Revival in Manhattan

King Lear. Erwin Piscator, 47, is the slight, grey son of a German Protestant family of Hessen-Nassau. He was drafted into the German Army during World War I, directed front-line theatricals. During the post-war social crisis he became a leading German radical impresario, a theatre figure almost as big as Max Reinhardt. He produced great plays frankly as propaganda, stressed all possible class-war angles, emphasized mass effects rather than individual actors. Determined to get his audiences "into" the plays, he abolished the curtain, had actors play in the aisles, loudspeakers sound from all parts of the house. His theatre became a versatile expressive "machine," blending plays, films, radio.

Six months before Hitler came to power, Piscator went to the U. S. S. R. to show his ideas, then to the "German University" (largely refugee) in Paris. Last spring he made his U. S. debut in Washington, D. C., with a conservative production of Shaw's Saint Joan, feebly played by Cinemactress Luise Rainer. Currently Piscator is director of the 400-seat Studio Theatre of Manhattan's New School for Social Research, many of whose brilliant staff are political refugees. There last week he gave King Lear, first of a subscription series of plays.

The net effect, anything but theatrically outlandish, was of a richly lighted Lear centring around a grey hill of steps that revolved for scene changes. The actors often pointed up the dialogue by posturing up and down the steps. They also made sallies into the aisles. If Piscator intended to de-emphasize the individual actors, his accomplishment was not noticeable. The veteran Sam Jaffe (of The Jazz Singer, Grand Hotel and Hollywood) was a subtle, moving Lear whose chief fault was that his appearance kept suggesting that ex-Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis was playing the part.

Piscator feels that Lear's picture of the ravages wrought by the power lust is especially relevant nowadays. It is. Whether or not Piscator's or others' stage inventions can add to Lear's bitter power, Piscator's Lear is a stimulating job.

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