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tale--and so the plays have to
be
done Off-Broadway. Cannibalism
the revelation, but the tribal world is peopled with old friends :
tyrant Southern lady again, wheel-chaired, reticuled, fierce-voiced,
quacious, incestuous. She talks and talks, trying to protect the
of a beloved son against the version of his death which his young
now locked up in a mental hospital, is compulsively repeating.
old dragon's auditor is a young psychiatrist, strangely antiseptic like
piece of surgical gauze; he is very white, white or blond hair,
shoes and socks, light suit, and a white manner. Perhaps this
man is got up to represent the operating table, since he specializes
lobotomies. And the dragon wants the girl lobotomized. Enter
Ophelia, looking like a member of Martha Graham's troupe, tall,
tense, wandering in a Graham maze. The girl tells the story of the
death, a fate that overtakes him in a place with a very exotic name,
sounding like Lope de Vega. The revelation has to do with the son's
flesh being eaten by starving young urchins. The white doctor decides
not to drill a hole in the girl's head and turns to tell us, the audience,
that her story
may
be true. At this point we in the audience can only
shout back at the playwright, "Lies, lies, lies!"
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs:
Inge likes poet,ical titles, not
sexy ones like
Cat
and
Streetcar.
The revelation in this work is moral
or character improving. The young mother has been spoiling her chil–
dren, trying to keep up with local society. (Stressing false values, not
in
the Daughters of the Confederacy way, but in the pioneer, Baptist way
of Theresa Wright, the star.) Everything is going wrong with
this
family. The wife is clenching her fists over party dresses, infidelities,
and
meanwhile her saddle-salesman husband is becoming commercially ex–
tinct, like the buffalo, and they may all starve. The young daughter,
very sensitive and shy, madly plays classical music on the piano to show
her superiority and trueness beneath the shyness. She goes to a dance
with a young Jewish boy, Sammy. Sammy kills himself because of a
mean snub and daughter
learns,
or has
revealed
to her by life, that
she
shouldn't have been thinking of her own troubles but of Sammy who
was
really
suffering. She sees, as her mother sees when she gets the lecture
about the vanishing harness market, that she's been selfish just where
she thought she was good. And there it is: regrets, misunderstandings,
tearful scenes from the Court of Domestic Relations. Our poor old town,
poor Mama, poor Papa; times past in Kansas, old nonsense from the
Garden District of New Orleans-and the eternal Delta Dragon reigning
forever and ever.
In
The Entertainer,
an empty, squalid music hall performer
and
his dejected family somehow manage
to
make a comment upon
coo-
