The New York Times, by Walter Kerr

By Walter Kerr

I am sorely tempted to pronounce Zero Mostel simply unreviewable and let it go at that. What is one to say of him? That he is a magnificent, wholly legitimate actor capable of tearing your heart out as he bends himself double, brow pouring sweat, over the milk cart he must push on alone?

No, you can’t quite say that, indelible as the image is in "Fiddler on the Roof," because just a few minutes earlier in the same "Fiddler on the Roof" he has been bringing down the house with a cross-eyed grimace — tongue lolling wildly — contorted enough to resurrect vaudeville, burlesque and possibly the commedia dell’arte in one great swivel of his head. The swivel undercuts the sweat. The seriousness on the second image can’t be taken at face value because of what the man has so recently been doing with his face.

What then? Do you treat him as a clown, almost as a king among clowns, because the manic impulse to which he so frequently surrenders is, for him, irresistibly real, a seizure rather than a posture, an inspiration from his daimon rather than a reflex acquired during stand-up entertaining? God knows he is one of the four or five funniest men left alive; it is scarcely a year since I saw the man do ten minutes at a banquet that left me gasping with admiration whenever I could stop laughing. But in "Fiddler" he is playing Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye, Tevye the dairyman with all those daughters to marry off sensibly; Tevye, the intimate of God with whom he is candid but to whom — as he points out — he never complains. (“After all, with your help, I’m starving to death.”) Wryness, yes. But crossed eyes, cap and bells?

The professional fool intercepts the great actor, the role the actor is playing inhibits the fool — somewhat. And you can, as a reviewer, point out the contradiction, the quarrel of styles. What you will still not have done is account for the effect Mr. Mostel imposes upon the yielding Winter Garden stage, upon the shtetl folk around him who live in designer Boris Aronson’s lovely floating spill of houses along a backdrop that threatens sunset, upon the audience. It is not that he is good, not that he is funny, not that he is one where he ought to be the other. It is simply that he is there.

Zero Mostel is a mighty presence rather than a completely honest performer, so enormous in his nimble bulk and so violent in his willed impact that he doesn’t invite judgment; he defies it, successfully. You can measure what he is doing, if you want to; but it’s not going to get you anywhere, he’s going to roll right over on you no matter what. And so you surrender, agree to let him dictate terms, and simply watch him.

You watch him do things that Sholom Aleichem would surely approve; tilt a sad head toward one weary shoulder not because he has a crick in the neck but because his eyes have opened so wide so often at the world’s unexpected ways that they’ve grown top-heavy, developed a list; wring out a wet sleeve as though the elements themselves had planned this injustice, while glancing at God to let Him know he knows just who perpetrated the joke; try desperately and helplessly to keep a stern finger pointed at the impoverished young tailor who’d like to marry his eldest daughter while that same daughter strokes his beard and begs him to reconsider his wrath. Even this behemoth, properly handled, can be tamed, touchingly.

You watch the actor do things that might have brought a bemused shrug from his original author, since even authors understand that adaptations for the musical stage must be given a little leeway; hold his head during a hangover and then wince mightily as his wife claps her hands in joy at a piece of welcome news; lapse into an unintelligible prayer as a means of silencing the woman he married long before youngsters were making marriage a matter of love; find himself utterly immobilized because he is standing on his own nightgown. And you watch him, listen to him, engage in familiar routines that haven’t much to do with folkways; nearly strangle on a drink and then pronounce it “very good”; camp a bit by rolling his belly during an otherwise charming marriage dance; pursue the intimidated tailor in circles until, losing him, he lifts a tablecloth to see if that’s where he’s hiding.

Whatever is done is done with such almost indifferent authority that it seems irreversible, like a landslide. One hesitates to raise questions about natural forces. Mr. Mostel is a natural force, going its own predetermined and quite conscienceless way, effortlessly brushing aside such obstacles as present themselves, using up all the oxygen in the immediate vicinity. The performer never seems to be contriving effects calculated to please us; he seems simply to exist, to let who will issue challenge. With the heft of Mount Rushmore and the wingspread of a giant condor, the man goes by, lifting one finger in acknowledgement of God and the rest of us. No, he doesn’t go by. He happens. He will happen again and we will go to watch him again. It’s like that.

By Walter Kerr

I guess there's a certain midseason madness that overtakes our stage directors, though I don't quite see why it should take the particular form it has these last few weeks. During these last few weeks it has been the inspired notion of good directors and true - I mean that, because the directors at hand were Vinnette Carroll and George Abbott - to have one or two members of the acting company first appear, for no reason whatsoever, from either the orchestra pit or the front row of the auditorium.

Nothing new about having actors pop up from all sorts of unlikely places, of course, and almost every time you see a Shakespearean production nowadays, approximately half the company is initially discovered trudging up an invisible flight of stairs from an apparently bottomless pit below stage, that pit the ghost of Hamlet's father is supposed to inhabit. But usually there's a reason for plucking players from the netherworld: Perhaps they're crawling into the daylight from dank prisons, as in "Measure for Measure," or have just dug themselves into a grave, as in "Hamlet."

And letting an actor halloo the company from the rear of the auditorium prior to jauntily sweeping down one or another aisle to join the ensemble onstage has been with us, to great and ill effect, for many years. Great effect: Ethel Merman hollering her heart out to get "Gypsy" going, and damn near stopping ours. Questionable effect: Equity members snaking down the aisles on their bellies for "Hair," forcing people in aisle seats to uncross their legs so as not to impede the rhythm of the slither.

Crawling and Clambering

But I just plain don't know why Miss Carroll, during an exuberant number in "Your Arms Too Short to Box With God," has just one member of her sizable gospel-belting troupe present himself at the foot of the stage and proceed to crawl across the entire front row of customers in order to arrive at the foot of the stage on the other side - isn't one side as good as another, since he's going to clamber up and join the folks, anyway? - or why Mr. Abbott decided it would be nice to have two of his skirted Illyrians in "Music Is" emerge from behind the tubas and bass fiddles in the orchestra pit and claw their ways past the rest of the musicians in a scramble to reach their fellow Illyrians who were already safely where they belonged, in front of the scenery.

There was a degree of suspense involved, to be sure. Would all the customers in Row A quickly lift up and retract their legs while crushing their hats, coats and packages to their breasts in order to give Miss Carroll's late-starter easy access to nowhere? One holdout and the actor's in trouble; trapped, he might have to be taken out by helicopter, or at least by two members of the company strong enough to lean down and hoist him out of his difficulties. And I kept expecting the Elizabethan costumes for "Music Is" to get snarled in the slide of an unwary trombone or snagged on the tip of a fiddle. None of these things happened, luckily. But couldn't we have saved the poor things the trip? I notice none of them ever went back down, having a pretty clear idea of what they were well out of.

Befuddlement at 'Going Up'

Merely mystifying, as I say; neither show was ever styled for audience interplay, or anything like that. But, then, directors behave oddly at all times. It's not really seasonal. I think my first befuddlement of the year came with the revival of that vintage musical, "Going Up," which had its charms though not quite enough of them. It also had one of the oddest entrances I've encountered this twelvemonth. Usually, entrances are arranged so that the newcomer can be clearly seen; he may have relatives in the house. There are exceptions to this, such as suspense melodramas in which unreliable types have been known to slip into rooms while the lights were out; but this sort of self-effacement is very rare among actors appearing in ordinary plays.

In "Going Up," an attractive wench named Kimberly Farr did not exactly come on while the lights were out. The lights, especially a broad Tiffany lamp smack in the center of the conservatory, were on. But the director did have her enter, through French windows, directly behind the Tiffany lamp, and he then had her stand there for a longer time than I'd have believed possible. She was in pink, and the lamp was mainly turquoise, so the two made a rather nice color combination. But since the two were of a height, she did look a bit like something out of Dali, a svelte human form with a flying saucer where her face should have been, and if I found it hard to believe she'd remain fixed in position for as long as she did, it's because most actresses I've known would have done something with that lamp - throw it at the director, let's say - rather than submissively join it for the duration.

Power Play Saws Power

In "Best Friend," Barbara Baxley was temporarily entertaining a male visitor who'd really come to call on an acquaintance of hers. The perfect hostess, she rose from her chair to go to the bar and make him a drink. While she was so occupied, he rose from his chair and, without further ado, promptly sat in hers, crossing his legs comfortably. Aha, you'll say, this was significant: the two were engaging in a powerplay, Harold Pinter-style, and he was usurping her territory.

Nothing like it. The power play came much, much later and wasn't very powerful. Either the director had been willing to do anything to get a little movement into the play or the caller was, simply and plainly, a clod, utterly unhousebroken, the kind of oaf who leaps into his hostess's rightful domain the minute the lady's back is turned. I was surprised he didn't get the bum's rush instead of his martini.

And then there's that old, old visual joke in the otherwise most entertaining "The Club" that the director didn't have sense enough to see wouldn't work this time. You remember the gag: someone starts pulling a long, long rope from the stage left portal, tugging it clear across stage and disappearing at stage right while the rope, suspended in midair, continues its journey. In due time we discover that the same person, re-appearing at stage left, is holding the other end of the rope.

