THEATER CHRONICLE
ODD MAN IN
A TOUCH OF THE POET. Eugene O'Neill. Helen Hayes Theater.
EPITAPH FOR GEORGE DILLON. John Osborne and Anthony Creighton.
John Golden Theater.
DEATHWATCH. Jean Genet. Theater East.
A drunkard, an unemployed actor, and a petty criminal are
the non-heroes of these new plays, all written by men of real talent in
a mode of defiant honesty that has come to be their professional signa–
ture. Each deals with a
mauvais sujet
who is also a painful subject, and
each is tense with a lyrical rhetoric of confession and self-exposure that
at times amounts to hysteria, embarrassing to the audience, which, not
being trained as a priestly confessor, regards the stage revelations as
an attack. More and more today, the theater at its most serious is
be–
coming an arena of combat with the audience; arena theater or theater–
in-the-round is not just a presentational gimmick but a style of writing
that involves the spectator as an unwilling accessory and that works
just as well when the proscenium arch is kept.
The non-hero as a disturbing central figure had already been dis–
covered by Chekhov, in the early play,
I vanov,
now running at the
Renata Theatre. Nothing Chekhov did later is as radical as this study.
Unele Vanya is ineffectual and the novelist Trigorin is a middling
sensual man, but their non-heroic qualities are seen in a softened and
palliated light: "Well, it's only human nature," a neighbor might
philosophize of their conduct. This is not true of Ivanov, a very strange
man, sallow, nervous, good-looking, sensitive, fond of reading, without
evident vices, who is ruining his property and the lives and characters
of everyone around him by an inner demoralization. He is married to
a tubercular
J
ewess, whom he once loved and who is now just such a
febrile, melancholy invalid as a provincial doctor, like Chekhov, might
see regularly on his rounds. Ivanov's family doctor has told him, re–
peatedly, that his course of conduct is literally killing his wife: the ina–
bility to settle down to anything, to stay home for a single evening or
put any kind of order into his affairs. Ivanov feels compunction without
being able to change. You would think, comments the spectator, that
