THEATER CHRONICLE
MODEST PROPOSALS
This review is dedicated to three repertory groups, the com–
pany headed by Richard Whorf and Jose Ferrer who put on
Volpone,
Angel Street,
and a bill of four Chekhov comedies at the New York
City Center, the Dublin Gate Theater, which brought a festival of
Irish comedies to the Mansfield, and New Stages, Inc., which is per–
forming Sartre's
The Respectful Prostitute
and Lennox Robinson's
Church Street
at the New Stages Theater on Bleecker Street. Since
the Dublin Gate Theater and the City Center group are no longer on
the boards, my notice is chiefly a labor of love, a bread-and-butter letter
addressed to the absent. The reader must forgive me for speaking in
his presence of pleasures from which he is now forever cut off, but
it would
be
thankless to allow these players to pass unsung into oblivion;
in any case,
if
he hurries, he may still find the box-office open at the
little theater on Bleecker Street.
In an ideal state of affairs, the performances of these companies
might have been looked on in a critical spirit and even with a certain
severity. Richard Whorf and Jose Ferrer made
Volpone
into a kind of
raucous collegiate romp, more reminiscent of a Marx Brothers film than
of that terrible Noah's Ark of carnivora that Jonson, master-carpenter,
beached on the English stage. The Dublin Gate players, at any rate
in the minor parts, had a slapdash style of acting that suggested an
Irish housemaid flailing about with a dust-cloth-they gave their roles
a lick and a promise and trusted to the audience's good nature to take
the will for the deed. And the younger male actors with New Stages, Inc.
are a wretched lot, feeble and uncertain in technique, miserably deficient
in
ease and charm; they seem to be the victims of a vocational delusion.
Yet the very shortcomings of these companies were allied to their
most amiable qualities. Toward these groups an audience has been able
to feel, for the first time in many seasons, an unguarded emotion, a
sense of camaraderie and friendly give-and-take which may in part have
been excited by a "popular" price policy at the box-office or by lrish-
477
