12 MARCH 1983, Page 28

Arts

Broadway: on and off

Giles Gordon

True West .(Cherry Lane)

Extremities (Westside Arts Center: Cheryl Crawford) 84 Charing Cross Road (Nederlander) New York

The most memorable, if tacky, recent performance in New York theatre took place not on Broadway, off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway but in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Parlour on Madison Ave- nue at 81st Street. A 71-year-old Southern gentleman lay there in his coffin, and dur- ing the days before interment the public were able to pay their last respects. The man's brother flew in to New York and re- quested that the lid of the coffin be remov- ed and the mourners shown the corpse's face. The deceased had choked on the plastic cap of a nasal spray in a hotel room and although, it is said, he was heard having trouble by a friend in an adjacent room he wasn't discovered dead until 12 hours later. The full story of how Tennessee Williams — one of America's two or three greatest playwrights — died hasn't come out yet.

The drama on stage in New York this season is thin, and the applause in Sardi's when the stars enter, hollow. Nevertheless, two of the country's best living dramatists have plays on off-Broadway (or off-off- Broadway: there are about as many defini- tions of what constitutes the one rather than the other as there are people to ask the question — it's probably more related to Equity salary agreements than anything else).

There is a new production of Sam Shepard's True West with an alarmingly powerful but increasingly self-indulgent performance — too much method and not enough method — by John Malkovich,who plays the recalcitrant brother, Lee, as an ageing Brando with a touch or two of Jack Nicholson. Whereas in London the Na- tional Theatre's polished and romanticised production made a pitch for the play as an instant North American classic, the chaotic New York staging mixes realism, naturalism, surrealism, expressionism and most other isms.

The second brother, Austin (Gary Sinise, who also directs — minimally), aspires to write not the great American movie but any old screenplay, provided it's filmed. It is

Lee, though, whose notes towards a nostalgic script are taken up by an idiot director and Austin who types them out. Anyone can make it in the States, Mr Shepard seems to be suggesting, but less through hard work, dedication and applica- tion than survival,, aggression and cynicism. The West may have diminished to Hollywood but movies, the American art form, no longer convince. The brothers, unable to complete their script and stupefied by alcohol, beat up their mother's suburban Californian house. Mr Malkovich utterly destroys a typewriter with a golf club, which — as Mr Shepard thinks well of the production — indicates the author's basic contempt for the word. Yet he is a hugely talented primitive, a Jackson Pollock of a playwright. Shepard's plays, though frequently reviv- ed, have a disposable feel to them. Not so those of A. R. Gurney Jr. His elegant The Dining Room is an almost Jamesian, Boston quadrille. A dining-room table -- representing many dining-room tables in many dining rooms down many years dominates the set, and the play. The table, made in Philadelphia in 1898, is 'not old, not an antique — it's just American'. The values of the Wasps of the Eastern Seaboard are observed, generation after generation, to be in retreat. The dining room is — was — the touchstone of family life, where parents taught children the rules of the game. Every new generation is seen to resent this, yet, when its turn comes, im poses a similar anarchy — a bit watered down, the thinning of the blood — on its children. And so on to the present when dining rooms look to be becoming as ex- tinct as dinosaurs. Families have 'eating areas' and they're little used as people no longer sit down to proper meals. Gurney regards middle-class mores and ideals as worth exploring in, dramatic forni. His characters — each of six excellent ac- tors plays many parts in David Trainer's stylish production — aren't geniuses or heroes, eccentrics or saints. They are or- dinary men and women trying to make sense of their lives as the centre no longer holds, as traditional values are eroded. The play is beautifully constructed and con- stantly surprises, always witty and sometimes wise. It should adorn Shaftesbury Avenue for many months when it opens later in the year. Lanford Wilson's new Broadway Play' Angels Fall, stars Fritz Weaver as all, agonised professor who, with his ex-studeja, wife (Nancy Snyder, the only member 01 the cast who speaks and reacts to the line as if for the first time) finds himself in a

Mission church in New Mexico. The roads are all blocked as there has been a nuclear alert — Los Alamos is close by. The themes

sorry, Themes — are big: relationships between teachers and taught, the purposes of education, traditional values versus new, the 'gaudy cataclysm' that is to come. The treatment is verbose and boulevardiste.

Extremities by William Mastrosimone Makes Jacobean drama, let alone the torrid Plays of the late Mr Williams, seem like Sunday school. An unshaven lout (James so) slips into an isolated farmhouse in New Jersey and terrorises, then attempts to rape, the incumbent, Marjorie (Susan n arandon, looking like a wide-eyed Eileen Atkins). As they grapple on the stage with much heavy breathing, screaming and smothering she squirts him in the eyes with ,rni.aee, ties him up with the telephone flex, ,..`"rows boiling water in his face, blindfolds him and imprisons him in the fireplace with a metal bed end which serves as bars. The two other young women who share the ruse return home from work. The first 'legs Marjorie to call the cops but she wants to kill the would-be rapist and bury him in the garden — the second says the man should be released as, there being no witriesses, the assault could not be proven. The play is cynical and clumsily written, 1 discussing a very serious social problem in essentially undramatic terms. It could not have been written by a woman. Ellen Burstyn plays Helene Hanff and °sePh Maher is Frank Doel in James b .,°,°se-Evans's Broadway production of 84 Charing Cross Road, a play which gives much pleasure to book lovers. The bookshop in Oliver Smith's handsome set seems bigger than Mark & Co was. The act- ng isn't remotely as good as in the London production but then it usually isn't in New York, Audiences — who ought in New York to be reviewed instead of the produc- 2ns — love to clap leading actors when `_`'ey first appear on stage and did so in this 41,ild the other plays discussed here. New

13k theatre audiences love to love everything.