Old Play in Manhattan

The Family Reunion (by T. S. Eliot) opened a season at the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater that will consist of works by Nobel prizewinners. Though written 19 years ago, The Family Reunion has, perhaps with reason, never before been professionally staged in the U.S. It is difficult to stage, since both the inwardness of its drama and the trickiness of its dramaturgy are difficult to project. Yet the play is worth producing, however serious its shortcomings. For it more than endeavors; it experiments. And it not only has a certain academic interest where it fails, but where it succeeds it is close to unique.

Eliot, after completing Murder in the Cathedral, was determined to write a verse play with a contemporary theme and a contemporary setting. The drawing-room setting he contrived was not only fitted for traditional moments of comedy, it made for eerie moments of contrast. The nobleman hero's return to his family, to confess to his own guilty crime while absent and then to smoke out the atmosphere of crime and guilt that haunted his childhood, is charged with ominous Aeschylean echoes. The Greek Furies themselves still hunt the criminal down, until he is able to convert an Orestes-like fleeing from doom into a Christian pursuit of salvation. Against this search for light are placed things blind and self-centered in contemporary life--a mother's passionate willfulness, a smug family's hush-hush gentility.

Eliot himself, one of his play's harshest critics, has deplored its not fusing Greek story with modern one, its exalting "versification at the expense of plot and character." And all too often The Family Reunion seems remote just where it should be intense, seems to be abstraction without even the vividness of allegory. Bloodless, it fails to cut quite to the bone; it is only those inwardly dead in the play who ever seem outwardly alive.

But though never really dramatic, The Family Reunion can become suddenly theatrical; its Chorus of Uncles and Aunts, although too selfconscious, can be amusing or striking; the atmosphere can quiver with menace; and the expertly managed verse is flexible as other things are rigid. Stuart Vaughan's sound staging and Norris Houghton's shapely set make for helpfully stylized effects, although a cast that includes Florence Reed, Lillian Gish and Fritz Weaver tends to act in varying styles. The cast, understandably, come off best where Eliot did--with the language.

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