THEATER,
ETC.
287
uard:
it does not acknowledge its morbidity, its qualities of personal
exorcism.
After the Fall
insists, as it were, to the bitter end, on being
serious, on dealing with big social and moral themes; and as such, it
must be judged sadly wanting, in both intelligence and moral honesty.
Since it insists ,on being serious, I suspect that
After the Fall
will
seem just as belabored, trite, and dated in a few years as O'Neill's
Marco Millions,
the second play in the Lincoln Center Repertory, does
now. Both plays are disfigured by a distressing (though, one imagines,
unconscious) complicity with what they profess to attack. The attack
which
Marco Millions
launched upon the philistine values of American
business civilization itself reeks of philistinism;
After the Fall
is a long
sermon in favor of being tough with oneself, but the argument is soft as
mush. It is indeed difficult to choose between the two plays, or their
productions. I don't know which is more heavy-handed: Marco Polo's
Babbittish exuberance over the wonders of Cathay ("Sure is a nice little
palace you got here, Khan"- Americans are crude and materialistic,
see?); or the weird declamations, at times archly poetic and stilted,
at times WEVD soap opera, of Miller's hero Quentin (Americans are
tormented and complex, see?). I don't know which I found more
monotonous, less ingratiating as an acting performance-Jason Ro–
bard Jr.'s depleted gauche Quentin or Hal Holbrook's hysterically boy–
ish Marco Polo. I could hardly tell Zohra Lampert when she was the
Bronxy chick who keeps running into Quentin's head to slobber all
over him for giving her the courage to have a nose job from Zohra
Lampert when she was supposed to be that elegant lovelorn flower
of the Orient, Princess Kukachin in
Marco Millions.
True, Elia Kazan's
staging of
After the Fall
was stark and
moderne
and repetitive, while
Jose Quintero's staging of
Marco Millions
was tricky and pretty and
had the advantage of Beni Montresor's lovely costumes, though the
stage was so badly lit you couldn't be sure of what you saw. But the
differences in the productions seemed trivial, when you consider that
Kazan had toiled over a bad play, and Quintero over a play so
juvenile that no production, however good, could redeem it. The
Lincoln Center Repertory group (our National Theatre?) is a stun–
ning disappointment. It's hard to believe that all its vaunted freedom
from Broadway commercialism has begotten are passably acted pro–
ductions of this wretched play by Miller, a play by O'Neill so bad it
isn't even of historical interest, and a fatuous c,omedy by S. N. Behrman
that makes
After the Fall
and
Marco Millions
look like works of
genius. And this, while a beautiful and serious new American play,
Robert Lowell's
The Old Glory,
has thus far gone without the large and
important production it deserves.