If I remember correctly, the rope in this case is an exceedingly long-stemmed rose, but no matter. What blows the whole business in "The Club" is that the attractive girl in tophat and tails who is doing the tugging; is also singing as she tugs. But this means that as she disappears at stage right to run around backstage and turn up as her own partner in the hauling. her voice has got to diminish and fade. Not only that. To the degree that we can still hear her, we can trace her invisible course. We know where she is and what she's doing the whole time, with the unsurprising result that we are not in the least surprised by her decidedly heralded return. You've got to keep mum during this gag, or else. Well, it's due for retirement anyway, I just thought. How do we know there wasn't a third Illyrian in the orchestra pit for "Music Is," one who never showed up because he or she got firmly enmeshed in the musicians' stands and is still there, thrashing away?

By Walter Kerr

There are at least five images I shan't forget as long as I live in Andrei Serban's mounting of "The Cherry Orchard" for Joseph Papp's new season at Lincoln Center, and I'm going to mention them to see what you can begin to make of the confidently daring, alternately vulgar and delicate, perverse, funny, deeply original and visually stunning event that sweeps through the vast white-on-white reaches of the Vivian Beaumont stage like a circus-bred whirlwind bent on making the world clean.

One. In a bandbox of a ballroom, all filigree and flickering candleltume, Madame Ranevskaya and her friends arc swirling themselves to exhaustion on the tide of the music, though we know that Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya is desperately anxious to hear the results of the day's auction; has her home, have her beloved trees, been sold away from her? Swinging in a great arc from the door of the salon with her dancing partner, Madame happens to cross the path of her daughter, just now being lifted from the ground by her own companion on an upsurge of melody. In the split second that daughter passes mother, the daughter's birdlike head darts downward to give Ranevskaya the quickest peck of a kiss and, in that same split second, to whisper the first rumor that the estate has been lost. Instantly the pulse of the dance - no more than an eighth note's been skipped - has carried the couples away again, gaily, indifferently. It's as though lightning had struck, struck with a kiss, pretending to be part of the festivities.

Two. Once the house has been stripped and all its inhabitants are ready to leave, one of the family suggests that they sit for a moment, just sit for a moment. There is immediate quiet, and agreement. The rooms they knew as children deserve a brief honoring. The furniture having gone, there is nowhere to sit but the floor. All find themselves places there, casually but carefully, unsuitably dressed for out-of-doors, lost in contemplation as they are in fact lost in space. Mr. Serban, who has a genius for malting sculptures of still-breathing people, has had them arrange themselves in a loosely crowded oblong, and I do not know whether he has intended anything so specifically vivid as the vision it conveyed to me. I suddenly saw them distributed about a boxcar, perhaps on straw, on their way to execution.

Three. In the bustle of farewells and failed hopes and forgetting that crowd "The Cherry Orchard" even as its blood is being drained from it during its final scene, a single children's rocking horse, so old now that what must once have been giddily bright red paint is scraped to the faintest of blushes, is carried high in air against the vacant backdrop, bobbing gently and serenely as it goes. We have seen portions of the horse before, when its dust coverings permitted, and know it to be a relic of the household nursery. We see it whole and bravely resolute, beyond time, as it vanishes for good.

Four. Chekhov's Trofimov is an eternal student and revolutionary prophet who simply cannot find his galoshes. At the Beaumont a pair of galoshes come flying through the air like a couple of simultaneously wounded ravens before Trofimov has been able to complete his complaint over their inexplicable loss. They land with a thump at his feet as he is getting out the last word. The effect is marvelously funny not only because of the spectacular parabola the boots make as they are so helpfully flung from the wings but because of all they tell us about human beings living together. Someone in that house knows that Trafimov will lose his galoshes again, someone in that house can anticipate the precise timing and duration of his complaint, someone is ready. 

****

Five. Irene Worth is the Madame Ranevskaya of the occasion, and I could delay us here with an accounting of a dozen or two swiftly telling gestures this unforgettable actress has devised by way of showing us the obtuseness, the sudden fierce sense, the self-indulgence and the genuine dismay of an extraordinarily complex woman. She has to do it in snatches, for reasons I'll get to; but she does it. The single inspiration I'm going to cling to, because it is the boldest, is her last loving look at the house she is leaving. There is, by the way, no real house to leave: Mr. Serban, brilliantly abetted by designer Santo Loquasto, has given us only an enormous void, an infinity of plain canvas, a place in which eagles might exercise their freedom. And so Miss Worth doesn't look at it, she inhales it, moving in a great running circle deep, deep into the unreachable horizon and then around and forward to encompass the curve of the forestage, not panting but sucking in breath as she flies, reaching out at last to grasp the hand or the companion waiting to take her away. But she doesn't seize that hand. Instead, on impulse, she barely brushes it with her fingers and dances off again on another grand tour, eyes ablaze, lungs filled, heart broken, lips parted in what is very nearly an all-devouring smile. And then she does it one more triumphant, unbelievable time, a bareback rider on the rim of the world. When she goes, she takes it all with her.

Now if some of these instances have the smell of the circus about them, some of vaudeville, some of chamber music, some of a thumping brass band, some of Peter Brook and some of Robert Wilson and some of Samuel Beckett transformed into a high-wire mountebank, they come by the aura consciously. There was a time, a few years back, when we were hearing a great deal about "total theater." All that it ever seemed to amount to, then, was a disjointed conjunction of mime, tumbling, unintelligible speech and strobe lights. But here, I think, we have it - somewhat flawed because it embraces so much, but functioning as a visual, verbal and emotional whole.

Circus? Chekhov's octogenarian Firs, cotton-haired caretaker of the estate. takes time all by himself to do an elderly but jaunty jigstep across the backdrop, top hat bouncing in the rhythm of the carriages he's used to. The children's aging governess, still doing her magic tricks to entertain them, tops her red-tassled Harlequin's costume with a clown-white face. Members of the household feel free to plump pillows into place on the tops of their heads just as real people do in the privacy of their homes - it's all logical enough, once you see it - and the sense that we are being visited by Madame Ranevskaya and Her Many Minstrels is often strong.

The comedy ranges from the hilariously plausible to the frantically forced, as though to prove that when Chekhov said he wrote comedy he meant it, with no holds barred so long as the play proper gets done, too. Meryl Streep, as the housemaid who's determined to have a young valet for herself, is given the slapstick concession, or a very large part of it. She's got to work hard, too hard, to establish a level of gagging we're certainly not accustomed to in "The Cherry Orchard," and some of her extravagances - crashing to the floor in a faint after a single kiss - fall as flat as she does. But, incontestably, she wins. By the time she is tripping herself up in the petticoats that are slithering about her ankles or tackling her valet with the expertise of a right guard, she is brilliantly funny. So, too is Max Wright in the small, often overlooked, role of an accident-prone clerk, a role Chekhov wrote with bumbling sight-gags in mind. Mr. Wright's efforts, during a melancholy mood, to disentangle a pistol from his belt, trousers and the guitar strap that seems determined to enshroud him forever are masterly. Nor are the fun and games confined to the play's secondary figures: George Voskovec, as Ranevskaya's idly daydreaming brother, is immensely and most naturally funny as he tries, like a recalcitrant child, to escape the warm cloak old Firs will make him wear. And who is to say that very odd accidents do not occur in badly regulated households?

In the meantime, and in the center ring, have we lost "The Cherry Orchard"? No, we have not. We've lost a conventional production of "The Cherry Orchard," to be sure. But we don't need that; we've had many and can have more any time we care to. For now we have a "Cherry Orchard" placed in a larger, airier, freer and at the same time more ominous landscape. When Miss Worth begins to speak of the spring blooms of 'her childhood, the scrim that serves as a backdrop begins to glow and to rise simultaneously, revealing row upon row of feathered May trees, not quite released from the winter's cold but irridescent with oncoming life. The vision is exquisite, and, under the formalized lighting that Jennifer Tipton has arranged, we know what we are looking at. At sunshine the color of snow. At a mothscape. Death and life at once. Equally evocative, once the play moves to an open field for a lazy late afternoon, is the contrasted silhouetting of newly come telegraph lines towering carelessly over fieldhands laboriously dragging an ancient giant plow.

****

There is one symbolic superimposition that seems to me thunderingly wrong, and I'd better say so quickly. The radical student Trofimov is played utterly straight, with very little attention given to his delusions and pomposities; if you arc going to do it that way, the role could scarcely be in better hands than Michael Cristofer's. To back up the young man's functions as revolutionary prophet, however, the skyline changes once again, this time to overwhelm us with factory chimneys beneath a soot-stained red sky. But this literalized intuition of a wholly industrialized world seems to me worse than obvious; it is out of tone, gratuitous, more than Chekhov foresaw, more than he meant, more than he wrote.

And a kind of loss must be acknowledged. If scrims are rising and dazzling vistas beginning to swim in new light while Miss Worth is speaking, the speech itself, the rhythmic continuity of the role, is bound to be interrupted. All of the performances are so interrupted, challenging the actors to make their effects in fits and starts separated vignettes, and to depend upon an overall styling to make a satisfying mosaic of the pieces. The thoroughly first-rate company, working with a gracefully colloquial adaptation by Jean-Claude van Itallie, is quite up to the dare. Miss

Worth sits at the lip of the apron and commands the universe itself to be still while she ever so slowly tears a letter from her lover into two equal halves; the severing of the last shred of paper has the force of a guillotine, resolutely faced. Raul Julia, Marybeth Hurt, Priscilla Smith and a half-dozen others establish themselves on the wing, vanishing, returning, asserting their brief right to center stage, yielding ground again.

