Directors Fiddle, Authors Burn

By Richard Lacayo.

"A

complete parody of the play," read the judgment. "Anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted." It was the kind of criticism that theater people dread, but there was worse. The statement was stapled to the playbill, and it was written by the playwright.

Last month the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., opened a new production of Endgame, Samuel Beckett's 1957 comedy of despair. In his stage directions, the Nobel-prizewinning author specified a parched setting, an empty room with two small windows. Director JoAnne Akalaitis set the action instead in a kind of postapocalyptic subway station, with puddles and a derelict train car. She also added music composed by her ex-husband Philip Glass.

Reinterpretation and updating have long kept classic plays limber. Audiences today are accustomed to gospel versions of Sophocles or Paleozoic resettings of Shakespeare. But Sophocles and Shakespeare live on Parnassus. Beckett lives in Paris, and he threatened an injunction to block the Endgame production. Just before opening night, both sides agreed instead that the show would go on. But attached to each program would be disclaimers from Beckett and his American agent and publisher, Barney Rosset, along with a defense of the production by Robert Brustein, A.R.T.'s artistic director.

In a letter to Brustein, Rosset had also questioned the casting of black actors in two of the play's four roles. Last week Actors' Equity, the stage performer's union, denounced such objections. Said the executive secretary of Equity, Alan Eisenberg: "We've got to raise the consciousness of the playwright to the concept of nontraditional casting."

Beckett, whose consciousness is already perched in the higher altitudes, holds that his stage directions are not embellishment but requirements fundamental to his play's radical astringency. And the play's the thing, he insists. Brustein, the eminent former head of the Yale University School of Drama, counters that theater is an amalgam of creative efforts, with contributions by the director, designers and actors. Says he: "The play, while the most important aspect, is not the only one." Brustein draws a distinction between new plays and those already in the canon. When staging a premiere, a director should respect the letter of the playwright's intentions. "The analogy is with Shakespeare," says Brustein. "The first performance of Antony and Cleopatra put Cleopatra on stage in a hoop skirt. Does that mean that all future productions should?"

Perhaps not. But increasingly, well-known playwrights are using legal pressure to insist that their intentions are respected. Last week Arthur Miller for the second time forced an avant-garde Manhattan theater troupe, the Wooster Group, to stop using portions of his play The Crucible in a production called L.S.D. In August, Edward Albee compelled a Texas stage company, Theater Arlington, to cut short its revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The production had converted Albee's squabbling heterosexual couples into a quartet of gay men. The director points to the oft-repeated rumor that this was Albee's original intent, a claim the playwright has denied.

The leasing contracts of Albee's plays stipulate things that may not be changed. "Specifically," he says, "actors must be of the same sex as the characters." What about Brustein's argument that if the theater is to remain vital, directors must be free to interpret? "There is a fine line between interpretation and distortion," says Albee. "There are certain stage directions that are meant to be followed."

With reporting by Sara White/Boston