A Summer Drama Festival: Tufts, Wellesley, Harvard

The year 1958 provided serious theatregoers in the Boston area with a good deal of summer dramatic fare. The season as a whole fell somewhat short of last summer's level, which was the highest within memory. Still, there were plenty of things this summer to be especially thankful for.

The brunt of the burden fell, as before, on three institutions: the Group 20 Players at Wellesley's Theatre on the Green, the Boston Summer Theatre in New England Mutual Hall, and the Tufts Arena Theatre in Medford.

Cambridge itself had two productions, staged by a group of students who called themselves the Harvard Summer Theatre Group.

Of all the companies, the Group 20 Players maintained the highest quality in choice of play and level of production. They offered four shows instead of the announced five, since two of the four proved to be such hits that each was held over an extra week, and the scheduled production of Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates was dropped at the season's close.

Sheridan's School for Scandal got the season off to a running start. A study of hypocrites and slanderers and their various entanglements, it is the classic English comedy of manners, reviving all the wit but not the obscenity of its Restoration predecessors. Even so, for years it could be presented in this country only under the guise of a "Comic Lecture in Five Parts on the Pernicious Vice of Scandal."

Oft-mounted as the play is, the chances are that it will probably never be performed any better; director Jerome T. Kilty '49 fashioned a show of amazing freshness and vitality. The most striking feature of this production was a complete stylistic consistency, which is the hardest virtue to achieve in a period piece like this. With one exception, every member of the cast down to the tripping maid (Moira Wylie '60) and whirl-wind butler (Robert Jordan '59) captured the proper unified style in both word and gesture.

Top honors went to Max Adrian, the "old, dangling" Sir Peter Teazle, and Cavada Humphrey, his young bride Lady Teazle. Adrian is a past master of timing and comic acting--a second "incomparable Max." And, as usual, it was a joy to watch Miss Humphrey's lovely carriage and to listen to her crystal-clear diction.

The other roles were well handled, the only jarring notes being contributed by Thomas Hill (Sir Oliver Surface), who, fine as he is in the more realistic modern repertory, could not attune his diction to the period style required here.

William D. Roberts designed another of his handsomely symmetrical two-level unit sets, complete with the celebrated gallery of ten ancestral portraits.

The next offering, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, had to be held over for an extra week. This eloquent and moving tragedy of the little man is surely the finest serious American play since Eugene O'Neill; and it enjoyed a distinguished performance under a British director, Basil Langton, despite the fact that it is an intensely American work.

Thomas Hill took the title role of Willy Loman. This type of part is exactly his dish of tea; he was utterly convincing at every moment, and compared favorably with his local predecessors in the role--Lee J. Cobb, Thomas Mitchell, and Dean Gitter '56.

Olive Dunbar made a wonderfully warm and pathetic Mrs. Loman. She was fine all the way through until her closing monologue in the Requiem, which proved a bit too much for her. Robert Evans '59 and Robert Blackburn were a fine pair of errant sons; and John Peters '52 made a splendidly materialistic Uncle Ben.

My one major reservation concerned the choice of background music, which was decidedly off-key with the rest of the production. For a play as purely American as this, surely something more appropriate could have been found than the exotic Brazil-inanities of Villa-Lobos.

Jerome Kilty thrives on challenges and obstacles; and once again he took a thorny classic and turned it into a viable and engrossing theatrical experience. The Merchant of Venice is a good play; but director Kilty made it seem like a great play, and this was no mean feat. One forgot that the play is poorly constructed and rather liberally endowed with passages where Shakespeare definitely nodded.

This production inevitably invited comparison with the one last summer at Stratford. Though the general approach was different, it measured up well and was in some respects superior.

There must be at least half as many ways to play Shylock as to play Hamlet, and most of them have been tried. Max Adrian gave us an unsympathetic Shylock--bitter, gloating, sadistic. Adrian is constitutionally incapable of doing a slipshod job; and this was a notable performance. Morris Carnovsky's unsurpassable portrayal last summer was an extraordinarily complex one; and it was no reflection on Adrian if he could not match it. Adrian's Shylock was simpler and more straightforward, and wholly consistent. And he adopted a faster tempo than most actors, avoiding exaggeration and the temptation to make every word a crucial one.

The scene between Launcelot and Old Gobbo, is, on the printed page, one of Shakespeare's weakest comic passages; and, on the stage, it usually proves to be an embarrassing interlude. For the first time in my experience, thanks to Frederic Warriner's Launcelot and Stanley Jay's Gobbo, the scene came out satisfactorily; their combined antics were most hilarious.