The mosaic is made, "The Cherry Orchard" survives and expands, the theater itself is both refashioned and renewed. I don't think l have ever seen anything quite like this production on a stage before and - arguing a point here, surrendering an old preference there - I left the Beaumont exhilarated.

By Walter Kerr

On television tomorrow evening we'll be watching Bette Davis receive from the American Film Institute - hell, can't you see her practically snatching it out of their hands? - the annual Life Achievement Award that has thus far been bestowed only upon John Ford, James Cagney, William Wyler and Orson Welles. Heady company, heavyweights all, suitable predecessors for the lady who pumped lead into her lover at the very beginning of "The Letter" and made you believe that the power wasn't coming from the pistol but from the thrust of her shoulders, the arch of her back, the blaze of her oversize eyes. Suitable predecessors, too, for the wench who was willing to execute any number of Warner Brothers, if need be, in order to earn the right to execute Errol Flynn, whack Humphrey Bogart across the face, spit at that nice Leslie Howard. If you have a taste for fantasy, you're probably already imagining her, at the ceremonies, clutching the trophy to her breast for a moment before turning aside to hang up her boxing gloves, tuck away her horsewhip, and file down her fingernails to a gentle, no longer lethal curve. After all, she's won, hasn't she? She's the champ, isn't she? And that's what she wanted from the beginning, right?

Wrong, I’d say, now that I've looked back at the assortment of her films ranging from her very first clinker, "'Bad Sister," to the twilight-of-a-caleer masterwork, "All About Eve," in which she played - to a fare-thee-well - not the person she was but the legend she'd become, and passing en route what seems to me the definitive Bette Davis vehicle, "Now Voyager." These Davis landmarks contradict one another crazily, but what emerges is not a creature who wished to become Kid Goliath, daughter of White Fang. What she wanted to be was a lovely loser, shy, pliant, docile and long-suffering, an eternal ingenue eternally shedding warm tears of gratitude on a strong man's shoulder. The only problem was that she had to beat the living daylights out of Hollywood to prove how vulnerable she was.

You probably don't believe a word of this, and you certainly won't have seen many of the earlier films lately - I have a feeling they wouldn't even allow "Bad Sister" on television, it's so primitive-grisly - which means I'd better try to explain. In "Bad Sister," the Universal sub-jewel that brought her to Hollywood from a beginning career on Broadway, she isn't the bad sister. She's the good one, and a real mess. As she waits around and waits around, closing doors regretfully and dropping through the portieres while her wicked brunette sibling, Sidney Fox, keeps both Conrad Nagel and Humphrey Bogart on the string, Miss Davis seems to have wandered in from Bela Lugosi's set - Universal had a lot of vampires around in those days - looking for a Bloodmobile. Everything about her is white: dress, skin, lips, eyelids, hair. If she'd had a trace of prettiness in her, you couldn't possibly have known: no emphasis. She looks like a flag of surrender.

Clearly the cameraman was embarrassed by her. He dwells suspiciously on her back, once he obscures her face entirely by plunking down a baby carriage in front of it, and when city-slicker Bogart comes to a family dinner- he has a lot more hair than Conrad Nagel, nicely parted in the middle - the festivities are half over before we discover that Miss Davis is at the table. In spite of the cameraman's efforts, our heroine was noticed by the New York Times reviewer: "Miss Davis's interpretation of Laura," he wrote "is too lugubrious and tends to destroy the sympathy the audience is expected to feel for the young woman."

The actress Fay Bainter once told me that the only thing a celebrated director said to her during the entire out-of-town tryout of a faltering new play was "You're not going to play it that way, are you, Fay?" If "Bad Sister" proved anything at all, it was that Bette Davis was an ingenue In appearance and in spirit, all right, but that she just couldn't play, it that way. She didn't dare ask for pity outright - too sickly, going on terminal. In the next year or so she managed to squeak in two more films at Universal, then another two at Jesser lots, but she was plainly going to be swept up along with the other autumn leaves.

At which point George Arliss happened. Miss Davis hasn't done everything for herself down the years; sometimes she had luck. Mr. Arliss, after what seems to have been no more than a cursory interview, took her on for his true love in "The Man Who Played God." Mr. Arliss may have seemed a bit old for her, but that was part of the plot. He was a concert pianist, she his protege, in love with him out of awe, loyal to him even after he'd lost his hearing, loyal to him even after she'd fallen- as she was so often to do - for George Brent. The part called for some determination, a bit of spunk. It also called for a couple of other things: she had to be a "good looker" if she wasn't to make a liar of the script, and she had to live up to a line that described her as wearing "all the latest California-style clothes." The transformation doesn't seem as startling now as it did to me when I was a lad of 19, but from our very first glimpse of her it's there: the dresses aren't at all slinky yet but they give her body enough shape to keep it from blurring into her face: the cloche hat frames her features so that they can be distinguished from her hair; she's acquired lips and eyelashes, courtesy of the Warner Brothers makeup department. Streamlined, on the smart side, speaking up for herself gallantly - albeit with a characteristic urge to self-sacrifice. She Is only kept from giving up Brent by Mr. Arliss's deep wisdom - Mr. Arliss was very deep, very wise - in an exchange which contains one of my favorite lines of 1932: "You've behaved like a gentleman, Grace, and perhaps I admire you more than I could ever have loved you." Good boy.

Mr. Arliss may have done her one other favor, though not everyone thought it a favor at the time. The actor's tightly compressed lips were never expressive in themselves. He used them for getting the words out, swiftly and precisely, depending upon his eyes to carry the emotion of the moment. Did she learn the trick from Him firing off a clatter of words at typewriter pace while she invited you to look elsewhere for what she was thinking and feeling? Crisp tongue but dissolving pools just a few inches above. The Times reviewer was put off: "Miss Davis who plays Grace, often speaks too rapidly for the microphone." This became the microphone's problem, not hers. Let technology catch up as best it could, Miss Davis was now fully, sleekly equipped to play magazine editors.

Which is, in effect, what she did for the next 15 films. Audiences had been alerted to her, Warners had signed her to a contract, she was available to play anything Glenda Farrell or Joan Blondell wasn't already doing. The Davis legend always has her clawing her way steadily to the top, ferociously bearding: Jack Warner in the Warners' den, issuing ultimatums about better parts Or Else. Can't be so, no matter what little things he may have said to the management from time to time. Any woman, any actress of hidden resources, who could have obediently, and even zestfully, ploughed her way through those 15 nondescript films has to have been one of the most docile, cooperative, gamely long-suffering, patient, pliable and probably prompt workhorses ever to visit the planet.

You often did feel she was visiting in the films, partly because the plots might lose her once they really got started, partly because of her own bright and breathless "I can only stay a moment" tempo. But if she seemed in slightly sharper focus than most of the folk around her, as though she had a party to go to the minute she finished work and was already tingling with anticipation, she also made herself appear to be having fun. No doubt it was fun to be a part of that Warner stock company so fondly remembered by film buffs today: in the James Cagney starring film, "Jimmy the Gent," she had Allen Jenkins and Alan Dinehart for company, in "The Bureau of Missing Persons" she had Pat O'Brien, Ruth Donnelly and Hugh Herbert, in "The Dark Horse" - in which she played the Glenda Farrell part - Frank McHugh, Guy Kibbee and Sam Hardy were around. But of course the whole point about a stock company is that it's a revolving operation; few of the people in it are going anywhere. except into a slight variation of the same part next week or next month. She'd been given a new look and a new career; and she was on a treadmill. She wasn't going to become a star.

Everyone knows that the breakthrough came with the heartless, cheaply artful, greedy and vituperative Cockney waitress of "Of Human Bondage," and there's no need here to go back over the electrifying performance that - to Hollywood's eternal embarrassment - didn't get an Academy Award. Except perhaps to note one thing: that this particular actress, given her particular equipment, had had to ask for neither sympathy nor admiration in order to get both. Was that a clue to something? Curious. But we mustn't leap ahead too quickly because Warner Brothers didn't. What most people don't know or don't remember is that after "Of Human Bondage," made on loan-out to RKO, the actress returned to her own studio to slave, dutifully, through nine more films, all but two of which - "Dangerous" and "The Petrified Forest" - were almost spectacularly mediocre. It was as though nothing had  happened: no acclaim for "Of Human Bondage," no belated, bad-conscience Academy Award a year later for "Dangerous."

Anyone surprised that at this point the lady blew up? We haven't been dealing with much of a rebel; more like The Mouse That At Long Last Roared.

****

The blowup was spectacular while it lasted, with flights to England, refusals to work, injunctions against working elsewhere, suits and countersuits. Miss Davis lost, legally; she could go back to Inhuman Bondage or get out of films altogether. Back she went only to discover, possibly to her great surprise, that in losing she'd won: the direct result of her temper tantrum was sweetness and light. By showing her teeth, she'd earned the right to be treated not necessarily as an ingenue - even an ingenue must come of age after 35 films - but at least as a lady. Three things promptly happened:

(1) The Brothers Warner fell all over themselves spending money on her films: for dialogue .that would unleash the intelligence behind that tricky tongue of hers, for supporting companies with a bit of class about them, for settings that no longer looked as though someone were saving money on the electric bills, for directors who hadn't been hanging around the lot since Dolores and Helene Costello were tots. The cigarettes alone must have cost them a fortune: Miss Davis soon took up smoking with a vengeance, miraculously managing to snatch six or seven quick drags per sentence and often puffing up such a billowing aura about her that the enhanced production values were all but obscured. William Wyler was called in to direct "Jezebel," the first film to make the most of the family reunion, and he not only trained our attention on her delectable deviousness - she is something to see as she spins a parasol faster than Japanese acrobats can, or as she keeps half a nervous eye on the walking stick with which Henry Fonda means to thrash her while taming him with a little-girl smile - but he photographed a film that remains stunning for its camera placements alone. She was mistress of the manse now, marching to Max Steiner.

