Quartet

By T.E.K.

TINTYPES Conceived by Mary Kyte with Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle

This show is a box of delectable bonbons, most of them early 20th century musical Americana. Tintypes is tender rather than torrid, its nostalgia is toothsomely sweet, not gooey.

There are close to 50 songs all together, clustered in sections that form a kind of rudimentary sociocultural chronicle. In "Arrivals," a Jewish immigrant (Jerry Zaks) just off the boat sings The Yankee Doodle Boy with an accent you could ladle with a chicken soup spoon. Later, as a fully assimilated show-biz tintype, he repeats the same number a la George M. Cohan.

The evening never gets stuck in gridlock. Tintypes has been nimbly and stylishly conceived by the trio of creators, who also serve as choreographer, pianist-conductor and director. Doing skits as well as songs, the five-member cast is in perpetuum mobile. Carolyn Mignini, as Anna Held, is a seraphic soprano; Mary Catherine Wright, militancy incarnate as Emma Goldman; and Trey Wilson makes a bully "T.R." And in a gentle zephyr of a show, Lynne Thigpen is a bracing typhoon belter.

THE SEA GULL by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's insistence that his plays were funny simply proves that the best of dramatists may be the worst of guides. The mainsprings of The Sea Gull's plot hardly elicit laughter. The jaded Trigorin (Christopher Walken), a fashionable author of about 35, is sensually drawn to Nina (Kathryn Bowling), an innocent 18-year-old. Watching Nina cradle a freshly killed sea gull, Trigorin jots down a writer's note: "An idea for a short story. A young girl has lived in a house on the shore of a lake since childhood, a young girl like you. She loves the lake like a sea gull, and she's as free and happy as a sea gull. But a man comes along, sees her, and just for the fun of it destroys her like that sea gull there." Since that is precisely what happens, how funny is it?

Is it funny that the middle-aging actress Arkadina (Rosemary Harris) is desperately clinging to Trigorin as her last lover, and is so hermetically narcissistic that she contributes to the destruction of her son, the avant-garde writer Konstantin (Brent Spiner)? Is it funny that Konstantin loves Nina, who regards him as a nuisance? Or that he, in turn, is loved by the vodka-swigging Masha (Pamela Payton-Wright), whom he detests?

No. There is humor in Chekhov, but it lights the interstices of his work, not the core. At the center is pain--of unrequited love, of oppressive boredom, of raw edgy nerves, of desolating aloneness.

Under the telling direction of Andrei Serban, the revival at Manhattan's Public Theater embraces all these aspects of Chekhov in part or in whole. The cast is admirable, and Serban's painterly eye groups them in configurations that enhance Jean-Claude van Itallie's faithful and felicitous adaptation of the text. Best of all, this production captures the ruminative pauses in Chekhov when people seem to be listening to faint, melancholy music borne across still, nocturnal waters.

THE WINSLOW BOY

by Terence Rattigan

"Let Right be done" is a tenet of the English courts. Off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater has done right by The Winslow Boy, which first appeared on Broadway in 1947. The "well-made play" was much in vogue at that time, and in the carpentry of artifice, Britain's Sir Terence Rattigan probably had no peer.

The story, drawn from a real event in pre-World War I Britain, involves Ronnie (David Haller), a naval cadet who has been expelled for supposedly stealing a five-shilling money order. Convinced that his son is innocent, Arthur Winslow (Ralph Clanton) launches a David-vs.-Goliath struggle against the powers that be. Thanks to a top barrister (Remak Ramsay) whose icy hauteur masks a passion for justice, the boy's name is cleared, but the economic and emotional costs are high, especially for Winslow's daughter Catherine, who loses her fiance. The strikingly attractive Giulia Pagano makes her spunky, perceptive and vulnerable. She is an actress whom you watch from the beginning and are bewitched by at the end.

A LIFE by Hugh Leonard

Irish Playwright Hugh Leonard is a kind of family doctor among contemporary dramatists. He probes the aches and pain of a lifetime. Drumm (Roy Dotrice), the unheroic hero of A Life, whom we first met in Leonard's "Da, " is an aging civil servant with razor-blade lips and a cut tingly witty tongue. He is dying of cancer, and what he finds out in this play is that he has squandered his life by suppressing it.

From boyhood on, he made few friends because he was so aloof and acerbic. He lost the only woman he loved (Aideen O'Kelly) by making her feel like an intellectual donkey. He has squelched his wife (Helen Stenborg) and berated his truest friend (Pat Hingle) for being a boozy buffoon.

An unappealing fellow, one may grant; yet his tart tongue yields much of the evening's not inconsiderable humor, and he wins the audience's grudging affection and concern by having applied more cruelly exacting standards to himself than he has to those he has mocked. --By T.E.K

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.