Nothingness Is All

By T.E.Kalem

DAYS IN THE TREES by MARGUERITE DURAS

The prevailing mood of this play is that of a fitful breeze stirring faded autumn leaves. Its central figure is an old woman (Mildred Dunnock) haunted by her impending death. She ruminates on many things and, like the play itself, comes to grips with none. Known only as "The Mother," she talks of old age, of passions spent and love unrequited, of parenthood and the serpents' teeth of thankless children. Since the play was originally written some 20 years ago by French Novelist, Dramatist and Film Writer Duras, it is very much in the theater-of-the-absurd tradition and echoes that genre's abiding theme --whatever we do or do not do, nothingness conquers all.

Just a Gigolo. This old woman has come to Paris for a last visit with her favorite son (Joseph Maher). As a boy, he used to idle away hours in the trees. As a man, he has idled away his life as a compulsive gambler and is now a gigolo in a nightclub. The woman he lives with is the club hustler (Suzanne Lederer). The conversational pas de trois that these three engage in is replete with bitterness and non-sequitur absurdist humor. The performers are also forced to carry an elephantine load of symbolism.

They are up to it. Dunnock unfalteringly reveals the interwoven strands of love and hate in a mother's heart, and Joseph Maher is splendid in conveying the sleazy, yet captivating charm of one of life's eternal dropouts.

Days in the Trees seems like a bad dream from which the playwright could not awaken. Nor can the actors who shudder convulsively with the dire reality of it.

T. E. Kalem

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