Off-Broadway, By Halves

Off-Broadway does things by halves most of the time, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. A playwright may get his hands on a fresh or exciting theme, but through clumsy craftsmanship, inept direction or an amateurish cast, the stage effect will be fumbled. Conversely, acting skills and staging techniques of a high order will sometimes be lavished on trivia, or the feeblest works of fine playwrights, or plays on tired subjects.

This season, off-Broadway has been particularly plagued by one-halfmanship, and its strongest impact has been the feeling that an off-Broadway evening is far from wasted yet less than richly satisfying.

The Self as an Unmade Bed. The good half of Telemachus Clay is its brilliantly evocative staging, the indifferent half its overfamiliar theme--the quest for identity, based on a personal history that sounds the way an unmade bed looks. Playwright Lewis John Carlino (Cages) uses the name Telemachus to invoke the son of Odysseus who could not draw his father's great bow. Carlino's Telemachus is illegitimate, and he searches for the lost father and the fullness of manhood in his Spoon Riverish home town and later in Hollywood.

This quest is electrically charged by Director Cyril Simon. Eleven actors sit facing the audience as ingenious lighting plays over them to orchestrate speeches and scenes like music, so that the playgoer feels that he is experiencing the thematic flow of the hero's life --lyrical, staccato, abrasive, brassy and blue. There are remarkable impressionistic renderings of states of feeling: the disembodied rush of a transcontinental train sucked through the vacuum of night, the empty-souled writhings of some Venice Beach bopniks. But in the end, the hero still seems incapable of drawing the bow of manhood.

The Playwright as Label. The one-halfmanship of buying a playwright's brand name on a piece of inferior work is illustrated by Jean Genet's The Maids. Two maids (Lee Grant and Kathleen Widdoes) dress up in their mistress' finery and plot her murder by poisoning her tea. The mistress (Eunice Anderson) avoids drinking the tea. One maid commits suicide, and the other expects to hang. For Genet, the theater is an instrument of the outcast's fantasized revenge: his characters ritually murder the authority they hate and envy by donning the vestments of the powers that be and play-acting their roles. In The Maids, this proves to be no more scarifying than little children playing grown-ups in their parents' clothing.

A popular half-form is the adaptation, half novel and half play. A novel has the time to grow imperceptibly, like a tree, acquiring added rings of meaning. A play is more like a duel or a trial. In a brief two hours it must draw blood or render a judgment.

This pitfall has trapped J. P. Donleavy in adapting his novel The Ginger Man, although he has fashioned an arresting amoralist as his antihero. Sebastian Dangerfield (Patrick O'Neal), an American studying law in Dublin, is life-prone and dead beat. His head is more often in his cups than his books. He is one of Nature's seductive heels, and in the most brilliant scene in the play, he seduces a mid-thirtyish spinster whose tempestuous flesh mocks her primly parochial morality.

The distinctive half of The Streets of New York comes from an able, well-drilled cast and a smart-looking professional production. The musical, lifted from a 19th century plotboiler by Dion Boucicault, revolves around a dastardly banker, and the evening would be more sappy than happy if it were not for the wittily euphonious lyrics of Barry Alan Grael and unforced melodies of Richard Chodosh.

A Legacy of Pain. In one of two compelling off-Broadway offerings that do have unity of tone, meaning, and performance, a consciousness of massive injustice and personal sorrow settles movingly upon the playgoer. In White America is a poignant chronicle of the Negro's centuries-old legacy of pain, oppression, and denial, from the days of slavery to the present hour. It is an evening of dramatic readings thoughtfully culled from the statements of Presidents, the reminiscences of ex-slaves and ante-bellum Southern matrons, the rantings of bigots. Sensitive actors make the word intolerance become flesh, tortured, torturing and unanswerable.

In In White America, pain is self-contained; in The Trojan Women, grief screams like a woman in childbirth. This Edith Hamilton translation of the Euripides classic has been directed by Michael Cacoyannis with brooding eloquence, cyclonic passion, and such cruel inner hurt that the stoniest playgoer must seek relief in tears. Pain paints the backdrop like a sky of blood. Pain drums the floor boards in the rhythmic open-palmed agony of the bowed women who must become the slaves and bedmates of the conquering Greeks. Pain frantically grips a little boy between his mother's legs before he is taken from her and thrown from the parapets of defeated Troy. The boy's body is returned on his dead father's shield, and as the corpse lies there, like a tiny crumpled animal, pain speaks again in the unpierced stillness that is more dreadful than weeping.

The laws of Greek tragedy are that when the worst has happened, something worse will happen, that the unbearable exists so that man may bear it, and that life is a problem to which the only solution is death. Rarely have these inexorabilities been brought home to a modern audience with more telling force than in this masterly revival. In the leading roles, Mildred Dunnock, Carrie Nye and Joyce Ebert deserve the compliment of the truth, that they are worthy of the playwright. If there is a more perfect method for re-creating this great tragedy than Director Cacoyannis has displayed, the difference may not be worth discovering.

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