THEATER
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certain shifts from pop to melodrama, from black comedy to serious
editorializing about the failures of the white liberal. The most offensive
part of the evening is his super-liberated stance on the race question:
like wow, man, he can make
tun
of blacks! Sample: the hero confesses
that on the Freedom March he met a laundress from Delaware named
"Urethra" and that during King's speech they were doing it behind a
tree;
"she
should have been listening," remarks the hero - to the
audience's huge delight - "after all, she's colored."
To be fair, Friedman can at times be inventive and funny. The
psychiatrist's blousy girlfriend, Cheyenne, is an imaginative creation
("once you get mixed up with those urban Jews it's like eating potato
chips"), and occasional one-liners are hilarious (psychiatrist bidding a
firm farewell to his patient: "It's time you got on your own two feet and
faked your way into the adult community"). The director, Jacques
Levy, whose work has been praised as extravagantly as Friedman's,
must indeed share the credit with him - credit, that is, for the bizarre
shifts in tone, the hysterical bad taste, the pointless vulgarities. The
cast, at least, was first rate, especially Cleavon Little.
EUGENE O'NEILL, MORE STATELY MANSIONS
A caricature of O 'Neill. The fault is due partly to an expository
script in which conflicts are simply stated as such rather than revealed
through the interaction of the characters. Jose Quintero has made a
bad situation worse by the quality of his adaptation and direction. He
has cut in such a way as to make a hideously explicit script even more
so, and (apparently mesmerized by that word
Stately),
has directed
the actors so woodenly as to point up at every juncture O'Neill's pen–
chant for flat-footed abstraction. Ingrid Bergman's beauty and presence
saved her from total disaster, but just barely. Even had she learned
her lines and how to project her voice, she would still have been badly
miscast; her accent and her gentleness clashed incongruously with the
role of a petulant, spoiled, slightly malignant Yankee.
The whole production, indeed, hung precariously between the seri–
ous and the mock, and often with hilarious results. The richness of the
inadvertent humor is difficult to reproduce, relying as it did on a
combination of visual and verbal effects. But picture, if you can,
characters dressed in eighteen-thirties high fashion (plaid slacks, Car–
din-like jackets, lace dickeys), reciting, in deadly serious voices, lines
like "Lately, mother, alone at the office, I felt so weary of the game,"
or (after a passionate kiss between husband and wife), "I'll have to
ask you to go now; the railroad directors will
be
here shortly." I was
