Fops & Philosophers

The School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan, and Right You Are by Luigi Pirandello. Whatever their age, these plays have the wine of life bottled in them. Settling down in a Broadway theater, the APA, the nation's most harmonious repertory troupe, deftly uncorks and pours out that life.

Right You Are is 48 years old, and there is scarcely a grey line in the script. It is a kind of intellectual and philosophical whodunit, aimed at discovering the truth of a situation. A government clerk (Sydney Walker), his wife and his mother-in-law (Helen Hayes) have recently arrived in an Italian town. Their new neighbors are all agog because he keeps the women in separate quarters, so that they can communicate only via notes put in a lowered basket. A convocation of irate gossipmongers, including the clerk's boss, summons the mother-in-law for an explanation.

She somewhat lamely argues that the son-in-law is so possessively in love with his wife that he shuts the mother out.

At the mother-in-law's exit, the distraught son-in-law appears and explains that the old lady is mad. Her daughter died four years before, and the woman kept in the apartment is his second wife. He acts as he does to preserve the mother-in-law's illusion. No sooner has he left the room than the mother-in-law reappears to argue that her son-in-law is the mad one. Her daughter had been placed in an asylum, and when she returned, cured, the son-in-law would not acknowledge her as his wife. The wife remarried him under a changed name, and the mother-in-law placates the son-in-law by accepting his delusion.

Baffled by the equal credibility of both witnesses, the investigators demand to see the wife. She appears in a heavy black veil, announces that she is the mother-in-law's daughter and the son-in-law's second wife. "For myself," she says, "I am she whom you believe me to be." In one of the many meanings he intends, Pirandello says that truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Obsessed with illusion and reality, Pirandello was ironically amused at the assurance of most people that they can tell which is which. He held the self to be an impenetrably veiled mystery. The character named Laudisi (Donald Moffat), who speaks for Pirandello in the play, says: "What can we really know about other people? Who they are, what they are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it?" The busybodies of the world who try to lift that veil find no truth, but they do uncover the pain at the heart of existence. If the motherin-law's daughter died, or if the son-in-law's wife was taken to an asylum, it may, in either instance, have been a reality too terrible to face. Pirandello agrees with O'Neill that man must have illusions to make life bearable.

If Right You Are is fraught with secrets too terrible to tell, The School for Scandal is full of secrets too scandalous not to whisper. The APA company rubs a trifle too much humanizing balm and not enough stingingly satiric acid into the pores of the play, and the production is no 18th century match for the high-styled revival presented on Broadway three seasons ago by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Yet it does have one incomparable delight: Rosemary Harris as Lady Teazle, the country kitten who comes to London town, takes the burr out of her purr and meows down the city minxes.

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