The Unfabulous Invalid

A few seasons back, playgoers rushed to off-Broadway theaters the way children tumble downstairs on Christmas morning, breathlessly expecting the unexpected present. But too many lemons showed up in the theatrical stocking, and audiences became wearier and warier. Production costs jumped, and off-Broadway found itself increasingly prey to the worst of Broadway's ailments, the hit-or-flop syndrome. So the off-Broadway theater is in crisis-an un-fabulous invalid. Luckily, this decline has zapped most vanity productions and self-indulgent exercises in beatnicknack-ery. The remnants, plus some earnest repertory and some irreverent topical comedy, still offer venturous playgoers a measure of dramatic experiment and serious theater.

"In America, We Bathe." Starting with its production of Robert Lowell's The Old Glory last season, the American Place Theater has been commendably true to its name. This is a theater group that strives to bare the roots of American experience, to record the resonances of the American locale. The strength of its current Hogan's Goat is its evocation of Irish character, customs and political power in the Brooklyn of 1890. Beneath the blather and the brogue, it is as if a well of ethnic memory had been tapped, and the making and unmaking of an American cascades turbulently across the stage.

In the first scene, Matt Stanton, the hero, describes his immigrant passage across the Atlantic in midwinter, seven weeks of steady rain. The men and women in the fetid, icy hold were unhousebroken animals. Beslimed in his own filth-a symbolic rebirth-Matt rises from the hold to be dashed with the condescending baptism of the new world: "In America, we bathe." In the strangled fury of his pride, Matt learns a new commandment: "Get power. Without it, there can be no decency." There is precious little decency in Matt's struggle for power. He steals a mistress away from the mayor, then grabs for the mayor's job. But old Mayor Quinn is as wily as he is corrupt. Quinn breaks Stanton's wife's heart and kills Matt's political chances.

It is Playwright William Alfred's harsh unvarnished view that the turn-of-the-century Irish were bewildered ex-peasants yearning for feudal authority, a leadership that became polarized in two figures: the priest and the politician. The priest, astringently played by Barnard Hughes, is torn by a mixture of pity and contempt for his people, and he exerts his authority as though he were a bouncer in a perpetually unruly bar. The politician, an arm-twisting, Jim Curley-like charmer, played with resourceful guile by Tom Ahearne, has one key speech in which he punctuates a list of catastrophes with the words

"But I kept my office"--a reflection of centuries of embittering Irish disenfranchisement.

Hogan's Goat does put on airs. It is a sentimental melodrama posing as an austere tragedy. Its blank verse is merely pumped-up prose. As playmaking, it is wildly, datedly implausible. Ethnically, it suggests that minority groups in the U.S. have a manifest destiny to disappear. The success of the dream is the death of the dream, and in one glamorous assimilationist triumph, President Kennedy abolished the limited Irish vision of local bosses, ward-heelers who could imagine no greater glory than to be nimble crumb collectors at the table of power.

All Jaw, No Teeth. A different kind of goat is involved in the Mad Show-- the goat that satirists always hope to make out of such national pastimes as soap-flake TV operas, movie epics, ad jingles. The result: a kind of pleasant-evening-was-had-by-all occasion.

Thanks to its three-man, two-woman cast, the show is funnier than its material, which takes its style from the sappy smile of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad magazine's trademark moron. The actors do versatile impersonations of the specialized zany-the hi-fi nut, the folksong nut, the technician nut whose means totally dwarf his ends. One of the funniest skits in the show features a TV sportscaster team that, with superb professional aplomb, misses the kickoff, the touchdown play, and even the score of a championship game, while cutting to "our man on the field," interviewing the coach, and breathlessly spieling, World Almanac-slye: "This is only the third time in a Hawk-Rocket game that a safety man of Polish extraction has broken both legs on the 20-yard line."

Merry as the bedlam often is, the critical fact remains that U.S. stage satire is all jaw and no teeth.

"That Flesh-Eating Beast." All jaw and sophistical truth-aches is what ails The Condemned of Altona, at Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater. Jean-Paul Sartre loves to play moral dentist to his time, and this play is his low-speed drill for making everyone cringe with guilt. An aged German shipping tycoon (George Coulouris) is dying of throat cancer, and he wants to get hand-on-the-Bible oaths of dynastic fealty from his daughter and two sons. Immured in an upstairs room, the elder son, Frantz, has not been seen by his father for 1 3 years, ever since World War II ended. Dressed in a bedraggled German officer's uniform, he hurls things at a faded poster of Hitler, sips stale champagne, occasionally munches on "war medals" made of Swiss chocolate. His sister brings him food and incestuous love.

Frantz's allegorical name, of course, is Universal Guilt. He is punishing himself for having tortured men on the Russian front, and the only image of Germany he can permit himself is that of a desolate landscape of expiation. He must deny modern German prosperity and seek a severer judge than history or time: himself. He is reconciled with his father only at the price of a suicide pact, and the pair drive into a nearby river. Frantz's tape-recorded voice goes on sermonizing in the library: "The century might have been a good one, had not man been watched from time immemorial by the cruel enemy who had sworn to destroy him, that hairless, evil, flesh-eating beast --man himself."

Justice v. Fate. This monistic vision falsifies life. Man is a beast - he may also be a saint, a sage, or an averagely decent human being. Like Arthur Miller, another public accountant of guilt, Sartre wants to even the score of past wrongs, to wrench justice from fate. This mentality is impervious to the tragic sense, the view of existence best expressed by Ortega y Gasset when he said: "The condition of man is essential uncertainty. Man feels himself lost, shipwrecked." Nor can Sartre, as an atheist, accept the dispensation of Christian grace, which redeems the sinner without denying the sin. In Sartre's world, the problem of evil is as shallow as Narcissus' pool. The self accuses, judges, justifies and condemns the self.

The best of acting companies might be able to touch off a dramatic explosion with this philosophical hydrogen. Manhattan's Lincoln Center troupe remains fireproof.

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