Amateur Nights

The National Repertory Theater has been touring the U.S. for five years. Rarely has theatrical mediocrity been spread so widely for so long. The company has also pocketed some $105,000 in National Arts Council grants, not a dime of which can be traced in the amateur-night stagecraft of its cast and directors. Last week the N.R.T. appeared on Broadway with dramatic choices that were varied in content yet reflected the standard repertory mentality: combine one old classic (Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid) with one serious American play (O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet) and sandwich in a filler of froth (Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30).

The N.R.T. stooped to conquer Moliere by condescension. Rarely trusting the playwright's lines to speak for themselves, the company gimmicked up the play with whoops and simpers, vaudeville pratfalls and putty noses. Invalid takes off after doctors and their gullible patients with a Shavian vengeance. But Moliere's prey is not his purpose. Like all masters of high comedy, he essentially diagnoses man's incurable diseases--vanity, pretension and folly. The bell-capped revelers of the N.R.T. are blind to this underlying gravity.

Poet, a late and lesser play of O'Neill's, is a sort of Iceman Crumbleth set in 1828. The Irish emigrant hero is an impoverished Massachusetts tavern keeper adrift on booze and Byronism, who rages at wife, daughter (Jeanne Hepple) and creation. Actor Denholm Elliott buries the poet in a rubble of rant, and the cast mouths more different brogues than there are counties in Ireland. As for Noel Coward's brittle trio of one-acters, time has partly damaged them, and this butter-fingered troupe completes the job.

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