THEATER
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and John Guare's
Muzeeka
was of interest chiefly for the acting of Sam
Waterston and Florence Tarlow, and for the nutty suggestiveness of
Shepard's script.
Muzeeka,
I'm told, made a strong impression last
summer at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A., but in the current pro–
duction it seems so devoid of interest that its West Coast success
can only be ascribed to Edward Parone's direction there. I'm the
more ready to credit Parone
with
that succeSS because this season he
directed an evening of eleven short plays entitled
Collision Course,
of
which one was mine, and I saw at firsthand how he can make some
tame
scripts
look more important than they are....
The Concept,
an
effort by ex-heroin addicts from Daytop to act out their experiences,
moved me a great deal less than
it
did most reviewers; the honesty and
appeal of the "actors" could not quite compensate for the self-conscious–
ness that pervaded much of the evening....
Joe Egg is
a good play
in
the sense and to the degree that a highly original situation and some
snappy, offbeat dialogue can make for one. Yet neither the play's
central relationship between husband and wife nor the special tensions
of living
with
a spastic child are sufficiently developed to validate the
abrupt, melodramatic ending. Moreover, the author's heavy reliance
on the tired device of asides to the audience, and his untheatrical in–
sistence on endlessly discussing past events rather than enacting present
ones, made for considerable tedium. I thought the performances uni–
formly good (though I saw Albert Finney's replacement, Donal Donnelly) ,
and was especially taken
with
Zena Walker's sympathetic performance
as the wife.
And now, in somewhat more detail, the two evenings which
im–
pressed me most this year.
AI..
CARMINES, IN CmcLEs
Al Carmines is associate minister and director of the arts program
at Judson Memorial Church. His reputation as a composer (though
that designation is too narrow accurately to describe his range of talent)
has been steadily growing as the result of his music for
Home Movies,
What Happened
and an opera,
Pomegranada. In Circles
seems to me
Carmines' best work to date, indeed an achievement of considerable
subtlety - for which the director, Lawrence Kornfeld, and a marvelously
fey cast (preeminently, Jacque Lynn Colton) deserve a share of credit.
Gertrude Stein's fifty-year-old playlet provides the "book" for
In
Circles.
Carmines' attraction to Stein is long-standing:
What Happened,
the Obie winner for 1964, was also based on Stein - and also directed
by Kornfeld. The Carmines-Stein collaboration is an almost predestined
