New Openings on Broadway

The Importance of Being Oscar is a one-man evening -- Actor-Playwright Micheal Mac Liammoir's account of the rise and fall, the life and letters, of Oscar Wilde. In the first half, Mac Liammoir offers a world all bons mots and boutonnieres, of the spotlighted esthete, of the lush poetry and the languid pose, of feats of personality and triumphs of playwriting. In the second half, which begins with Wilde's imprisonment, Mac Liammoir portrays the reviled man, the repentant sinner, the reproaches in De Profundis to his fellow sinner Lord Alfred Douglas, and the last salvation-seeking, wit-flecked Paris years.

Of Mac Liammoir's real versatility and virtuosity there can be no question. Of his devoted saturation in his subject there can be no question either. Yet the evening's total effect is somewhat mixed. The very length that makes such performing remarkable makes it also redundant. And doubtless a theatrical presentation of a very theatrical personality will have a slightly over-theatrical effect. But Mac Liammoir has helped this on by his choice of material and his own frequent way of acting it out.

Only less remarkable than how brilliantly Wilde could write is how badly, and at times Mac Liammoir seems to use the bad less for thinking it expressive of Wilde than for thinking it good. There is small effort to recall the most dazzling talker of modern times, and far too much to stress Wilde's scarred and suffering side--in whom the play-actor yet persisted.

Oscar Wilde, in adversity, might call shallowness "the supreme vice"; but shallow-ness--a wonderfully rewarding shallow-ness--is what went deepest in him. And much more than when sincerely contrite, he is tragic in the superb gallantry of such humor as when, standing handcuffed in the pouring rain, he murmured: "If this is how Her Majesty treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any." By omitting such touches and emphasizing Wilde's plangent side, and by himself--if often eloquent--being often florid, Mac Liammoir piles Pelion upon Oscar, and turns what he dubs a baroque and rococo story into a rather mawkish and Victorian one. In both men notable showmanship can become mere staginess.

Big Fish, Little Fish (by Hugh Wheeler), despite a good deal wrong with it, is honest, unhackneyed, ably acted, and quite worth seeing. Center of it is William Baker, a once-promising, now dribbling, minor publishing-house editor who is yet the big fish for a group of skimpy has-beens and pallid never-weres. There are William's dull mistresses, who have been more habit-forming than exhilarating; there is a culture-nibbling male spinster, a self-centered, vermouth-soggy ex-publisher. Dancing around William at birthdays and get-togethers, they bicker and collide, inflate their roles, deflate their rivals; while darting dandiacally in and out is a successful literary glamour boy, cruelly kind as he hurries off to grander feasts.

It is he, however, who gets William a big new job that means coming to life again and -- to the horror of his hangers-on-moving to Switzerland. But the play's last act, instead of untying all its knots, makes one or two into nooses.

Writing of derelicts on a raft and of a captain with but half an oar, Playwright Wheeler himself can get rather tossed about. Psychologically, his center remains rather dead; William never quite materializes. And in what is more of a group picture than a developed story, there is sometimes labored humor in the dialogue, sometimes flatness and forced pathos in the scenes. All the more for treating of fumbled lives, Big Fish needs a firmer hand.

But it can be a good writing hand.

Wheeler catches the tyrannizing loneliness of his people; their comic crotchets and wacky thoughts; what has turned to dust in them, and sediment, and vinegar; the mixture of bluntness and pretense; the sharp nails on their dead fingers, the sharp pangs in their dried-up frames. Like Chekhov, Wheeler can pity without prettifying, and see what is funny in what is sad.

And along with what failure exposes, he shows what success does : his glossy young novelist and smooth Swiss publisher zoom like heedless fast cars among stumbling pedestrians. In the play's ambivalent pic ture of haves and have-nots are its keen est knife-thrusts.

If Big Fish at times provides rather the sense of something than the very thing itself, the production works always in its favor. Under John Gielgud's able direction, every performance is good -- Jason Robards Jr. as William, Hume Cronyn as the spinster, George Grizzard as the glam our boy and, even better, Martin Gabel as the ex-publisher and George Voskovec as the Swiss one.

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