The casket-choosing scenes can be a bore, too. But Jay, doubling as the Prince of Arragon, emerged as a delightful fop. Robert Evans made the Prince of Morocco a glum, dead-pan character, with unfortunate results; the only way to save him is to play him for comedy, as Earle Hyman did so tellingly last year.

Laurinda Barrett was an admirable Portia, and Robert Blackburn a forceful Bassanio. But Basil Langton failed to give much color to the title role of Antonio.

Kilty always likes to include crowds of colorful townspeople where appropriate. Here some two dozen persons appeared from time to time--throwing dice, playing ring-toss, pitching apples, turning cartwheels, washing laundry and running about with flambeaux.

The performers on the whole came through clearly; though one was frequently aware of their striving for clarity, which they must eventually overcome. Clarity should seem effortless.

The Group 20 Players wound up their season with Shaw's Pygmalion. This represented a real coup. The professional rights to the play have been frozen since My Fair Lady opened and will remain so as long as the musical runs. Somehow Kilty managed to persuade Shaw's agents to make one exception; those who missed this production will just have to wait years to see it.

Shaw's masterful satire on social distinctions and middle-class morality enjoyed a stunning production under the direction of Laurier Lister.

Rosemary Harris came over all the way from London to play the role of Eliza; and she was certainly worth importing. She negotiated all the phonetic difficulties impeccably as she underwent the transformation from a cockney flower-girl to a lady who could pass for a well-bred duchess.

Max Adrian wrung every drop out of the part of 'Liza's father. Kilty was a model Professor Higgins, and Cavada Humphrey was properly reginal as the professor's Victorian mother.

A noteworthy touch of authenticity was provided by a vintage London taxi especially imported for the show from England, which drove on and off the outdoor set as called for in the script.

This summer marked the thirteenth season of the Boston Summer Theatre. In its first eleven years, it averaged one or two works of top quality each season amidst a mass of mediocrity. Last summer producer Lee Falk offered nothing but plays of high quality--Jonson's Volpone, Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival, Fry's Venus Observed, Shaw's Back to Methuselah, Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, and Graham Greene's The Potting Shed. The 1958 season of eight plays constituted a letdown from last year, but it was far better than all the pre-1957 seasons.

One of the most gifted of our young men of letters is Gore Vidal. Having attained high esteem through his novels, TV dramas, movie scripts, short stories and literary criticisms, he has now successfully taken the legitimate stage into his domain with his comedy Visit to a Small Planet, which recently finished a Broadway run of almost 400 performances.

Visit satirizes in very funny fashion a good many things, such as man's penchant for war, the Pentagon bureaucracy, the self-inflated news analyst, free love, the power of mind over matter, and the flying saucer furore.

Among the many virtues of the play--as of most of Vidal's writing--is the freshness of the dialogue. He avoids dull or hackneyed speech; his lines are original and unpredictable, and be-speak an uncommonly imaginative creative mind.

This production was not up to the Broadway one. Bert Lahr had a lot of fun as the visitor from outer space, but lacked the polished hauteur that Cyril Ritchard brought to the role. Kenny Delmar (Fred Allen's Senator Claghorn, for those of you with long memories) could have used more of Eddie Mayehoff's bluffness in the part of the none-too-bright general who has trouble with anything bigger than the Army's laundry problems.

I never thought I'd ever see James Mason singing, soft-shoeing, and straw-hatting his way through old vaudeville routines. But that is precisely what he did in his Boston stage debut. He evidently had the same yen that Sir Laurence Olivier recently satisfied in John Osborne's The Entertainer; and what's more, both Mason's material and performance were superior to Olivier's.

Mason's vehicle was Vina Delmar's Midsummer, a sentimental comedy that had a short Broadway run in 1953. The play is not very substantial; but it is at east completely written, though the beginning is unfocussed and there are evidences of obvious padding.

The action centers about a down-and-out teacher (played by Mason) with a craving for the adventure and glamour of show biz; his wife (portrayed by Mason's wife Pamela), who wants him to settle down into the security of a teaching job; and their shockingly precocious nine-year-old daughter (played by the Masons' own daughter Portland).

Mason gave a suave and perfectly controlled performance, such as we often get from the best British actors and have usually got from Mason himself in his many movies from Seventh Veil through Julius Caesar to Cry Terror.

Pamela was not so well suited to her role of the uneducated wife (which raised Geraldine Page to Broadway stardom): she spoke the English language far too beautifully. Her highly cultured accent would never be found in a woman who cannot even read.