(2) The legend jelled. Add the vixen of "Jezebel'' to the jinx of "Dangerous" to the trollop of "Of Human Bondage" and you've arrived at the image that would demand she play "The Letter" as a mere way-stop to "The Little Foxes." In fact, it scarcely became necessary to motivate her behavior: neither "Dangerous" nor "Jezebel" bothers to offer an initial rationale for her unruly conduct. In "Dangerous" she is dangerous simply because she is Bette Davis; in "Jezebel" she is a jezebel for exactly the same reason, that and no more. An electricity crackled about her now that sent out its own warnings, she entered a room as though she were slicing it in half with a knife, disaster areas blossomed where her stride had stirred a breeze. Audiences identified her with a malicious dynamism - for good and sufficient reason, to be sure; and critics would have her no other way. The New York Times reviewer objected sternly to Miss Davis's reform at the conclusion of "Jezebel," sure that she ought to have "remained unregenerate to the end."

He only liked her when she was being "hateful' and thought it "a shame to temper that gift for feminine spite."

****

(3) Because this became the Davis iconography, because we knew she carried fury inside her and could unleash it whenever she chose, Miss Davis could go back to being a good girl again. Safely. This is the part we forget, even when we remember the films in which she made the trip back home. Ever see "The Great Lie"? She looks like a pale little schoolgirl, with a white flower in her hair, alongside that towering brute of a brunette, Mary Astor. Miss Astor's the heel here - and dandy, as ever. Mlss Davis is the unlucky-in-love slavey who cares for her and cares for her, asking for nothing in return but the right to rear another woman's child. O most noble soul! Of course you recall "Dark VIctory," with our girl realizing that she is at last going blind and rising from the flowers she's been planting in the garden to go to her deathbed with dignity, uncomplaining, alone. These films appeared at least as regularly as the Wicked Witch films in the 24 she made between "Jezebel" and "All About Eve," and there seems io have been only one precaution they had to take. Each had to display the steel in her spine at least once. Having briefly reminded us of her mettle, she was free to melt as gracefully as she liked into the lemon meringue she was made of.

That's why "Now, Voyager" is irresistible even now, Do you know what it is, really? Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling, The Evil Stepmother, The Wild Child, and Brief Encounter incredibly, effortlessly immaculately tucked into one another like a clap-shut telescope. All this and Claude Rains, too. Miss Davis has to have believed in fairy tales, from Goody Two-Shoes on up, to have appeared as she first does in the film: rimless glasses, hair flattened down hopelessly and then braided across the top of her head, dowdy print dress to make her shapeless again, shoes that seem to have been designed for Mr. Howard's club foot in "Of Human Bondage" except that she is wearing two of them, too inhibited to keep a teacup from rattling against its saucer, utterly incapable of saying boo to a goose. She is the victim incarnate, victim of a wealthy Boston mother so domineering that only Gladys Cooper could possibly have persuaded an audience that such an ogre might exist. No venom in Miss Davis; Miss Cooper has cornered the market.

Temporarily rescued by psychiatrist Rains, playing The Good God ever so cheerfully, the lady undergoes a decided transformation: next time we see her, descending from shipboard, she's ineffably sleek, the curved brim or an enormous hat proclaiming her newfound sophistication. It's as though the washout of "Bad Sister" had turned into a magazine editor all over again.

But only on the outside. Inside, she's the same quivering waif, unable to believe a man could conceivably love her, unable, for that matter, to light her own cigarettes - which is how Paul Henreid became celebrated for his romantic little trick of lighting two at once, and then sharing. Mr. Henreid's married, of course, but love is love and in due time the astonished girl is shedding tears of gratitude all over his manly lapels.

No descent into soup, though. Spinetime. Surrendering Mr. Henreid to his wife, and not for the last time, Miss Davis returns home with just enough fresh confidlence to do battle, toe to toe, with Mother Cooper, who is still bent on possessing, and even redowdyizing, her chick. We know who's going to win this time, and Miss Cooper winds up dead as a Boston cod. Of natural causes, I hasten to add: Miss Davis no longer requires anything more lethal than her unyielding will. Having given us what we demand of her - proof that an ever-so-shy girl can have guts, too - she is at liberty to devote the rest of the film to loving kindness, saving Mr. Henreid's own ugly-duckling 14-year-old from neurotic despair, returning him to his obligations once more while she contents herself - chin tilted, honey-colored hair sweeping upward from the nape of her neck - with the stars. The film's last line is a sentimental horror; everything else about "Now, Voyager," so far as Bette Davis is concerned, is Honest Injun.

For this is what she was, no doubt is. A girl who had to become heavyweight champ in order to get permission to play water boy. A girl who had to become shameless as an actress, savagely let herself go, in order to persuade us of her ingenue decency. A not really pretty glrl, and for far too long a much too patient one, who had to let us see her tough and had to let us see her cheap before we'd take her on her own tenns, neither tough nor cheap but quickly warm and pliant. A girl who had to exercise demonic power In order to exorcise the demon of her blandness, and who was then able to say to another ugly duckling - Mr. Henreid's decidedly unpretty offspring - "There's something else you can have if you earn it, a kind of beauty."

And say it not soppily but with unselfconscious conviction. TNT became her trademark, and she used TNT often; cunning pro that she was, she used it to make herself fragile and to make us like her that way.

Good girl.

By Walter Kerr

At what point did the contemporary world, enlightened as it is, come to regard sex as poison, deadly no matter what the dosage? The question crossed my mind, fleetingly, as I came away from Albert Innaurato's short, thoroughly unpleasant, undeniably powerful "The Transfiguration or Henna Blimpie," now part of a double bill called "Monsters" at the Astor Place Theater. If I didn't pursue it at the time, I suppose it was because it was so easy to answer: "Benno" is such a disturbing play - I felt as though I'd been mauled in the playhouse, and by experts - because we have at last been willing to face up to the nature of the sensual beast inside us, to acknowledge candidly that beast's indiscriminate taste for sodomy, child molestation, homosexual attack, castration, fetishism in its fanciest forms, what have you. If our experiences when dealing with sex in the theater have grown more troubling (the audience with which I saw "Benne" did not relax its attention for a moment, but it attempted to relieve its unease by shifting about in its seats to a most remarkable degree), it is because the theater itself has grown more honest.

Later in the week, and after I'd seen Mr. Innaurato's longer, gentler but still sexually anguished "Gemini" at the Circle Repertory's home on Sheridan Square, I moved uptown for Theodore Mann's new production of "Romeo and Juliet," expecting simply to listen to "Romeo and Juliet" again and perhaps relish freshly that lovely lyricism we're always going on about. I didn't waste much time on the lyricism. Instead, I found myself hearing an attitude toward sex-composed of two simultaneous strands meshing without effort - that quite made hash of the "honesty" theory I'd been nursing. 

***

We are neither more honest nor more knowing about sex than Shakespeare was. Of course I ought to have realized that, did realize it; schoolboys quickly catch on to the bawdry that so regularly and so easily salts and peppers the play, commonplace and matter-of-fact as the Monday wash. Our noses are not rubbed in its grubbier aspects, to be sure. But familiarity with what boys and girls, men and women, are apt to be up to, or at least fantasizing about, is well-nigh total and freely made light of.

Juliet's nurse is not unaware of, or the least bit embarrassed by, the fleshly stirrings that surely rise unbidden in her 13-year-old charge. She assumes them, could not possibly be shocked by them. "Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks," she tells the mere child, rather enjoying the spectacle. Homosexuality is touched on, turned into a joke. When a mooning Romeo is prodded by Benvolio to say what ails him, Romeo's confession, "I do love a woman," is instantly countered by a ribald sally from his friend: "I aimed so near when I supposed you loved." Mereutio and that street-gang of his use five-letter words that continue to convey their messages in the 20th century, and there's not a character in the play who doesn't take lust, natural or "unnatural," for granted. We can't really claim much that is new in the way of . information for ourselves.

But mark two things. The candor is casual, its content laughed off as inevitable. Furtive urges of the flesh have nothing to do with the horrors that follow: the poison that is responsible for so much fatal swordplay and so many threatened and actual suicides is a social poison, distilled from the senseless hatreds of feuding families. Sex as such is no villain; vengeance is. And sex, raw sex if you like, does not by its very existence rule out the possibility of genuine, selfless, idealized love. Most of the play is lyrical, rhapsodic even, undisturbed by the bawdy that is its natural companion. That is to say, Shakespeare permitted the two a reasonably peaceful coexistence, one extending the other a cheerfully helping hand. If romance had its underside, it was a rather jolly underside. Wantonness came with the package; if anything, Shakespeare liked it.

My question stands, then: why, in our presumed wisdom that is not really all that new, are we so determined to find sex repellent? Sex is the mortal enemy of Jove in "Benno Blimpie"; it is, in the end, the enemy Benne wishes to kill. Denno, played with hauntingly sorrowful eyes by James Coco, is an enormously fat boy, sprawled like a giant jellyfish over the pyramid the work resembles, dripping chocolate ice cream down his vast white shirt as he methodically, purposively eats himself to death.

