The Michigan Daily-Tuesday, April 3, 1979-Page 7
arts & entertainment
Four plays tickle Albee fans
MAGGIE SMITH In 1 969
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie
Forget the maudlin theme sung by ROD McKUEN if you can
and come to see MAGGIE SMITH as the outrageously ill-
informed and irrepressibly mad Brodie. She's a teacher at an
exclusive Guru's school in the 30's and a little old to get
taken down the primrose path. Academy Award for Best
Actress.
WED: BETTY BOOP CARTOONS
THURS: Lucas's THX 1138
Cinema Guild
TONIGHT
7:00 & 9:15
OLD ARCH. AUD.
$1.50
I I
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
It's a fascinating though often
sobering experience to be re-introduced
to formerly cherished, lately forgotten
works of art to see if they have
withstood the test of time. Such is the
unavoidable test forced upon Edward
Albee's The American Dream and The
Zoo Story, two in a quartet of one-act
plays staged and directed by the
playwright Saturday at Power Center.
Two decades ago, Albee burst into a
stagnating American theater like a
lightning bolt. American Dream and
Zoo Story exemplified what was
proclaimed an avant garde revolution:
The former was an overtly ex-
pressionistic fantasy which was ger-
minal in defining the term "black
comedy;" the latter was a more
stylistically conventional yet searing
interplay of grim humor and horror
that did as much as any work of its time
to delineate the lonely anguish of the
''beat generation."~
Though his work in the subsequent
fifteen years has all too often dwindled
into clever, baroque triviality, this
decline might ironically be a case of
Albee the man resolving the inner tor-
ment that}provoked the genius of Albee
the playwright.
The American Dream (1960) and The
Zoo Story (1958) are primary products
of the author's white-heat period, and.
it's interesting to see whether they
carry the same urgency for today's
audience. Dream depicts images of
sterility, castration, numbness - at-
titudes endemic to all of Albee's work.
His living room tableau brings us
Mommy: Loud, overbearing, stridently
trivial; Daddy: Ineffectual, fearful,
anal-oriented; and Grandma: Wise,
angry, far more flamboyantly full of
life than her twisted offspring. Gran-
dma grieves for Daddy and despises
Mommy, who chronically threatens to
have Grandma carted away by "the
van men."
The play is flecked with absurdist
delights: A proper and prim society
matron, Mrs. Barker, comes visiting,
and exclaims in the most dripping
lexicon of social convention: "What an
ugly apartment!" Mommy asks if she's
like to take off her dress; Mrs. Barker
voices gracious thanks, then does so ("I
feel ever so much more comfortable.")
With the savage precision of a Magritte
anomaly Albee mourns the corruption
of the language into mindless decorum.
Into this polyester environment
walks The Young Man, on the surface a
,wandering stud cliche. Self-absorbed in
his looks and demeanor, he forges an
unlikely alliance with Grandma; two
generations removed, they stare at
each other across an emotional chasm,
yet somehow make contact. The Young
Man is the perfect handsome walking
ideal of nothing - the devolved product
of three generations mutated into min-
dlessness: "The American Dream."
Dream's performances were
generally adroit, though Anne Bar-
clay's Grandma suffered from a poor
makeup job and a tendency to swallow
some of her best lines. Patricia
Kilgarriff was bitchily ferocious as
Mommy, and Wyman Pendleton suf-
ficiently simpering and cringing as
Daddy (Pendleton's age posed a
problem, though: Did his ineffectual
fumblings imply asexuality or simply
approaching senility?) Eileen Burns'
elegant Mrs. Barker was glitteringly,
phonily perfect.
As The Young Man, Stephen Rowe
delivered his lines in an offhand,
vibrant manner sharply contrasting the
traditional mannequin projection of the
part. The interpretation lent a certain
air of hope to Albee's bleak,
domesticity, in style if not in content.
The American Dream may need not be
a dead-end clone - perhaps we can
evolve forward again.
Albee's direction of The Zoo Story
also exuded a subtle shift in emphasis
which may indicate a mellowing in the
.dmm. lqw
playwright's personality. Zoo Story's
structure is simple but riveting: A well-
dressed man sits reading on a bench in
Central Park on a Sunday afternoon. He
is approached by a disheveled, slightly
dangerous-looking young man, who
strikes up a conversation with him.
