Delicacy & Violence

Without scenery, well-known actors or advance fanfare, Cameo Theater (Tues. 9:30 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) last week presented one of the most exciting plays ever shown on U.S. television. It was a tense, deceptively simple dramatization of Shirley Jackson's disturbing New Yorker short story, The Lottery. Crowding the TV screen with dramatic close-ups and using music scored for an unusual orchestra of organ and musical saw, Cameo took its audience into an isolated village of uncertain time and place to witness the celebration of an annual rite and its grim ending: the communal stoning-to-death of a luckless citizen.

In its printed form, The Lottery had almost as many interpretations as it had readers. As adapted for TV, it was an emotionally moving, if logically unconvincing, indictment of prejudice. "They did a beautiful job," commented Author Jackson, "except that I don't think it was my story."

To Albert McCleery, the 38-year-old ex-paratrooper who produces and directs Cameo Theater, the "beautiful job" was what mattered most. An admirer of the "arena" theater (TIME, June 12), he got his early training at Gilmor Brown's Pasadena Playhouse, was briefly a movie writer (The Lady Is Willing) and, as head of the Fordham University Theater, set up one of the first arena theaters east of the Mississippi. After "wasting a year and $50,000 of NBC's money" doing standard TV shows, McCleery got his chance to experiment with the month-old Cameo Theater.

Operating on a budget of $2,000 a week (some $5,000 less than the average half-hour TV network drama show), McCleery solved the problem of sets by not having any. "If we need a wall, we just let the absence of light stand for a wall," he explains. In the resulting gloom, his cameramen have been known to crawl around on hands and knees, with matches or flashlights, to find their camera positions. But, though the staging may be dark, the actors are highlighted. "I'm trying to paint pictures with faces," says McCleery. "You can only do it by getting so close that you can see what the eye does and the heart does."

McCleery has some doubts that he will be able to duplicate the impact of The Lottery on any of his remaining shows. "Just like everyone else," he says, "we have trouble getting good scripts. All the wealth of NBC couldn't get me 18 good shows." His aim is "to show we can do things of delicacy and violence by using the arena theater in television. Isn't that enough for a starter?"

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