****

He has sought love, from his parents, from his grandfather, perhaps from schoolyard acquaintances. His mother - made funny and hideously destructive in the same brilliant strokes by Rosemary DeAngelis - shoos him from the table, from the house, as "fat and ugly"; she is preoccupied with the fact that his father is now impotent though his grandfather is not. The psychologically castrated father is appalled that Benno is so sexually passive, not at all the son he wanted. The grandfather will have Benne nowhere near him; he is far too busy seducing, or being seduced by, a nymphet bold and skilled enough to give Lolita cold chills; instead of delivering the promised sex, however, the young slut puts a knife in the old man before she has done with him. Three boys in the schoolyard assault Benne homosexually. When we last see him, he is holding a meat cleaver high above his head, ready to bring it down upon his genitals.

I haven't used the notion of sex as a poison randomly. Halfway through Mr. Innaurato's nightmare, Benne promises himself that he will blind himself, lock himself in a room with the household rodents, and eat rat poison. '"I will be a sexual object to them," he says bitterly, maliciously, knowing that as the rats indulge themselves they will also be killing themselves. Sex as killer. We come upon the image more and more often these days. 

Its function is nowhere near so lethal in the full-length "Gemini," though once again we meet an unloved fat boy who, this time, does take rat poison (unsuccessfully). The thread that comes close to holding the backyard celebrations and caterwaulings of an Italian neighborhood together is here homosexual. A 21-year-old who has been having an affair with a friend's sister fears that it is the friend he really loves, and the subject must be aired, to the dismay of one and all. Sex as anxiety, as a disruptive force viewed with uniform distaste.

Strictly speaking, "Gemini" makes no clear statement, morose or otherwise; as the piece stands (it apparently underwent considerable revision before its Sheridan Square showings), a last-minute and insufficiently motivated change of heart leaves all members of the trio happy. The trio had not, in any case, provided us with the real body of the play: that comes from the sidelines, from the sometimes too extravagant but often very amusing portraits of family and friends, of a monarch-mother who rules the garden with a fly swatter until she climbs a telephone pole bent on spectacular but rather inefficient suicide, of a father's woebegone mistress who isn't hungry enough to be served a helping of pasta but who manages to make a holocaust of everyone else's plate. Under Peter Mark Schifter’s direction, a thoroughly sound and sensitive company does ample justice to Mr. Innaurato's menagerie.

The resolute singlemindedness of "Benne Blimpie" makes it unmistakably the stronger play, abrasive as it means to to be, abrasive as it is. Its structure is rigidly economical (having just one thing to say). Its language is atonally musical. taut and tough piano wire. The author is clearly someone to be reckoned with, even as we are attempting to cope with the wrecked sexuality of his vision, a vision that increasingly dominates 20th century literature and that Shakespeare, lucky soul, would scarcely have recognized. 

"Romeo and Juliet,” by the way, Is not otherwise very Illuminating in its Circle in the Square mounting. Nearing Its first half, airy and rapidly spoken, Shakespeare's youngsters are eager to get on with it, rattling off their moonstruck metaphors for the charmingly giddy things they are (Pamela Payton-Wright Is especially fetching imagining her lover cut up into stars to make the heavens brighter) and blushing very little about their hurry - once properly blessed to be abed. Jan Miner is a droll nurse, happy as can be when there's hanky-panky to be helped along. Lester Rawlins is an unusually authoritative Capulet. and the fencing bouts staged by Patrick Crean and Erik Fredericksen are first-rate. 

Unhappily, the very speed, the lightness of foot and line that makes a pleasant enough breeze of the evening's beginnings puts down no foundation for the emotional storms that must follow, particularly since Paul Rudd, as Romeo, tends to adopt the postures of passion without ever seeming to feel very personally about what is happening to him. As the evening grows more serious, we don't grow more serious along with it. I know I spent part of my time wondering why these two foolish children couldn't devise some expedient means of getting themselves out of the whole mess (couldn’t they both slip away to Mantua?). The rest of the time I spent admiring the 17th century’s easy embrace of sex in its totality, as a given.

But the 17th century is not ours, and we now live with the revulsions of “Benno Blimple." Being of our time, "Benno Blimpie” speaks to our time, to that rift in the contemporary psyche that led Susan Sontag to speculate a little while hack on whether them mightn't, after all, be something wrong with sex (functionally, not morally). Someone - I name no villain, because I am not at all prepared to isolate one - has taken a cleaver to our Instincts, neatly and rather nastily severing sensuality from affection. The matter certainly wants looking into, even if the inquiry leaves us temporarily shaken. 

By Walter Kerr

Ethel Merman is the bonfire and Mary Martin is the smoke. They go very nicely together, if you're in a mood to burn up the town.

At least, that's the way they struck me - I think they did strike me, I still seem to be reeling - on Sunday night at the Broadway, where the ''two first ladies of the theater” (as Mayor Beame called them while presenting them with identical crown-shaped trophies) did what is called a benefit for The Friends of the Theater and Music Collection of the Museum of the City of New York. But it wasn't a benefit, really. It was a blessing, as any good warm blaze in this old cold world of ours is bound to be. Scorched you a bit sometimes, too.

The scorcher, as you scarcely need to be told, was Merman, too hot for Fahrenheit to measure, too bright to be stared at without a pair of those goggles that riveters wear. (Do they wear something for their eardrums as well?) the pair came on together, bursting through circus hoops as Mama Rose and Nellie Forbush respectively, and they did "Send in the Clowns" (which belongs to neither of them, professionally) like a prayer, demurely, devoutly, disarmingly. But it was Ethel the Everready who opened up first (and second, and third. and after that I lost count).

I always think of her as standing still and belting. I don't know why. I'm pretty sure she did stand still once, while she was first singing "Let's Be Buddies" in whatever triumphant show that was. But at the Broadway she was an itch that couldn't be scratched, a brushfire claiming a whole mountainside, a pop and a map and a crackle that kept her rocking from side to side like a metronome on wheels, slipping without warning into a fiercely infectious jig-step for "Doin' What Comes Naturally" throwing her substantial but untamable body around as easily as she tossed breathtaking keyshifts to the winds, and - I guess I still don't believe it - unleashing "Everything's Coming Up Roses" like a freshly tapped gusher, with the sound soaring high in the air, straight up and off into eternity. Incredible.

A Certain Elusiveness

Speaking of eternity, there is an afterlife. During one of her subsequent appearances, Miss Merman was momentarily interrupted by the appearance of a trumpeter, choosing to play Gabriel in the song featuring that archangel's name. The trumpeter ripped off a few calls, judgment-day calls. "Do you hear that playing?" Miss Merman asked with an instant pickup, and in earnest (one of the finest things she does, again and again, is to take rhetorical questions such as "Why doesn't alcohol thrill me at all?" seriously, so that she can ride upward on a wave of: exhilaration). Gabriel's stand-in kept blowing. Miss Merman began swimming. Guess who won? The thing is, with Gabriel now definitely outclassed, they're going to need her up there. And if they need her, she'll oblige, so we're all set.

Okay. Miss Martin. I think of her as smoke, not just because everything about her curls, such as her apricot smile and the peach-tinted fringe of auburn hair that sneaks out from under her sailor cap like seafoam. It's a matter of elusiveness. Smoke is always changing shape, so that you can't be sure from moment to moment just what it most resembles; heaven knows you can't catch it.

There was a moment, for instance, when the master of ceremonies, Cyril Ritchard - impeccable in white tails, splendidly imperious of tongue - began to speak of Miss Martin's adventures in the theater while simultaneously draping himself in Captain Hook's wicked black wig. As he did so, for a few seconds, there was a flicker of moving light along one side wall of the auditorium, a flicker that then leaped clear across stage to flare into a full spotlight circling Miss Martin herself.

But before anyone had seen her, they'd applauded that delicate, teasing, evanescent flicker of light, quite as though it was Tinker Bell she'd once played, instead of Peter. But I guess that's the point about her. She's both, and neither, and just you try to nail her down while she's vaporizing, silkily and conspiratorially, with a wink and a kiss and a crow and a cackle, before your eyes.

Complex Proposition

On Sunday night she teed off with a slight vocal mishap:Seated on a piano and running through a medley of songs she'd done in cabaret before fame found her out (songs not identified with her), she somehow slipped off pitch and stayed there until her next time around. Next time around, though, she knew where she was: down at the footlights, subtly weaving magical patterns made of near-whispers and visual slipperiness. You see, she starts off like a stray feather rising unbidden from the floor to undulate gently in midair, lazily doing the bidding of any breezes that happen to be around, and then just as you've got used to her easygoing little-girl charms, you notice what a very dirty sound the lady manages to produce during one of the breaks in "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."

At which point you realize that you've got a much more complex proposition on your hands than you thought. Meantime, she's up and taken off like a hummingbird gone ice skating. And opened her throat, as well as her arms, to skip as deliriously as ever through "Wonderful Guy." At least that's what she did on Sunday night. I keep wanting to write this in the present tense, because I keep imagining the two of them still there, captives of the theater that they've captivated.

