In the Land of Hiawatha

The building, designed by Architect Ralph Rapson. looks as if Henry Moore had been doodling on it with a jigsaw. Through the holes of the outer facade peeks a structure drawn with a Mondrian ruler in a rectilinear austerity of charcoal grey, white and glass. Suspended over the stairs and lobbies are globes of light, a child's army of upside-down lollipops. The stage itself juts forward like a mammoth home plate with a blunted tip, while a rear portico of four columns supports an upper platform. Around this arena stage sweeps a C-arc of 200DEG. some tiers of the 1,437 seats rising as steeply as bleachers, others sloping more conventionally, none more than 52 ft. from the playing stage. The seats come in twelve shades of color. Above hover the scattered grey clouds of the acoustical panels, some of which house the spots that stab the stage with light. Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Midwestern home of a repertory company exclusively committed to the dramatic classics, is a token of light: the light of ever quickening U.S. cultural interest, and the light of a theater seeking its better self far from Broadway's glaringly commercial White Way. Two questing Manhattan producers, Oliver Rea and Peter Zeisler, along with Tyrone Guthrie, were drawn to Minneapolis as a city immune to Broadway's manic-depressive boom-or-bust psychology. Guthrie, a restlessly inventive director, had already been the chief architect of Stratford, Ontario's successful festival. The trio found a fervent ally and a doggedly gifted fund raiser in Minneapolis Editor John Cowles Jr. Prophesied Guthrie, who carries his 6-ft. 5-in. frame like a queen's grenadier guard in mufti: "Minn will come through." Minn did. The T. B. Walker Foundation donated the land and a grant of $400,000. The Ford Foundation added $337,000. A Sunday school class in Mankato, Minn., sent 37-c-. Out of a pyramid of effort, a $2,250,000 theater was born. To keep it alive for a four-play, May through mid-September season costs $660,000. Already $331,150 has been raised in advance sales. What is the value of a classical repertory theater? In Guthrie's view, it offers playgoers the chance to see "American expressions of the human spirit." As for actors: "How can actors develop other than personality cults if they don't measure themselves against the past?" How stiff a standard that is and how long it will take for U.S. actors to measure up to it were swiftly revealed on opening night. Director Guthrie elected to do an uncut Hamlet in modern dress, and he provided some of the eye-catchers that make purists accuse him of being a theatrical prankster: mourners with black umbrellas at Ophelia's burial; a Laertes who waves a revolver in Claudius' face and a Claudius who gets the revolver and slyly pockets the cartridges, like a silent-movie badman. If Guthrie seems to scramble his props, mixing candles with flashlights, snap-brim fedoras with Kaiser Wilhelm helmets, it may be that he means to suggest the wild and whirling confusion of Hamlet's brain, the visible signs of time uncontrollably out of joint. But apparently even the most forceful director can control only the circumference of Hamlet and never its center. The decisive tone and quality of the play comes from the actor who plays the title part. Before rehearsals began, Guthrie hoped to have George Grizzard reveal "something naked of the human condition. I've got to get him to take off his 'clothes.' " He failed. Grizzard is a buttoned-up Hamlet in a buttoned-down shirt, a bland suburbanite puzzled by the mess he is in, but with no hint of being the terrible plaything of destiny. He is the nice boy who always got good marks at Wittenberg U., never dented the family convertible, was engaged to that sweet Ophelia girl next door, and then inexplicably got his name splashed all over the tabloids by his revolting behavior toward his mother and girl friend, not to mention that gory mass-murder spree. One can hear the neighbors saying, "Hamlet was always such a polite, quiet boy. I'll never understand why he did it." This uncomprehending performance reflects the fact that George Grizzard has not thought out his answer to the Hamlet Problem--why Hamlet waits so long to kill the king. While the Hamlet Problem, like Hamlet, defies augury, or certain solution, one pivotal surmise may be made. Hamlet knows the code of his society--revenge of a father's murder--but he does not instinctively feel it. He is agonized by not feeling it, tormented by the paralysis of being in which the heart's purpose is blunted by the mind's doubts. He self-consciously flogs his will to take the place of his instincts ("Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!") His delay intensifies his guilt; his guilt mounts to anguish, and his anguish drives him to the far edge of sanity. The moment-to-moment danger, tension and exhilaration of the play is not that Hamlet will kill the king, but that he will lose his reason. His silent plea is Lear's spoken "Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven." By insisting on being cool and levelheaded, Grizzard removes the nervous system of the play; by insisting that Hamlet be normal, he makes he one demand that the most complex character in English drama cannot meet. The Miser, by Moliere, the Guthne troupe's second offering, almost visibly chased away the lingering ghost of a sad Hamlet. Director Douglas Campbell has made a stylized harlequinade of Moliere's comedy of avarice, with curtsying dances and puckish pratfalls, Halloween masks and wopsical hats. It is more a costume ball than a play, and it stresses what is sheen-deep in Moliere's wit rather than what is skinflinty. Still, in a glancing way, the master French comic moralist's point does get made--that a sin is called deadly because it deadens. Mock-Hero Harpagon (Hume Cronyn) is dead to his children's hope of love, dead to his servants' grievances, dead to any generous stirrings of heart or mind. He counts the world well lost for money. Skittering about like a drunken sandpiper, Hume Cronyn is a dizzy delight. His Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, an imp of interest rates, a tooth-clacking, raggedy-cloaked, stringy-haired, sciatica-plagued witch of usury. As a syrup-tongued matchmaker, Zoe Caldwell steals laughs from Cronyn, and is the yeasty comic find of the company. Obviously, the Guthrie troupe is off to a brave rather than a great start. If a Hamlet of this caliber were to open on Broadway, it would close on Saturday, and a slight Moliere farce would fare only slightly better. But that is to forget that Shakespeare and Moliere can rarely be seen on Broadway at all, and there lies the moral and marvel of Minneapolis.

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