Basil Rathbone is an old pro; Geraldine Page is a young pro. These two stars, collaborating in Terence Rattigan's expertly written Separate Tables, provided the Boston Summer Theatre with its best show of the season.

Separate Tables is actually a brace of plays with the same locale--Table by the Window and Table Number Seven--each dealing with a different type of loneliness, and each, aside from the two leads, employing the same set of characters. There is plenty of humor, but the themes are basically serious.

The second play is the more important one. Citing it in a recent article in the New York Times the British author Stephen Spender said: "The way in which a talent can be damped down by success to the faintest squeak of social protest is shown (here) ... where the writer's plea for sympathy with the man who gets off with girls in cinemas is a pill covered under about sixteen layers of sugar." True, the play was originally intended as a dramatization of the actual case of a well-known British actor with a taste for young men. But the result, watered down though it be, still has a point; and Rattigan, with a sure ear for dialogue, makes it clearly and movingly.

Miss Page turned in consummate portrayals of the divorcee and the spinster (which Margaret Leighton attempted so inadequately in the pre-Broadway tryout here two years ago). Her performance in either play alone would have been an impressive achievement. But her ability to undergo such a transformation during intermission was almost uncanny. And this was much more than a change of costume, makeup and wig; she did it through her posture, gait, gesture, diction and other ways. Through extraordinary muscular control, she was able to change her whole repertory of facial contours from those of a stunning beauty to those of an uncomely nobody. Genius is not a word to be tossed about lightly; but Miss Page has unmistakable marks of genius. She has moments that are way beyond the reach of all but a few actresses.

Rathbone was effective in the second play, if not quite up to his Broadway predecessor, Eric Portman. He was, however not really at home in the first play. He is habitually cool, clean, clipped and polished; and it was clearly an effort for him to be awkward, slovenly, and impetuous. The two stars enjoyed an uncommonly fine supporting cast--better than the Broadway one, and better directed.

Faye Emerson and Murray Matheson starred in three of the nine one-acters that make up Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30. They did well with Ways and Means, a bedroom comedy complete with burglar. But why did they omit the final line? Without it, the end fell flat. Hands Across the Sea is a plotless bit of mayhem, a three-minute joke extended to thirty. Shadow Play is a confused, stylized soap opera about a marriage on the rocks. It showed that the two stars ought not to sing in public; but it did provide a good final examination for the lighting technicians and stagehands.

Arnold Schulman's A Hole in the Head is a rather good addition to the corpus of laughter-and-tears drama. It is not a thesis play; nor is it a deep one. The author chose the just-plain-folks, people-in-the-house-next-door, it-could-happen-to-you genre, set within the framework of a specific middle-class cultural milieu--the sort that has tempted many American writers, with varying success, ever since Abie's Irish Rose.

In this instance, the milieu is Jewish. But Schulman, though a Jew, has presented it with restraint and avoided the easy temptation of exaggerating the Jewish elements.

Now it is true of most plays that some, if not all, of the characters undergo a big change by the time the curtain is rung down. Here, curiously, every character is just the same at the end of the play as at the start. Yet this does not yield a vacuum. Events do transpire; and the essential elements of conflict and suspense are not lacking.

The lead in this production was Hal March, who was making his legitimate stage debut. Tackling the role in which Paul Douglas scored on Broadway, he proved he could do more than fire questions at TV contestants in isolation booths. In fact, he gave a smooth and consistent performance. His only serious lapse came near the close of the first act, where he had a heart-to-heart talk with his young son and reminisced about his dead wife. This is hard to pull off, but the writing is so fine that it still emerged as one of the two most memorable scenes in the play. The other scene occurred later when Uncle Max, splendidly played by Bill Tierney, blustered on and on with incredible outspokenness and tactlessness until he caused the unspeakable embarrassment of all present.

Though the play is unpretentious, its genuineness has led Maurice Schwartz, our foremost Yiddish actor-producer, to turn it into a Yiddish musical for the coming season. One cannot help but recognize the warmth and honesty of Schulman's writing.

To show what captivated New Yorkers in the early 1920's, the Summer Theatre dusted off Dulcy, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It strikes us as a period piece today, but it was written as a contemporary satire on the Westchester County middle-class set of 1921.

With Lynn Fontanne in the title role, the play ran on Broadway for months, and "Dulcy" became a household word. But tastes and standards change, and the play today is little more than a feather-weight farce and a historical curiosity.

Dulcinea Smith is a witless, bromidic, meddlesome but well-meaning woman with a mania for engineering other people's lives. She manages to have a finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth. In a bridge game she wonders whether she should "discard from strength or weakness." Actually, she does everything from weakness.