They work together most remarkably, without sentimentality or undue deference. Obviously each has a healthy respect for the other, obviously the strains of "Friendship" that float from the pit during the overture aren't inappropriate. But no goo, and who needs nostalgia? They're pros, they can either do it or they can't, and they were up there to show that they could. Not even a "Hello Dolly!'' with two crimson dollies descending two mauve staircases - and with a chorus line that waggishly included Joel Grev, Yul Brynner, Burgess Meredith and the like - got out of hand. Sleek, sure, robust, finally rip-roaring. Ditto with a duo-medley of "I" songs, with the pair harmonizing on "Red, Red Robin" and doing counterpoint with "Indian Love Call" and "Tea for Two." (Martin yodeling, Merman munching on the fox-trot).

It's Tuesday morning now. I hear music and there's no one there. . . .

By Walter Kerr

A correspondent has sent me a clipping and I am fascinated by it for a very special reason. It is a Variety review of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" written immediately after its out-of-town opening 40 years ago, and it is highly unfavorable: Do you know why it is unfavorable? Variety's man found the play far too avant-garde for his taste.

"Our Town" avant-garde? No one thinks of it that way any more, not that homespun, endearing, down-to-earth account of everyday life and death in Grover’s Corners, simple as bread being baked in a sunlit kitchen. As for those who hold it sentimental and self-consciously folksy, the notion of putting the adjective "experimental" to it must seem unreason itself. Yet it was avant-garde and it was experimental. It was so regarded and so damned.

A few excerpts from the review: "It will probably go down as the season's most extravagant waste of fine talent… It probably represents an an all-time high in experimental theater for Broadway. By comparison the modem dress, sceneryless ‘Julius Caesar' [Orson Welles] emerges as orthodox and conventional. It's the type of stuff put on here every now and then by the Princeton Theater Intime, university experimental group, and other serious collegiate organizations. 'Our Town' should have been left on the campus…"

The piece goes on to specify just what was so novel about the venture (though the novelty is described as "thin"). "First tipoff on the experimental biz," it reports, "comes upon entering the theater… There is no curtain and the full stage is bare, with only a few stray props resting against the back wall. At what corresponds to curtain time, out walks the stage manager… and leisurely sets down a few chairs and two small tables. These, together with two ladders used later for imaginary stairways, represent the only props or scenery used throughout the play." In point of fact, these usages were adventurous in an American play intended for Broadway. The use of ladders as acting areas seemed to echo the innovative techniques of Meyerhold in Russia; the narrator-cum-stagehand sounded a little bit Chinese and a little bit Brecht. After the triumphant Broadway success of "Our Town," however, we never questioned the use of these particular devices again; they became tools casually available to any dramatist wishing to borrow them.

But what fascinates me so is not the ironies that grew out of the situation: the fact that an apparent failure in Princeton could become so solidly embedded in American drama and the American psyche that its 40th anniversary would be celebrated on Memorial Day of this year by its fifth separate production for television; or the fact that what was once rejected as far too far-out could come to seem second nature. I'm interested, rather, in another irony, one that sheds some light on our own avant-garde, developed during the past 15 to 20 years and just now making its way out of theaters in time and into the uptown Establishment.

You will notice that most of the techniques thought too daring in "Our Town" were visual techniques: open spaces, limited and arbitrary props, love scenes-on ladders and graveyards composed of nothing but folding chairs and umbrellas. Yet none of these things was considered an end in itself. The evening was not primarily, or even remotely, an improvisation arrived at by actors and directors, working independently of a writer. The innovations of "Our Town" were meant to be functional, supportive: they were used to facilitate - indeed, to make possible - the movement of an all-important text. "Our Town" was the work of a literary man. The play was written.

Not so with our avant-garde, now displaying its wares to mass rather than elite audiences. The man who has most emphatically cracked the Establishment, of course, Is Andrei Serban, whose mounting of "Agamemnon" is current at the Lincoln Center Beaumont and whose much-In-demand "Cherry Orchard" will return to replace it while "Agamemnon" goes to Central Park during the summer. No gainsaying the impact Mr. Serban has had on the current season, however "controversial" that impact may be. By continuing and consolidating the inspirations born in lofts, garages and church basements over the two decades past, and by adding an expansive vision of his own, he has Moved In. But attend: he has Moved In without bringing along a writer of his own. Yes, he does use texts, though not avant-garde texts: Chekhov and Aeschylus scarcely qualify as 1977 ground-breakers. Sometimes Mr. Serban respects the text at hand, as he did (in my opinion) with "The Cherry Orchard," magically amplifying but not erasing it. Sometimes he does not: what Aeschylus wrote in the "Agamemnon" is deliberately, resolutely buried beneath dumb-show, processional, torchlight spectacle throughout.

For his thrust, like the central thrust of almost all the experimentation directly proceeding him, is primarily visual, profoundly theatrical rather than literary, derived not so much from the word as from the circus, from pantomime and the commedia dell'arte, from gymnastics and religious ritual, from painting and revue and Grand Guignol, from dance. In the sense that these things are almost always given precedence, our avant-garde is anti-text, anti-literary. In the sense that dramatic logic and dramatic psychology have been superseded by theatrical spectacle, it is also anti-intellectual. Those who wish to put a pejorative term to it are free to do so: the avant-garde normally rejects conventional theater because it is too tainted with show-biz, but our avant-garde has become show-biz incarnate.

Think back. What were we looking at 10 or so years ago? The Living Theater, spelling out the title "Frankenstein" with the double-jointed bodies of the performers, for all the world like the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. Andre Gregory rolling up his actors into spinning hoops for ''Alice in Wonderland," creating a caterpillar smoking a hookah while reclining on a toadstool composed of four actors bent double. Peter Brook slapping the text of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" about freely while he riveted our eyes upon the main business of the evening: aerialists in silver capes slithering down ropes from a balcony, trapeze artists spinning saucers as they swung high over the stage, Puck getting about on stilts, a hurricane of confetti and Frisbees bringing a scene to its close. Tom O'Horgan exhibiting, side-show style, nude bodies in glass cases, as Richard Foreman is still doing at the Ontological Hysteric Theater. Richard Schechner playing hob with the implications of Euripides's "The Bacchae" while audience attention was diverted by invitations to dance with the company, engage in group gropes. Charles Ludlum staging dances with thalidomide victims, dunking the heads of actors in clown makeup Into toilet bowls.

Of them all-and there were more-only Joseph Chaikin of The Open Theater made a serious attempt to keep a writer at his side, seeking an ultimate fusion. It was the talented Jean-Claude van Itallie who provided him with the right chanted words to pave way for "The Serpent's" remarkable passages of mime: Eve tempted in Eden, Cain killing Abel. But what Mr. van Itallie wrote played second fiddle - it was really a sort of accompaniment - to what was seen; the fusion didn't really take place, the word did not win.

With Jerzy Grotowski it was told it could not win. For Grotowski text was the enemy of the actor, fetters falsely imposed upon him. An actor's gut impulse - a pre-verbal groan, a piggyback ride, a tongue lapping the lacquered floor - was the true stuff of theater and drama both, and no playwright was to be permitted to usurp his original, sacred right to create for himself. If texts were used, they were shredded, performed out of sequence or at rates of speed that made them incomprehensible to the most attentive of ears. Better no text at all. Let the magic of the body and the primal cry straining at the human vocal cords make direct, intuitive contact with those of us assembled above the pit, staring down. Were there strange moments in which such contact was made? Yes.

Values were discovered during these years of seething, sometimes foolish, sometimes startlingly provocative, activity. You need only go to "The Cherry Orchard" to see what they are, what can be made of them. There was one value, however, that was not, could not, be developed in the circumstances: language, and all of the structures of thought and melody that rise from it.

Why was that? Usually avant-garde movements begin as literary revolutions and go on that way until their own "Finnegans Wake" exhausts them. Why was ours so determined to tum its back on the Writer, dispense with him if possible? Were the directors of the period pigs, the performers narcissists, greedily bent on gratifying themselves alone? Not at all. The bias was built in. Ours may have been the first extended avant-garde period to have arranged, at the outset, its own lapse into silence, the first to use the word in order to get rid of the word.

Go back another 10 years, roughly to the coming of Samuel Beckett and the non-coming of Godot. Beckett was of course a literary man, producing literary works; thus far our avant-garde began much as any earlier avant-garde period. Beckett had a message. The message was that there was no message. And right there were the seeds of an ultimate silence. Didi and Gogo waited through an eternity, as cheerfully as their respective pains permitted, for a promised word. They waited in vain. If existence had any meaning at all, it was not going to be conveyed to us in language.

lonesco thumped the point home. The expectant gathered in a lighthouse, awaiting the speaker who would tell them what they needed to hear. This speaker arrived. He spoke gibberish.

Beckett's Winnie in "Happy Days," did use words, hundreds and hundreds of them, as she sat chattering and primping, primping and chattering, while the sand rose about her immobilizing her utterly. But these were pass-the-time words, pretty flights into futility. They accomplished nothing on the arid desen she inhabited; the sand would soon reach her mouth, it was silence that was coming. Beckett wrote some silent plays, as well as the silent "Film." Ionesco again hit harder, and less poetically. In "Rhinoceros," he parodied logic baldly, scoffing at the possibility that a syllogism could conceivably have meaning for us. Not content with dismantling verbal structures, he attacked not only the word in the gibberish of "The Chairs" but even the individual letter that went to make up the word: in "The Lesson" he questioned the sanity of anyone who thought that "f" was pronounced "f." Some of this was mild fun, to be sure, but one conclusion was inescapable: human beings were incapable of communicating with each other through language. An old couple sit together. The woman mourns the fact that their only son has left them. The man, agreeing, mourns the fact that they never had a son. Word cancels word, line cancels line, meaning cancels meaning.