Over the course of the next hour, the
young man - named Jerry - reveals
himself as a veritable walking
catalogue of alienation, a resident of
urban Hell unable to make contact with
the simplest objects around him. He
contorts his entire visage at the sheer
agony of existence - "with howling
because you're alive."
As Jerry rips off the coverings of his
soul - often amusingly, as is Albee's
trademark - he also drags his not-too-
willing listener, Peter, into a similar
look at his own psyche: Though finan-
cially well-to-do, Peter is revealed as a
fearful, prissy, brow-beaten man: A
subtler version of American Dream's
Daddy.
Jerry excoriates Peter with a verbal
sadism Albee later refined to a razor's
edge in Virginia Woolf; he toys with
him, searing him with a disdain ex-
ceeded only by Jerry's loathing for
himself.
Through this contrast of extremes,
Jerry feels he has somehow achieved a
kind of communication, a link, even if
only with a dog. Albee's unsettling
message that a synthesizing of great
kindnesssandscruelty are "the teaching
emotions" serves as the ominous
prelude to the play's violent, apocalyp-
tic climax.
Once Zoo Story debuted, the charac-
ter of Jerry became a symbol of
modern estrangement to dozens of
literary descendants - from Teddy in
When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? to
Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. Yet one is
a bit perplexed as to just how Albee
perceives his protagonist today.
Though Zoo Story nimbly, almost
simultaneously juxtaposes comedy and
tragedy (no one equals Albee at th i
art), one detected a subtle shift in em-
phasis in the Power Center production.
Albee seemed to pace his two charac-
ters in a more snappy, contrapuntal
style, eschewing some of the play's
darker mode in favor of rapid-fire
repartee. Many of Jerry's confessional
monologues took on an almost musical,
rhythmic quality, as if the
author/director had become preoc-
cupied more with tone than with con-
tent. In the process, The Zoo Story's
black comedy elements seemed to
override its tragic overtones to the
point where the audience was still emit-
ting mirthful responses - not
necessarily misplaced - right through
the play's shocking, horrific final
moments.
Stephen Rowe's Jerry was wondrous
to behold. An absorbingly physical ac-
tor, Rowe paced the stage like a grimy,
caged panther, giving vent to all the
pained fury built up in, a lifetime of
loneliness. Wyman Pendleton was
somewhat less successful as Peter,
with the actor's advanced age once
again distorting the scenario. Though
the two characters are supposed to be
of comparable chronology, the obvious
age gap between the two performers
make Jerry's purposeful bullying
smack slightly of a senior citizen
mugging.
T-h'is is a significant departure in
form, and one with which I'm not very
comfortable. Though it seems logical
and right to accept the author's own in-
terpretation as the definitive viewpoint,
I harbor vague suspicions that Albee
feared Jerry's pure rage wouldn't stand
up in 1979, that a more sardonic, less
fiery interpretation was necessary to
reach today's audiences. If so, it
represents a philosophical retreat
which cheapens his play's power, which
I feel remains as vibrant today as it did
20 years ago.
By ANNE SHARP
Many years ago, Mad magazine did a
feature on The Shortest Books Ever
Written. One of the titles was "The
Warm, Wonderful World of Edward
Albee". Albee the playwright is no sen-
timentalist. Gut-level tragedy, with all
its pity and horror, is his meat and
drink, and he has abandoned the more
facile trappings of traditional theater in
order to convey them in s'tark reality.
Albee is best known for angst-ridden
works like Zoo Story and Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? Perhaps it was in the
script, or in the way Albee directed his
work, but Counting the Ways, the Albee
one-act which opened Saturday
evening's show at Power Center, was a
most un-albeesque little entertainment.
Counting the Ways is a charming, funny
series of very brief vignettes. A fiftyish
woman, (Patricia Kilgarriff, with a
frizzy, short perm), asks her husband
(Wyman Pendleton) as if in an aside,
"Do you love me?" Of course he does;
he is a jovial, aesthetic fellow, quite
pleased with the way things are, but af-
ter a few blackouts it appears that the
woman is dissatisfied ,with 1their sex
life; she tells us about it, in typical
Albee fashion, both cryptically and in
gross detail.
