The Playhouse Is the Thing

All the playhouse needs is a moat, and it could pass for a medieval fortress. Yet it is not forbidding. The new home of Houston's 21-year-old Alley Theater is a child's idea of a castle--a genuine playhouse. The sandblasted concrete with its nine turreted towers glows like imprisoned sunlight; glass has succumbed to stone. And behind the facade, inner grace balances outer strength. The stairways are cascades of red-orange carpeting; the low ceilings are dimpled with lights embedded in them like flat moons, and the throwaway nooks and crannies have no function except to delight the eye.

The atmosphere is invariably one of warmth, and the architectural scale is everywhere measured by human dimensions. Architect Ulrich Franzen is a master of the broken line and the ingratiating curve. Nothing is rigid and antiseptic. Masculinity and femininity thrust, parry, yield and wed in a superlative marriage of craft and art. The main theater itself, a semicircular urn of intimacy seating 798, is a kind of womb with seats. Decked out in soft brown and nuzzling together like cattle, the rows of theater seats are concentrated reminders that the playgoer is in an edifice indigenous to the Southwest, a vivid memory link with the adobe hut and the Alamo. Aided by the Ford Foundation ($2,400,000) and bolstering that grant with $900,000 from the pocketed dimes of children as well as the black gold of oil, the people of Houston have much more to show for the money than a structure of civic pride. They have that unique treasure, a native home of the spirit.

Symbolical Journey. Perhaps the playhouse is so fine because it is a gift of love. It was built for a person as well as a purpose. It is Houston's outpouring of affection for Nina Vance, 53, a perky, scrappy woman who founded the Alley and fought for regional theater before the words were invented.

Her choice of a first play, Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, to launch the new theater was symbolically correct. Houston is the nation's space center, and on opening night 30 of the U.S.'s 52 astronauts were present. They journey among the stars that Galileo peered at through his heretical telescope.

Unfortunately, Miss Vance's direction of the play does not soar into orbit. Perhaps the shift in sheer playing space from the postage-stamp stage of the old Alley Theater was intimidating. A risky lark tends to become a sobersided responsibility when culture receives the imprimatur of opulence. In this production, everything that was raging and revolutionary in Brecht has been quietly domesticated. The central confrontation of the play, the direct clash between the authority of divine revelation and the authority of scientific observation, is muted.

False Messiah. As Galileo, Tony van Bridge is far from the ravenous sensualist of thought that Brecht had in mind, a man as avid for "a new idea as for an old wine." He nibbles fastidiously at a part that calls for gorging. This glutton of the mind is an intellectual mercenary. He will retract theories, integrity and self-respect so long as he is paid off with his life. Knowledge is an appetite for him and not an unstained banner of loyalty to scientific inquiry or a mandate to kill the belief in God. He is the typical Brechtian hero-heel, a seemingly intrepid liberator of mankind who is cringingly adept at saving his own skin, a born false Messiah. Brecht rather ingenuously indicts Galileo for not ushering in a sempiternal age of reason and for recanting before the agents of the Inquisition. Actually, Western man adopted an unquestioning faith in science that more than redressed any betrayal of freedom of thought that might properly be ascribed to Galileo. But the earth and men's minds have turned again since Galileo's day, and they now question whether science has not led them with the former inexorability of religion toward madness and potential oblivion.

In this pedestrian production, all that is least attractive in Brecht becomes dismayingly visible. He is a classroom martinet using the stage as a blackboard for his highly debatable theorems. He is forever barking out class-conscious slogans at what he regards as an inattentive crew of playgoing idiots. The Teutonic condescension of the man finally becomes as irritating as it is boring. Inspired direction can mask the defects of monumental didacticism, the preachiness of a Shaw without wit. This Director Vance fails to do. In Houston right now, the playhouse is the thing.

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