Theater: The Price Is Right

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The world's wealthiest woman shows up at the impoverished village of her birth and offers improvements beyond imagination, plus a fortune for each man, woman and child. There is one catch: the townspeople must murder their popular mayor-elect. In his youth he seduced and abandoned a poor girl so he could marry a little money. Now old and rich, she wants vengeance. She believes everyone has a price, and she is right. Friedrich Durrenmatt's morality play THE VISIT seemed shockingly cynical when the Lunts brought it to Broadway in the '50s. In a sad measure of the disillusioning years since, it now triumphs as a comedy. Harris Yulin is fine as the betrayer and Jane Alexander dazzling as the raddled revenger. But the real star is Alexander's husband Edwin Sherin, who has directed in high Austro-German style, most of the characters sporting masks and sounding like puppets. He controls the tone unerringly. The simpler and more childlike the telling, the more piercing the satire gets in Broadway's finest revival of the past half-dozen years. W.A.H. III