This summer's Dulcy was Dody Goodman, a refugee from the Jack Paar TV show. She has one of the most unpleasant and whiny voices I've ever heard on the stage; but that is probably an advantage for this role. Heaven help her if she ever tries to play another type of woman, though!

As the ancient poet Horace said, "Dulcy est desipere in loco."

The season included the tryouts of two new plays, which sandwiched a hammy production of The Happiest Millionaire (with Victor Jory). The first tryout was Sweet and Sour, by Florence Lowe and Caroline Francke. It proved to be just one more play about the younger generation's attempt to deal with an intractable old father. The authors obviously thought they were writing the Jewish counterpart of Life With Father, but their play will never have 3183 performances on Broadway. They fell into most of the traps that Schulman avoided in A Hole in the Head. The old Jew was played by Melvyn Douglas, who is having a second career these days by taking on "character" parts; but even he could not make the play ring true.

The other tryout was Third Best Sport, by Eleanor and Leo Bayer. (The third best sport turned out to be convention-going, after sex and baseball.) The play is a propaganda comedy about non-conformity, hypocrisy and group-ism. It is an inept concoction of situational cliches, overworn ideas and stereotyped characters. There is the sour corporation president, the xenophobic grande dame, the iconoclastic philosophy professor, the ambitious junior executive, and the young wife who upsets everything by refusing to be a lickspittle. The structure is creaky, and the turns of the plot wholly predictable. Celeste Holm did her best as the young wife, but she was just wasting her time.

The Tufts Arena Theatre is not in a class with the other two groups, nor does it pretend to be. It is a semi-professional institution whose members are still in the process of acquiring their basic crafts.

In past summers there has usually been at least one member of the company who showed exceptional acting talent. This year there was none. The repertory was also somewhat below par: The Reluctant Debutante, The Mousetrap, A Clearing in the Woods, Tartuffe, The Torchbearers, and Green Grow the Lilacs.

One was curious to see Agatha Christie's mystery The Mousetrap, because it is still running in London after six years and holds the all-time record for commercial longevity. It is a fairly neat and entertaining piece of construction, though the characters are all clear stereotypes. But it certainly ranks lower than her Witness for the Prosecution.

Arthur Laurents' A Clearing in the Woods was the most newsworthy play that Tufts staged. Laurents is a playwright who always knows exactly what he's doing. He has been widely acclaimed for his Home of the Brave, Time of the Cuckoo, and West Side Story. Yet despite a laudable production, his Clearing last year enjoyed only a brief Broadway run.

Plans are under way to mount it off-Broadway during the coming season; and the motivation is justified, for this is an important play. It is "difficult" and unorthodox, and demands unflagging concentration. There is no plot in the usual sense of the word; and the element of time is employed in a fluid and daring way.

The work revolves around an extraordinarily fascinating and complex young woman named Virginia, who is tormented by "three white nightmares," all personified on stage. Virginia undergoes before our eyes a sort of psychoanalysis, though there is fortunately none of the professional mumbo-jumbo that normally accompanies such matters. She finally manages to exorcise the tormentors; thus the title of the play not only designates its physical locale but also symbolizes the catharsis of Virginia's crowded, confused mind.

The situation might suggest the kind of triple schizophrenia recently popularized in The Three Faces of Eve; or in Burgess Meredith's controversial production of Hamlet, in which three persons depicted three facets of Hamlet's personality and spoke now successively, now simultaneously.

But Laurents has gone a step further here. Virginia lives in the present. The three girl tormentors, however, are not facets of her personality but rather three historical crises in her life. Laurents, perhaps taking a cue from Jacqueline's dream in Rolland's novel Jean Christophe, has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre. It is a fine play, and some day will be generally recognized as such.

Cambridge's contribution to the summer's theatrical activity derived from the two productions mounted by students in the area. The first was Anouilh's Antigone, given in the Christ Church auditorium. Anouilh's reworking of the ancient myth makes Creon a very sympathetic character. It does not seem so carefully thought out as it should be, but it has undeniable moments of great power.

Nadine Duwez handled the title role with considerable skill. The Creon of Elias Kulukundis '60 was a bit awkward. Earle Edgerton '56 directed, and others in the cast included Debbie Gayle, Mary Cass, Herb Propper, Sidney Davis, William Batchelder '59, Robert Hesse '59, and Nicholas Thompson '60.22"No Exit": MARY CASS and EARLE EDGERTON '56.