ALBEE IS NO pretty poet, and he
reminds us that love in this world
equals sex. Meanwhile, He (Albee's
character), perplexed and hurt, asks
her why there are now two little beds in
their room, instead of one big one.
A loud, Pavlovian bell sounds from
the control room at this point. "Identify
yourselves," orders the booming, un-
seen, Godlike voice of the stage
manager over the intercom. Smiling,
all out of character, Patricia Kilgarriff
springs to her feet and, slightly flushed,
explains to the audience that this is
where Albee directed them to interrupt
the play and speak extemporaneously
about themselves.
The two return to their places after a
brief personal exposition, resume
character, and Pendleton cries, as if
nothing has happened, "Separate
rooms! Oh, God!"
WHAT MAKES Albee's plays -so
enigmatic at first (or second or third)
glance is that he introduces the unin-
formed observer to a set of complex
people who, it seems, existed long
before the author wrote down their
struggles, and who never stop living for
a moment in order to explain to the
audience what the hell is going on in
their lives.
The husband/wife relationship in
Counting the Ways is obvious from the
outset, which is probably why the
audience found the play so amusing and
accessible.
However, Listening calls on us to play
plot detective again. Three characters
meet in a decaying, lush garden: a man
(Wyman Pendleton), a woman, (Eileen
Burns, a great lioness-haired Margaret
Tyzack of an actress), and what we
gather is supposed to be a young girl,
but is really Patricia Kilgarriff in one of
those grinning, grotesque performan-
ces given by mature tragediennes who
are forced to play roles which are far
too young for them. What follows is
your typical, inscrutable, subterranean
Albee situation, as difficult to explain
as to explicate, with tangled relation-
ships aboundiig.
Though the entertainment value was
negligible, Listening did boast a
magnificent performancedby Eileen
Burns. As the cruel, flippant, brooding
woman of the garden, she clearly
dominated the stage, a character we
loved to hate.
It's so seldom that exciting, original
stage performances like Albee Directs
Albee come to this sedate, uninspired
University town. Maybe some angry
young man or woman found some in-
spiration insAlbee's visit here, and will
decide to start his own revolt against
theatrical convention. A bright thought
for the future of the U-M drama depar-
tment, but not a very likely possibility.
The University of Michigan
Gilbert and Sullivan Society
Presents
Or
'The Lass That Loved A Sailor'
April 5-8 and 12-14,1979
Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre,
Ann Arbor
Tickets availb"e at the Mendelssohn Box Office
10 a.m.-B p.m. Coll 763-1085.
SPECIAL STUDENT RATE
Students with U of M I.D. may purchase tickets
at a discount for performances on April 5, 8, and
12. These tickets will be on sale only from 2-4
p.m. at the Mendelssohn Box Office'the Wednes.
day preceding the performance.
Price: $2.50 LIMIT: 1 ticket/U of M I.D.
.
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The Ann Arbor Film Cooperetive presents at ALB 3
TUESDAY, APRIL 3
MY LIFE TO LIVE
(Vivre So Vie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) 7 only-MLB 3
More has been written about MY LIFE TO LIVE than perhaps any other Godard
film. A young French girl becomes a prostitute to make a living, and becomes
caught in a relationship with her pimp. Concerned with the relationship of
words to feeling, images to reality, the film prompted Susan Santag to de-
scribe it as "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful and original works of
art I know." With Anna Karina. In French, with subtitles. Music by Michel
Lengrand.
WEEKEND
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1976) 8:30 only-MLB 3
Perhqps the greatest film of its kind, this is Godard's last and most incisive
look into the 60's. "The film must be seen for its power, ambition, humor,
and scenes of astonishing beauty."-N.Y. TIMES.
THE WAR IS OVER
(Alain Resnais, 1966)., 10:30 only-MLB 3
MIAGILIN
SPECIAL GUEST
LARY CORYELL
;,
WEDNESDAY- MAY 2-8pm
HILL AUD." ANN ARBOR
TICKETS $6.50,
550,
450