Family Communion

By T.E.K.

IN CELEBRATION by DAVID STOREY

Families are a funny breed. They draw, spill, suck and drink the blood they share. They seem to survive everything with dumb granitic tenacity. What they give to each other is measureless, like divine grace; what they take is inexorable, like mortal fate.

David Storey's In Celebration, presented by Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, is in the tradition of the finest family plays. Its relatives leap to mind: Long Day's Journey Into Night, Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, The Homecoming, Like them, it is incessantly poised between laughter, tears and the unfathomable mystery of existence. Like them, it is a loving, sorrowing armistice with the past.

Written years before Home, The Changing Room and The Contractor, In Celebration is Storey's most personal play. The first three are exactly ob served, but in them Storey distances au thor and subject with fastidious detachment. In Celebration seems to have been axed out of the playwright's heart. While writing this work, Storey must some times have seen blood red.

The setting is an English coal-mining town. The three sons of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw are joining them to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Mr. Shaw (Donald Ewer) has gone down into the coalpits for 49 years. He has a lung-dusty cough, a ready thirst and a powerful conviction that he has saved his boys from the red-brick slavery of a Midlands industrial warren.

The boys, or men, arrive, and it gradually becomes clear that class escalation has taken a toll. Stripping away the complex humanity of Storey's characterizations, one sees that the eldest son has become an acerbic, vengeful fire brand; the middle son, a priggish, glossy Establishment apologist; and the young est a haunted, weepy, torn-apart teacher. What is immediately apparent is that the emotional ground between parents and sons has been land-mined. Affections that are not actually felt are masked in billboards ("To the finest mother and the finest dad") while genuine feelings of tenderness are muted in throwaway lines or not uttered at all. There is a lacerating poignance in this.

To some degree, the parents are spared because they continue to see the boys as boys. There are ready, fond and funny reminiscences of their scampish escapades. But on another level, too much planning and sacrifice have been invested in making the boys proper successes to admit baffling failure.

More Immune. It is scandalous to Mrs. Shaw (Katherine Squire) that Andrew (Stanley Anderson), the firebrand, should have ditched his law career to be come an abstract painter. Why has Steven (Philip Charles MacKenzie), the youngest, with his odd, pervasive silence, quit work on his incisive book about modern society? Colin (Paul Collins), the brother in industrial relations, pleas es his mother mightily by announcing.a forthcoming marriage. Consider his rea son: "It's just less embarrassing to be married than not to be."

Saved from the coalpits for a moral and personal abyss? Storey himself has written of the play: "I felt the basic tragedy was that education has alienated everyone in the family, all of them, rather than enhancing their lives . . . thus the impulse of one's parents was ambiguous. They said they wanted you to have a better life, but what they really meant was they wanted you to be better off. Richer. More immune to life."

The Arena Stage company gives an ensemble performance of lustrous brilliance. In tempo, mood and nuance, John Dillon's direction shows Chekhovian sensitivity. The evening provides one of those rare instances when bright rays of honor shine on the playwright, the audience and the theater.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.