Off Broadway

The season has already started off Broadway--but with more of a sputter than a spurt. The Ofay Watcher meanders through a black-white confrontation with moments of humor but no fresh insights. Years of sibling rivalry and family dissonance are spewed up in an evening-long wrangle between a brother and a sister in Hello and Goodbye by South Africa's Athol Fugard. Unlike a good family fight, a bad one sounds dull, mean and petty, though Colleen Dewhurst as the whoring sister gives a performance that is etched in sulfuric acid.

Having made some sort of homosexual breakthrough with Mart Crowley's gentle tragicomedy The Boys in the Band, off Broadway promises to go farther with a revamped version of Fortune and Men's Eyes. This is an angry, violent foray into prison homosexuality, staged by Sal Mineo to include a naked onstage rape sequence. Nothing so nude or erotically minded as Oh! Calcutta! is presently scheduled.

A nation's theater never lives by money and talent alone. Zest, hard work, devotion and love must be present. One woman in New York epitomizes those qualities: Ellen Stewart, the indefatigable doyenne of off-off-Broad way's experimental Cafe La Mama. Out of La Mama have come Jean-Claude van Itallie (America Hurrah!), Tom O'Horgan, (director of Futz and Hair), Sam Shepard (the 27-year-old author of Red Cross and Chicago), Leonard Melfi (Jack and Jill) and a host of others. Ellen Stewart announces the evening's program by ringing a homely cowbell. As long as Ellen rings her cowbell, whatever the season brings, the theater is alive.

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