The rash of "no communication" plays that followed, inspired by Existentialist philosophy and generally offered under the heading of Theater of the Absurd, will be readily recalled, and were Written. That is to say, the language was put down and swiftly shown to be profitless. For the most part, it was indeed profitless, both for the characters on stage and the audience out front. I suppose I must have seen at least 200 uncommunicative variants on, or imitations of, the genre in a three-to four-year period, virtually all of them by young would-be writers who were never heard of again. I can think of just three Absurdist or Absurdist-influence plays sturdy enough to survive the death of the vogue: Edward Albee's "The American Dream," Arnold Weinstein's "The Red Eye of Love," and, quite a bit later, John Guare's "House of Blue Leaves." Otherwise, the form was simply too easy to fake; it didn't require talent to put random non-sense on paper and call it Absurdism; the fallout was inevitable.

So was the next step. If communication through words had been proved impossible - and a great many laborers in the theatrical vineyard, influenced not only by Beckett but by philosophers from Kierkegaard to Sartre, had now accepted the premise as so - then other means of communication would have to be found. Out went the text, no longer valid as a tool, and a movement that had begun as a literary one become subliterary or extra-literary at the behest of the literary men themselves. The Writers had made writing suspect; it was time to send in the clowns.

Hence the explosion of mountebankery, of "plays" that were really painting or music or dance, of solemn investigations of time, space and silence, and genuine mimetic inspiration and occasional successful gut contact. Sometimes something beautiful to look at, at least. And sometimes entertaining mockery of the theater that had been abandoned, the literary theater that had self-destructed in the manner of Jean Tinguely's machine. Quite a bonfire for a while, and though its blaze is fast fading now, it still casts shadows on a few out-of-the-way walls: in Robert Wilson's alternately funny, stunning and unendurably tedious finger-painting to the sound of a clavichord, in Richard Foreman's "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" false perspectives, in the still-lifes and the disembodied dancing glass slippers (heels electrically lighted from within) of the Mabou Mines.

Most of the major companies that flourished while the flames leaped highest have vanished, and we're clearly now in a period of assimilation, a time when the Establishment reaches out and seizes whatever it can usefully incorporate into its own more traditional wares. In the assimilation the theater as a whole gained something: a livelier use of the eye, an increased awareness of the body, a heightened sense of the interrelationship between drama and all of the other arts.

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It's also lost something. Writers. If Mr. Serban must use texts from Chekhov and Aeschylus, as Mr. Foreman used Brecht and Peter Brook used Shakespeare and Richard Schechner used Euripides, it's because new playwrights, new texts, were of little or no concern to them during their years of adventure. We may very well have lost an entire generation of potential dramatists in the process, leaving us to stare in bewilderment and some distress at a void that houses performers readily enough but contains no one to provide them with fresh words to speak.

Less than a handful of playwrights who worked with, or were influenced by, the avant-garde at its peak continue to work, but in outer orbit. Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van ltallie, lsrael Horovitz, John Guare are all there and all talented; but they're still on the theatrical periphery, not quite full-bodied enough to assert themselves as literary forces capable of commanding a large audience, sustaining an entire evening with language and narrative of their own devising. Some will still make it; but it's a struggle given the halfhearted value that was assigned them during their years of apprenticeship. Those who are now prying open the doors of the theatrical center - Alben Innaurato, David Mamet, David Rabe among them - are men who came along a bit late in the avant-garde's day, late enough to avail themselves of certain of its residual pleasures and/or treasures without feeling committed to its anti-literary drift. They were, and are, primarily word men.

We'll continue to take profit from all that has gone on. But all that has gone on has left many a potential dramatist crippled.

By Walter Kerr

I have just seen the lion lie down with the lamb. Suppose we fantasize for a moment. Let's say that a young, green playwright with a young, green script has been able to see that script - however unpolished it may be - acted out. His audience has been composed of some ordinary, quite amiable and easygoing people, plus a large contingent of those extraordinary, constitutionally suspicious creatures called critics. Next morning, quite early, he has been able to sit on the stage so recently occupied by his actors and directly confront the critics.

He begins the conversation neither arrogantly nor defensively. He speaks of "my doubts now," indicating that the previous evening's performance has itself suggested unresolved problems to him - without any help from professional gadflies. He is not fearful, or at all self-conscious, about speaking of his structural search for a "cleanliness and elegance of line." There is nothing pretentious in this. He is serious and means to be taken seriously. He does realize that in rewriting during rehearsal he has "unlocked certain major themes without really dealing with them." These things said, he invites comment.

The critics, all of them professionals, respond courteously but straightforwardly, with no air of passing judgement from on high, with none of that condescension that comes of wishing to be kind. The play's qualities, achievements, possible stumbles, intended and unintended ambiguities are considered, candidly but with great civility; conceivable alternatives are explored; differences of opinion are weighed, calmly, reflectively. The critics are not telling the playwright anything; they are asking, talking about. Every single thing they say could fairly be called constructive.

The playwright takes notes furiously, sometimes nodding his head rapidly in momentary assent, sometimes raising his chin sharply in fleeting private debate. When the session is pronounced over, he thanks his critics with an earnestness that must be taken as genuine. He has been stimulated by the exchange and he is grateful. For a very brief moment the theater's two arch-enemies -the writer and the reviewer - have become companions working toward a single end: the making of a better play for a richer stage.

Do you believe a word of it? I said we were fantasizing because it's all so unlikely; but, as it happens, we weren't. I've just spent several days at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., and I can assure you that Utopia, if what I've been describing strikes you as Utopia, exists. The process not only functions, under the presidency of George C. White and the artistic direction of Lloyd Richards, with an incredible serenity; it produces. Of the 12 plays mounted and discussed during last year's four-week working season, eight reached New York, at one production level or another, during the past winter, with a ninth still on the way. I won't even go into the regional and university theater productions that have followed first exposure at the Center, enabling the writer to take advantage of anything learned during his baptism and providing his play with its "second step" toward a dreamed-of perfection. It wouldn't be gross exaggeration to call what is currently happening in Waterford miraculous.

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But miracles, large or small, don't come easily, and this one certainly didn't. Any gathering of writers and critics is potentially explosive and when, 13 years ago, the O'Neill's National Playwrights Conference first tried its wings it was quite badly burned. It was already finding, and helping to mature, valuable plays during 'its early years: Ron Cowen's "Summertree," for instance, was performed beneath a tree on the lawn in 1967 (the tree has grown taller now but everyone still calls it the "summertree"). But the volatile mix of authors and reviewers led, in its original form, to something like disaster. The practice at the time was to complete the performance and, within 10 minutes, have a handful of professional critics on stage to take the play apart. "Summertree" was promptly savaged, with one reviewer magisterially instructing the author to forget the theater all together and go back to pumping gas. The battles - and that is what they were - stopped short of being bloody, but rancor made the cool night air from Long Island Sound a great deal warmer than it need have been.

In an effort at easing the unhappy tensions, a National Critics Institute was formed to house a few reviewers from major newspapers together with a larger group of student-critic "fellows" for the entire four weeks, and the lot of them were hustled off the stage and into the "mansion" that serves as headquarters. There they were given typewriters and asked to write out, with rather more time and more deliberate consideration their reviews. Unfortunately, these reviews were either posted on a bulletin board the next morning or read aloud at a conference table in the presence of the author. To give you an idea of how this worked out, on one occasion the author arrived at the morning session to face his probable detractors carrying a briefcase, which he placed firmly on the meeting table. From it he solemnly removed a pistol and waited for the reviews to begin. The fact that the weapon was later discovered to be a water-pistol only means that the author is still safely at large. It didn't change the atmosphere or put an end to recriminations.

Do you know how the problem was solved, leading to the astonishing harmony that prevails today? In several ways, actually, but in one that was undoubtedly all-important. The Critics Institute, under Ernest Schier's direction, altered its focus. Its principal object was no longer to review the plays. Its purpose, rather, was to review the reviews, with the author absent or present as he chose. Critics assembled to criticize, or at least discuss, one another's criticisms, and this singular act of humility - this facing up to the fact that reviewers were in every way less than infallible - did the trick. It was now understood that a review might be every bit as flawed as the play under consideration, that it, too, was open to debate; the news got through to the gratified playwrights, a sense of common difficulty and common purpose began to take over, easy interchange replaced what had for so long been contention.

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Two other things helped. Four or five well-known critics, with an occasional established playwright thrown in, were invited to stay for the full session and serve as "dramaturgs," counsellors to the playwrights while their plays were in rehearsal. (Prowling through the big red barn on the premises, I was cheered to see Edith Oliver of The New Yorker sitting most casually on the floor alongside her assigned author, checking the manuscript with him while keeping an eye that is both generous and sharp on the players who were giving life to his lines.) Each dramaturg stays the course until the play is at last performed for the public, venturing suggestions, listening to questions, hand-holding if need be. It is no doubt good for a critic, now and again, to become involved in the making of a play; it is surely good for the playwright to deal, however temporarily, with a reviewer who is not so much fiend as friend.

