Salome's Revenge

THE VISIT

by FRIEDRICH DUERRENMATT

Like Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch, Switzerland's Friedrich Duerrenmatt is one of those didactic dramatists who regard the theater as a classroom, the stage as a blackboard, the pen as a pointer and the playgoers as barely educable dolts. These playwrights take a dim view of man, dividing the species into two arbitrary categories: predators and prey, the fleecers and the fleeced. No one would deny that such characters are abundantly present in life, but to see the entire pattern of human behavior in these terms is one-eyed vision. As propounded in The Visit, currently being revived by the New Phoenix Repertory Theater, the lesson of the one-eyed is: Everything can be bought.

This old and unreliable cliche remains in vogue precisely because it is a comfort to the cynically inert conscience. Why risk a moral stance if evil, greed and calculated self-interest will invariably win out? Win they certainly do in The Visit. Clara Zachanassian (Rachel Roberts), a middle-aging, much-married multimillionairess, has come back to her impoverished home town of Gullen with a rather special proposition. She will bestow half a billion marks on the town and another half a billion to be divided equally among its citizens in return for what might be called Salome's revenge.

Seduced, impregnated and run out of town at 17, she has come back for what she calls justice: nothing less than the life of her then youthful betrayer Anton Schill (John Me Martin), now an amiable, bumbling shopkeeper and a town favorite. Responding in outrage, the townspeople treat Clara's offer as a macabre joke. However, they promptly proceed to plunge into debt on the supposition that Clara will bail them out without the sacrificial killing. Finally faced with the alternatives of penury or plenty, the citizens stage a trial in which Schill is condemned to death as a kind of enemy of the people.

The play is tricked out with melodramatic devices that keep it moving suspensefully, though often with a heavily ironic tread. Always fastidiously attentive to detail, Harold Prince has directed in the mode of stylized Expressionism, which helps mask gaping implausibilities in the writing.

While the two leads can scarcely dispel the powerful memory of the 1958 Lunt-Fontanne production, they establish their own interpretations with unstrained validity. Rachel Roberts brings a commandingly icy meanness to Clara while hinting at a lost tenderness. In recent seasons, John McMartin has established himself as an actor of distinctive range. He has played the disenchanted author in Follies, the skeptical servant Sganarelle in Moliere's Don Juan, and the mask-divided soul Dion Anthony in O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Now, as the hero of The Visit, he is initially bland, wistfully nostalgic about his early romance, then terrified and finally stoically resigned. Paradoxically, his work, as well as that of the rest of the cast, refutes the play's central theme. Money alone could never buy it.

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