The Four Seasons

Two people in love can, and inevitably will, be each other's heaven and hell. So argues Arnold Wesker in his latest play, The Four Seasons, which opened, off-Broadway last week. Love buds in spring rain, blossoms in summer ardor, withers and stales in autumnal tiffs and recriminations, and turns to icy death in a winter of unfeeling. The play is intimate and perceptive, though it lacks dramatic vigor. The language that might have lifted it to poetry is too often absent. Yet the playwright's intent is aspiring and his subject compels attention.

Wesker's two lovers--symbolically named Adam (Paul Roebling) and Beatrice (Barbara Hayes)--begin in winter. They are weary, wary, and thirtyish. Their minds are haunted by the ghosts of mangled marriages and past lovers, betrayed and betraying. Having died several times from the internal wounds of love, they do not want to start "all that again." But Eros is a bully boy, and they do.

Of necessity, there is more talk of love than lovemaking. In their amorous monologues, the two tenderly rue the fact that they could not present themselves to each other as virginal offerings. He adorns her with endearments, and she deifies him with worship. Yet in one explosively funny scene in which he prepares a strudel, the battle of the sexes erupts. She is testy because he has invaded her cooking domain.

Seasons is fundamentally static, and it seems to move more from conclusion to conclusion than from scene to scene. Wesker is good at suggesting how a couple in love becomes the most exclusive club in the world. He registers the fierce chemistry of passion by which the Other Woman swiftly becomes the Only Woman. Where Wesker is strongest he is also weakest, since the language of love is finite and, in his prosaic words, even banal.

To love means to give, and notwithstanding Wesker's pedestrian imagery, the play rates a Q.E.D. on its major proposition. The fact that it was written by a kitchen-sink realist like Wesker is added evidence that the generation of British playwrights that began by looking back in social anger is now looking forward in private anguish.

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