And, in all probability, the O'Neill is now benefiting from what I think of as The Law of Accelerating Returns. It has, by this time, helped give birth to a good many well-known plays: Israel Horovitz's "The Indian Wants the Bronx," John Guare's "House of Blue Leaves," Charles Fuller's "The Brownsville Raid," Kevin O'Morrison's "Ladyhouse Blues," Albert Innaurato's "The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie" among them. As the numbers increase, and the organization's reputation for finding work of quality grows, better and better scripts are going to be submitted for possible hearing. As it is, Mr. Richards and his staff manage to read 800 plays yearly while getting ready for the July plunge, thinning this to 80 “finalists,” and then - no doubt with pain - cutting to the feasible 12. As the submissions do grow better (if that little Law of mine really operates), reviewers obviously have an easier time of it; the more serious the work, the more seriously it can be taken. One more nudge toward good author-critic relations.

The Conference has managed to solve a thorny problem ingeniously. That is not its only achievement. Visitors are asked not to write about the plays they may see in one of three available theaters for the simple, and sound, reason that the plays are still in work. But I am free to say that the production quality of the piece I saw and heard was, to me, close to downright unbelievable. There had been less than three days rehearsal time. The actors were carrying scripts, as is customary. And yet the performances were both vigorous and sensitive, the stage direction was fluid and fully shaped, and the carried scripts seemed to vanish along with the last traces of daylight that filtered through the leaves of a huge copper beach overhead. Not a scene lost its momentum, or its dramatic design, for want of a word or the need to turn a page. The playwright could see his play.

Five minutes into the performance a stray voice floated up from the road below, clear in the night air. “What’s goin’ on up there, huh?” it asked. The audience laughed, but it was a strangely contented laugh. Contented, I think, because it knew the answer to the question. Plenty was going on.

When you've seen one "Tartuffe," you've seen exactly one "Tartuffe"; you certainly haven't seen them all. I discovered this at a relatively tender age, having quickly come across variant playings of the famous under-the-table scene. A brief rundown, in case it's slipped your memory: the pious fraud, Tartuffe, has been trying and trying to seduce the wife of his benefactor, who simply will not believe the candid report his wife gives him; to prove that what she is saying is so, the lady orders her spouse to crawl beneath the table in the center of the room and wait till Tartuffe approaches her, whereupon he will hear lust rampant, deceit on the march. She does make a proviso: if matters should threaten to get out of hand, her husband is to pop out of his hiding place in time to preserve her virtue. A scene for actors and directors to dine upon, obviously.

It so happens that I first saw it done without a cloth draped over the table, which meant that we were not only able to watch the unctuous hypocrite's octopus-like pursuit of milady but could read the face of the hidden husband like a fever-chart. Initial confidence in his devout friend's rectitude. Slight surprise at the sound of a few strongly worded endearments. Comfortable rationalization and dismissal of same. Fresh alarm. Unmistakable shock. Humiliation at having been duped. Rage at having been wrong. Seething frustration at now having to remain under the table until the evidence is unmistakably complete. Impotent collapse and near-paralysis once it is complete, a psychic ennui that delays his appearance well beyond his desperate wife's endurance.

Grimaces? The gamut. An invitation to conscienceless mugging? Yes, it could be that. More, it opened the way to the kind of irrelevant sight-gagging that Moliere doesn't really need. I've seen actors playing Organ, the gullible husband headed for a cuckold's horns, grab a piece of fruit from the table before diving under it. Thereafter he peeled, choked on, and tore to shreds the banana or orange he'd taken along for sustenance. I've also watched an Orgon doze off into slumber, so confident was he of a scoundrel's innocence, only to be thumped awake by the crack of Tartuffe's own palm, beating the table-top in passion.

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Excesses, no doubt. But everything depends on the actor. The reactions, made visible, are all legitimate; they are also legitimately funny if the performer is an honest man. And the business of letting us see him has one marked virtue: it keeps Orgon at the center of the play. Orgon is, after all, the core of the piece; certainly he is its motor and he may be its meaning. Orgon initiates all of the essential action, taking the conniver with his rosary beads into his home, betrothing him to a most unwilling daughter, deeding him his property with nary a thought for his family. The piece is about Orgon's credulity; in its original form, Tartuffe was not even exposed, we were simply left with Orgon's offering everything he possessed to the mealy-mouthed houseguest who'd bilked him. Moliere, chief actor in his own company, played the part; that's where the meat was.

Yet the scene as scene plays best when the table is completely draped and Orgon concealed from view, a lesson I learned at the knee of the Comedie Francaise long after I'd grown accustomed to cross-legged antics in plain view. Suddenly focus shifts and a wondrous comic tension asserts itself. Our attention is centered on Elmire, Orgon's wife, now, and we share first her bewilderment and then her increasing panic as Tartuffe's assaults become more violent and Orgon does not appear from the folds of cloth that enclose him. We've imagined all his first reactions; we are able to do that for ourselves. What in heaven's name is keeping him now? The longer the delay the funnier the passage grows. We know the man to be obtuse. How obtuse? And what must Elmire do to rouse this mysteriously sluggish saviour? But notice something.

If it is Elmire who is making the comedy here - coughing ever more loudly to attract his attention, turning odd word-stresses into plain cries for help as she pries herself loose from yet another slimey embrace - we are nonetheless preoccupied with what preoccupies her: the tablecloth. And so we are once again preoccupied with Orgon, whether we can see him or not. Tricky. More complex. Richer.

Stephen Porter's new production of the play for Circle in the Square does use the tablecloth, and Tammy Grimes, as Elmire, calls down laughs sharp as thunderclaps in her baffled desperation, sometimes circling the table like a lion-tamer trying to draw one cat out of its lair, sometimes fiat on her back as John Wood's Tartuffe grows recklessly ardent. Yet there is something wrong with the sequence, which is no doubt why so many echoes of past performances came clattering into my head as I watched. Its rhythm is subtly off, a matter of unpredictable spurts rather than an enveloping progression. Miss Grimes's coughs do not seem to come in quite the right places; and the spaces between them are long enough for us to lose the thread of what she is up to. Mr. Wood's passion flares in fits and starts, too, and I'm not sure

it was at all wise to have him, during his inspection of the premises to make certain no one is overhearing, actually begin to lift the tablecloth; it's easy enough for Miss Grimes to halt him by bolting into his arms like a cannonball but once we realize he's thought of the spot as a possible hiding-place, we expect him to return to it; he doesn't, of course, and we've got an unfinished gesture on our hands. And Orgon, concealed, does not really remain a comic presence for us;

Stefan Gierasch, a fine naturalistic actor not overly skilled at stylization, has made him too straight earlier for us to revel in his discomfitures now.

****

Earlier. Thinking back, I gradually realized that the evening as a whole, handsome and generally well-cast as it is, have been bothered with erratic rhythms from the beginning. No two performers, for instance, had adopted quite the same approach to Moliere's, and translator Richard Wilbur's, rhymed couplets. Mr. Gierasch tends to read them for line-length, with no runovers, as though he couldn't get the look of them on a page out of his head. Patricia Elliott, whose impertinent house maid Is the evening's chief asset after Miss Grimes's Elmire, is, for a while, so eager not to stress the rhymes that she nearly skips them entirely, breathlessly plunging into whatever follows. Peter Coffield's raisonneur, stating the common-sense argument of the play at some length, makes the length seem longer by slavishly riding a metronome.

And the jumpiness carries over into the treatment of entire sequences. There's a very choice passage, for instance, in which two young lovers, about to be separated by the girl's father, somehow fall into injured petulance with each other instead of taking arms against the true culprit; feigning a haughty indifference, they adopt attitudes that are quite at variance with their own best interests. There are young fools as well as old, Moliere wants us to know. But it is essential, if the passage is to be as delicious as it ought, for Swoosie Kurtz, lips all atremble, and Victor Garber, voice pitched to hysteria, to fall into their foolish postures, unwillingly, unwittingly.

Here they rush into them before we have caught the moment of transition, with the result that the scene plays out more testily then tastily.

Mr. Wood offers us a Tartuffe of singular ferocity, a carnivore likelier to make mincemeat of a woman than to bed her. His technical dexterity is a marvel to shrink from: barefoot, knotted cord swinging from his waist, arms flapping wide as a bat's wings in his apparent eagerness to be crucified, he sends his fleshly demands racing up and down ravaged vocal cords most expertly. But his is an intensity almost beyond comedy - we do not take much delight in his casuistries, his devout justifications for endless venality - and there is finally something uncomfortable, even close to obscene, in his kneeling on a stool to confess, abjectly, openly, that he is thoroughly evil. We shouldn't believe him sincere; but we nearly do. The precision of the performance is remarkable but there is little playfulness in it; it is difficult to fit him readily into the daylight world of the others.

Since director Porter is an old hand at Moliere and quite the best hand we have, it is likely that the clashing cadences and unsettled relationships of the preview I saw will have settled down somewhat by this time and that, given enough playing, a seamless "Tartuffe" may emerge. Meantime we must snatch our intermittent pleasure - and it is considerable - from Miss Grimes, looking rather like Beatrice Lillie impersonating Elizabeth I of England, and from Miss Elliott, cocking her head so far to the left that you feel she is likely to lose it while reflectively trying to imagine the grisly charms of being married to Tartuffe. Incidentally, the two actresses could easily exchange roles some otherwise unbusy evening; that would be interesting, and, I'll bet, fun.