Regional Crucible

With the start of its fifth season at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Theater Company represents a kind of crucible for the bubbling promises, heady aspirations and worrisome perils of most U.S. regional theaters. The program consists of a new play (Harpers Ferry), a classic (The Shoemaker's Holiday), and a minor work of a major playwright (Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival). Each in its own way serves to illustrate the hopes, habits and problems that animate and afflict regional theaters.

Regional theaters would like to put on new plays, and the Minneapolis production of Harpers Ferry is the premiere performance of the Barrie Stavis drama. While his intent is admirable, the aridity of the script testifies to the dearth of U.S. playwriting talent. In its tiny way, Harpers Ferry is as disastrous as John Brown's raid. Stavis has submitted a series of affidavits rather than a drama, as the characters continually testify to action that is happening offstage rather than on.

Mouthfuls of Wind. Starting from the agreed-upon historic evil of slavery, Playwright Stavis cannot hope to stir up much dramatic conflict. He is forced to fall back on an ex post facto irony supplied by history--namely, that John Brown's misguided zeal helped to spark the holocaust of Civil War. Mouthfuls of windy rhetoric scarcely help, nor does the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, who has sculpted his actors in bas-reliefs as stonily static as the play.

The pride, but seldom the joy, of the regional theater is its revival of neglected classics. The passage of centuries frequently reduces such plays to the bleached bones of greatness, and it takes supremely gifted actors and directors to restore the living flesh. Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday is a 1599 plotboiler--and about as brimming with life as a 368th class reunion. To give the text a tonic lift, Director Douglas Campbell relies mostly on the broad byplay of slapped buttocks, knowing winks and donkey laughs--not exactly the elixir of dramatic life.

The hero of the play, Simon Eyre, is a shoemaker who climbs with casual assurance to the post of sheriff and then "becomes lord mayor of London. Eyre is a kind of workingman's Falstaff with some of Sir John's gusto but none of his wit. Campbell plays the part as if he were clowning in an alehouse and bellows his lines like an order for more drink. The production fails to impose a tonal unity on the play: it wobbles incessantly between Elizabethan local color, carnival gaiety, and caustic social comment. Every ten minutes or so, the company buffets the ear with song to vary baffling it with speech.

Stalking in a Villa. For a novelty or a challenge, regional theater loves to pull out a play from a playwright's next-to-bottom drawer, and often it gets stuck. Jean Anouilh was 22 when he wrote Thieves' Carnival in 1932, and appears to have apprenticed himself simultaneously to Noel Coward and the Marx Brothers. The play somehow lacks both the polish of high comedy and the absolute zaniness of low farce. Though fashioned out of whole froth, the play's manner must be stylized; the chief difficulty, in or out of Minneapolis, is that the U.S. actor, unlike his British counterpart, does not yet know how not to be natural.

Three partners in crime, disguised as two ruined Spanish noblemen and their ecclesiastical secretary, insinuate themselves into a palatial villa in Vichy. Also on the premises are a father-and-son fortune-hunting team busy stalking the two wealthy nieces of Lady Hurf. Eva, the disillusioned elder niece, runs through lovers like stockings; her younger sister Juliette--the only innocent of the play --believes in love as a morning glory trusts the sun.

Bits of funny business raise ripples of laughter that never quite swell into waves. One of the thieves is so beside himself with love for Juliette that he begins stuffing his swag bag with old magazines, ash trays and scatter rugs instead of diamonds and pearls. The later Anouilh would have leavened this charade with deft ironic epigrams about the aimlessness and cynicism of life. The best that Thieves' Carnival produces are lines like "If your lovers bore you, marry one of them. That will give the others an added fascination."

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