast terror, in the face of careers that almost inevitably would be shattered...

...Many of its principal figures are still among us...

...They would rather have him call out the troops and call out the troops he does as the audience files out...

...Some witnesses cooperate, naming names, voicing their mea culpas, real or symbolic...

...There are briefer Committee encounters with Lillian Hellman, Jose Ferrer, Ring Lardner, Jr., Sterling Hayden, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Miller, and others...

...Like most political plays, Are You Now is a prisoner of its own polemic, victim of its own overkill...

...Watergate Classics does not come close to that impossible...

...In a program note, Bentley advises the audience that "the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) were taken down by a stenographer and then printed...

...The first is a parody of the Wizard of Oz by Isaiah Sheffer, who also directed...

...But there is the problem of straw men, of one-dimensional stereotypes...

...To present the masses of testimony of that decade clearly would be impossible...