A Coney Island of the Mind

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In the Broadway season's most acclaimed musical, Stephen Sondheim's fairy-tale adaptation Into the Woods, a smudged and hapless Cinderella repeatedly sings of her yearning "to go to the festival." She has no idea what to do when she gets there. In fact, she does not quite know what a festival is, and its reality could never match her glittering, if vague, expectations. But a festival sounds like the height of glamour and sophistication.

Somewhat like Cinderella, cultural leaders of New York City have spent the past two decades pondering, and two years preparing, the city's first International Festival of the Arts, which they too want to be everything imaginable. The result: a month-long extravaganza embracing 350 theater, dance, music, film and video events in 55-plus venues, ranging from a Polish troupe re-creating 17th century religious ecstasy in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to a water ballet accompanied by video projections at the Columbia University swimming pool.

The opening weekend included gondoliers from Venice, laser beams playing over the Empire State Building, and 1,000 schoolchildren, police and Australian lifeguards performing the whimsical A Day in the Life of Coney Island under the direction of Jacques d'Amboise. These items attracted the attention of the station-wagon set. Other performances were, aptly, more serious and even arcane.

During its long gestation, the festival underwent repeated changes of rationale. In the 1970s it was touted as a way to counter the publicity fallout from New York's fiscal crisis, a prototype "I Love New York" campaign. Later, as other cities staged their own festivals -- including Los Angeles in 1984 and again in 1987, and Chicago in 1986 and again this spring -- a New York event became an issue of civic pride. By the time it finally got under way June 11, its goal was seen as mainly aesthetic. According to Founder Martin Segal, a financial consultant and chairman emeritus of the city's Lincoln Center cultural complex, the festival was to celebrate the attainments of the 20th century and thereby "prove that the times we were living in were not all that doleful."

Whatever its shape and purpose, the festival was bound to face complaints from a cultural community that is notorious for carping more than any wicked stepmother. Before the first trumpet or toe shoe had been lifted, critics were charging that the sprawling roster of events lacked focus, and had been inflated with items that were scheduled anyway or that are customary offerings of the city's arts institutions. Some ballyhooed events, they noted, were direct transfers: O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey into Night from the Yale Repertory Theater, Martha Clarke's Cocteau-like erotic fantasy Miracolo d'Amore from the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C. While the $4.3 million in available subsidies was welcomed, many in the city's arts community questioned whether the whole venture was needed. Explained Publicist Bruce Cohen, whose clients include several festival offerings: "New York City is an arts festival all the time. That's why we live here."

Nor was the festival without financial setbacks. American Express gave $3.5 million of the $8.5 million total budget and spent an estimated additional $8 million to $10 million on promotion. (Other corporate backers included Chase Manhattan Bank, Pan American Airlines and Louis Vuitton.) Yet initial ticket sales for many events were weak, and although they improved, few events would run long enough to recoup the lost income. Spectators may have been overwhelmed by the diversity of choice. Moreover, New York City audiences are prone to wait for reviews before they go to anything.

What had promised to be a theatrical high point of the festival had to be canceled because of low box-office receipts and a consequent lack of financing. Producer Ken Marsolais dropped the Maly Theater of Leningrad's seven-hour, 59-actor staging of Brothers and Sisters, a tragicomic depiction of a ravaged Soviet Union during and just after World War II. But after days of warnings about potential danger to East-West relations, he managed to substitute a less expansive Maly work, Stars in the Morning Sky, about prostitutes shipped into internal exile before the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Performances begin this week.

The 20th century theme does not mean an exclusive emphasis on the avant- garde. A cabaret-style tribute to Cole Porter traded on nostalgia, as did a Clark Tippet dance set to barbershop quartets for the American Ballet Theater. Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock from Dublin's Gate Theater is a robustly old-fashioned stage mix of comedy and tragedy, while the two O'Neill plays honor the centennial of the playwright's birth and star two of his foremost interpreters, Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.

Director Jose Quintero's lugubrious staging of Long Day's Journey, well-nigh perfect in its conventional way, lacks the revelatory quality of Jonathan Miller's fast-paced and fiercely funny version on Broadway in 1986. Dewhurst is almost poisonous as the often sanctified mother, yet retains a seductive girlishness. Robards dwells on the surface as her husband and fails to achieve the character's moment of transformation from a shambling old man into the brilliant actor that he was before he squandered his talent on easy applause and nightly whiskey. Thus the less esteemed Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Arvin Brown, here seems more satisfying. In this slice of Norman Rockwell life, Dewhurst and Robards achieve sensual chemistry as a Connecticut newspaper editor and his featherheaded wife, still in love after decades of marriage.

Of smaller theater items, the only outright triumph was I'll Go On, an arrestingly funny adaptation of Samuel Beckett's novels performed solo by Barry McGovern, an ingratiatingly blank-faced Irishman. Two Polish troupes offered incantatory visions, mostly in their native tongue: Gardzienice had ferocious energy in an alleged biography of a 17th century religious martyr but lacked narrative drive. Tadeusz Kantor's I Shall Never Return, a bitter reverie reflecting the successive political indignities visited on his native land, was much more skillfully shaded.

Although Segal originally intended to stress music and dance, the offerings in those fields have yet to strike many sparks. Like the Los Angeles festivals, the New York lineup gives too much attention to a genre variously classed as dance, except that the dancers are not trusted enough to be given anything interesting to do; or theater, except that the texts are typically minimal and witless; or performance art, except that the real emphasis is on props and tricks rather than performers. A case in point: the pretentious numbers staged by Bill Forsythe, an American, for his Frankfurt Ballet.

The same complaints might be made about Clarke's Miracolo d'Amore, which is rescued by being exquisitely beautiful. Clarke usually credits a painter with inspiring her imagery. This time it is Tiepolo. But the ancient crone sweeping and cackling, the commedia dell'arte clowns, the quartet of nude women gently interweaving in a dance, the men employing a variety of bird noises, the eerily believable copulation between a girl and a skeleton also bring to mind Cocteau and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Diaghilev. If more explicitly violent and more frequently nude than necessary, Miracolo is nonetheless a fitting tribute to what was freshest and most original in early 20th century art. Recalling it, audiences may well end as Cinderella does, despite her tribulations, in Into The Woods. Once on the throne, she wants nothing more than to hold another festival.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York