Classics Revisited

By T.E. Kalem

Like virtually everything in the theater, the revival is an enterprise of high risk. In addition to normal hazards, it must compete with the playgoer's memories of past productions or expectations aroused in the classroom or the library. In an era of relative creative dearth like the present, a spate of revivals comes to the fore as the theater's defensive mechanism of survival. Some are delightful, some are dreadful, all are instructive; it is invariably interesting to see what the effects of time, changing values or an altered milieu have had on a classic. Some current revivals on the New York boards:

MEDEA, by Euripides, is a tale of vitriolic passion. The heroine (Irene Papas) is a sorceress from Colchis. She falls in love with Jason (John P. Ryan) and helps him regain the Golden Fleece. In the process, Medea betrays her father and murders her brother.

The play proper begins in Corinth where Jason-mean, unloving and ungrateful-has become engaged to Glauce, the daughter of King Kreon. In a fury of revenge, Medea arranges the death of Glauce and Kreon through the device of a poisoned robe. Suppressing all motherly instincts, she hacks to death the two children she has had by Jason.

The first thing to note about Medea is that it is an un-Greek tragedy in Aristotelian terms. Though Medea fell in love with Jason through the agency of the goddesses Hera and Aphrodite, the deities are conspicuously absent from the play as instruments of inevitability. The heroine does not fall through a fatal flaw, or die, and the catharsis of pity and terror is largely missing. Medea wreaks havoc on herself and those around her by fulfilling her own nature, that of being a creature of unbridled emotions. To Euripides and his Greek audience, the tragedy was probably regarded as that of all humankind whenever passion overcomes reason.

In his fluent adaptation. Director

Minos Volonakis has taken another tack. He views Medea as a social tragedy in which the heroine is victimized as a racial alien and violated as a woman simply because she is a woman. Greece's Irene Papas, who has often played aggrieved and grieving women (Z, Electra, Iphigenia in Aulis), brings to the role a controlled intensity, an innate intelligence, and an implacably stubborn anger. To humanize the part, however, is to make it somewhat less than awesome in its sweeping horror. The paradox remains that the Greek playwrights gave us a gallery of women who bewail their powerlessness while these very same women are as flintily, dauntingly formidable as any of their sex ever seen on or off a stage.

THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS, by Sean

O'Casey. The play tells of the Easter Rising of 1916, a kind of futile miniature war seen through the eyes of the innocent bystanders. O'Casey's tragicomic vision is almost as constant as Shakespeare's, and his ironic sense of people and events moves always through counterpoint. After some fancy blather about "the glory of bloodshed," one sees the terrible reality of a boy dying of a stomach wound. Nora (Roberta Maxwell) pleads desperately with her husband not to go on with the fighting. He leaves her, is killed, and she goes affectingly mad.

Despite the tragedies of war and death, laughter and the mean and drunken energies of life go on. While a British warship is shelling this Dublin slum, O'Casey's characters are out looting the shops, trying on fancy hats, trundling pianos down the streets and pulling big double beds out of broken shop windows. O'Casey's turbulent canvas of humanity makes him almost a Brueghel among playwrights.

What goes wrong with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater revival is that O'Casey's people are ineluctably Irish, and this cast, with one exception, playacts at being Irish. The exception is Jack MacGowran, who is vastly impressive as Fluther Good, a cocky, reeling indomitable sparrow of a man with wistful repentance on the brain and wet wit on his tongue.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD, by

Anton Chekhov. An aristocratic family of spent means and etiolated will is about to lose its ancestral home and beloved cherry orchard. By symbolic extension, the privileged are about to lose all of Russia. Everyone has his favorite Chekhov play, but no one has ever seriously denied that this is one of the greatest plays in the entire history of dramatic art. It is a daunting venture for any group of actors, and especially for an all-black cast such as this, since black actors have had such meager opportunities to play classic roles. Insofar as this production at Joseph Papp's Public Theater is a test of the thesis that blacks can play traditionally white roles with equal credibility and excellence, the results are inconclusive. There is proof, however, that proper casting is as imperative with blacks as with whites.

Two key roles in this Cherry Orchard are miscast, not as to skill, but in terms of temperament. Madame Ra-nevskaya, who cannot bring herself to uproot the orchard and build a housing development, ought to be enveloped in actressy vanity and a flighty inability to cope. Yet Gloria Foster displays little vanity and seems to possess such granitic strength as to have sold the estate and axed the first cherry tree herself. Lopakin, the son of a serf, who buys the Ranevskaya property at auction, is played a shade too unctuously by James Earl Jones, who also lacks the quality of a steely, patient peasant finally coming into his own. Earle Hyman, on the other hand, succeeds as Madame Ra-nevskaya's billiards-obsessed brother Leonid. Hyman's portrayal of world-weary neurasthenia and narcotized memories of past luxury perfectly realizes one important aspect of the play.

DON JUAN IN HELL, by George Bernard Shaw. This is Act III of the four-act Man and Superman. It is usually left out of the play, since it has only a tenuous connection with the rest of the larger work and lasts two hours all by itself. It is a dream sequence set in hell, with four characters out of the legend made famous by Moliere and Mozart: Don Juan; Dona Ana, whose virtue he attempted to assault; the Commendatore, her father, slain by the archseducer; and the devil. In all of English drama, there is no more dazzlingly sustained discussion of ideas in dialogue. The words sing, the ideas go off like fireworks. It is like a great parliamentary debate in which the members orate arias with the omnipresent Shaw in the Speaker's chair. Behind it all is Shaw's master paradox: that hell is the kind of heaven most people crave, with the devil as a genial host offering comfort and the best of company. But heaven is for the ardent, soldierly few, driven by divine discontent and the life force, who see man only as an unending bridge to his better self.

As the devil, Edward Mulhare is an urbane charmer, and Paul Henreid's Commendatore and Agnes Moore-head's Dona Ana are all that could be asked. In the title role, Ricardo Montalban is superb, no libertine at all, but Shaw incarnate, with his puritan passion for exposing hypocrisy and cant. If all our minds are freer of the pollution of smug platitudes, it is because Shaw, with his Jovian laughter, helped to clear them. --T.E.Kalem

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