Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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What ever happened to Hua Guofeng? That question occupied the center of the Peking stage last week, over shadowing that other current piece of political drama, the trial of the Gang of Four...
This play may carry a jinx. Each the infrequent attempts to stage it in the U.S. in the past quarter-century has proved monumentally inert, and the present production at Broadway's Circle in the Square is no exception. Borkman is a wintry drama, a sort of autopsy blanched ruined lives...
...here come Amlin Gray, play-wright-in-residence of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater; Daniel Stern and Bob Gunton, a pair of young actors; and Carole Rothman, co-artistic director of the Second Stage, an off-off-Broadway company lodged in a 16th-floor penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. And lo, Viet Nam lives in Gray's nightmarishly funny vaudeville. A Buddhist monk sets himself ablaze; an Army lieutenant is shot in the back by his troops; a B-52 crashes in enemy territory; a Viet Nam village falls to guerrillas; Saigon orphans...
...economy of the production underlines this: Patricia Woodbridge's desolate set announces from the start that less is more. And at the end, on the blank stage of the reporter's mind, nothing is everything. He is not alone. The imaginative playgoer, who has assisted throughout in peopling this surreal mindscape, thus implicates himself in the reporter's disintegration. The successive circles of hell blend and accelerate into a whirlpool of familiar, frightening apparitions. The Viet Nam nightmare is alive and well. "That story" is everyone's. -By Richard Corliss
...oceanic surf of gabble, a big fraction of it as disposable as a weather-caster's strained charm. It is easy to snap off and tune out, but it is not so simple to elude real-life blather. Try to get away from it all, and soon a stage-struck airline captain will be monologuing about terrain miles below and half-obscured by the cloud cover. Go to the dentist, and the procedure is all but ordained: thumbs fill the mouth, the drill starts to whine, and a voice begins to express all those unpalatable political opinions...