Two by Two

Off-Broadway offered double bills by two talked-about playwrights :

Garden District comprises two Tennessee Williams plays laid in New Orleans. Something Unspoken, dealing with an uppity society woman and her secretary-companion, is a warm-up piece that leaves the spectator cold. Suddenly Last Summer is a vivid display of Williams' unique virtues and persisting excesses. A kind of psychological suspense piece, it works backward from the knowledge of a self-luxuriating "poet's" death to the nature of it. His rich, ruthless mother had long shared her son's dubious traveled life, but when she had a slight stroke, he took a young girl cousin on his final, fatal trip. The cousin's appalling story of his death has caused the mother to have the girl put in a mental institution; now she is using her money as a club on relatives and doctor alike. Instead, the skeptical doctor (Robert Lansing) gives the girl an injection of a truth drug, and out of her pours a story ending with the poet's hideous, obscenely cannibalistic fate.

A narrative that after a deft slow start keeps gathering fascination, Suddenly Last Summer is further proof that Williams at his best is unsurpassed in the American theater at weaving dark spells, and unequaled at writing long, full-breathed dramatic arias--first the mother's (well done by Hortense Alden), then the girl's (done brilliantly by Anne Meacham).

Unhappily, Williams' story dies with his telling it, for though he weaves a spell he cannot validate a vision. It matters less that noisomely misanthropic symbols keep recurring in his work than that they nowhere seem purgative. With Swiftian ferocity he reveals a Swiftian tormented-ness; and as with Swift, however much he retches, he cannot disgorge.* More culpably, Williams' gift for theatricalism makes the how of Suddenly Last Summer devour the why, turns the horrifying means into an end in itself.

With The Chairs and The Lesson, Rumanian-French Eugene Ionesco, whose work has been about equally hailed for its meaning and hooted for lack of any, had his first professional Manhattan hearing. In The Chairs, dubbed "a tragic farce," an aged couple who live in a sort of wave-washed fortress give a party for a horde of guests who are only so many chairs. After the old man (Eli Wallach) has delivered a "message" about the world, he and his wife throw themselves into the water. Swimming in symbolism, The Chairs readily enough suggests people's enisled fate in life's estranging sea, their efforts to flesh their daydreams, enforce their beliefs, communicate, be remembered. Providing playfully humorous touches and some remarkable stage effects, The Chairs is at times both engaging and lightly evocative, but calls for greater imaginative pressure, has no really tragic underside to its surface drolleries.

In The Lesson, a mad professor harangues and finally kills an odd, 17-year-old student (played as winningly by Joan Plowright as she plays the 94-year-old wife in The Chairs). The play perhaps symbolizes how pedantry destroys individuality, but like so much anti-academic satire, runs to academic jokes. Ionesco's seems an agreeable but thin talent, with a kind of philosophic-puppet show appeal.

* Playwright Williams, who is undergoing analysis, recently said that Suddenly is "a final fling at violence."

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