Old Play in Manhattan

He Who Gets Slapped (translated from the Russian of Leonid Andreyev by Judith Guthrie; produced by the Theatre Guild) made box office of bewilderment when it was first produced on Broadway 24 years ago. Audiences were seldom quite sure what Andreyev's circus tragedy meant, but it fitted neatly into a culture-crazed era that wore its art on its sleeve. He Who Gets Slapped was unquestionably Slavic, questionably symbolic and flamboyantly gloomy.

On Broadway last week, He seemed a good deal less freighted with inner meanings. It seemed, in fact, what it doubtless always was--a piece of theater, of emotional bravura, of florid fiddling. Behind its clown's make-up there was nothing much of a face. Yet the makeup, at first glance, was by no means unstriking. For half the evening, indeed--while its melodrama seemed crouching to spring--He had a jittery tension, a rataplan rhythm, a glare of circus lights and blare of circus music, that were theatrically vivid. Then things got fuzzy and highflown, and the melodrama lost its edge, the atmosphere lost its eeriness. The minor characters became tiresome, and the main character turned operatic.

The main character is a celebrated man who, betrayed by his wife and best friend, masochistically underscores his humiliation by becoming a circus clown named Funny. Most of the others in the circus, he soon learns, are unhappy too. Funny (Dennis King) falls in love with a charming, childlike little bareback rider whose depraved nobleman of a "father" is on the point of marrying her off to a rich, lecherous baron. When he finds he cannot stop the marriage, Funny, with considerable fanfare, poisons himself and the girl.

Far too unreal for life, He Who Gets Slapped lacks the true overtones of art. Perhaps it suggests that a circus is but a smaller version of the world, and as misleadingly gay a one; perhaps it shows how people love to dramatize pain, how grossness is always buying up beauty. But none of this, is new, whatever the '20s had thought, and it is not made compelling. It is only, at its best, made spectacular.

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