Maggots

By -- T.E.K.

TALES FROM THE VIENNA WOODS by Oedoen von Horvath

High above the stage is a cupola-shaped structure outlined with electric bulbs, as if for a summer festival. In it, a string quartet plays beguiling Viennese waltzes. Directly beneath it, on the stage proper, is a butcher shop openly displaying huge gory carcasses hung from steel hooks. The images form a contrapuntal irony. This is a subcutaneous play in which maggots infest the corrupt body of a seemingly sound and smugly self-satisfied society. The true atmosphere of the play is the stench of impending Nazism.

The playwright, Oedoen von Horvath, had good reasons to be prescient. The son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, he settled in Berlin in 1924, completing Tales from the Vienna Woods in 1930. Tales is being given its U.S. premiere at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theater in an intelligent, well-articulated production that scants none of the play's corrosive undertones.

Like Bertolt Brecht, whom he most nearly resembles, Horvath was interested in shopkeepers, merchants and petty shysters who either are trampled by history or must learn to turn tricks to survive. And like Brecht, Horvath was willing to work along plot lines that are shamelessly melodramatic and tearjerking.

Tales might almost be subtitled Heaven Will Not Protect the Working Girl. The young heroine, Marianne (Carol Kane), works in her father's toy-soldier shop. The father (Robert Burr) affiances her to a middle-aged butcher friend (Clarence Felder). She balks at the match, runs off with a feckless horseplayer (John Glover) and eventually winds up doing nude tableaux in a cabaret. At play's end there are several reconciliations, all of them more bitter than sweet.

The plot is not the point. Horvath, who died in 1938, transports us to the world of George Grosz's biting satirical portraits of the bloated German bourgeoisie. Director Keith Hack paces the play with caustic Brechtian briskness, and the large cast ably meets that demand. Scene follows scene in revue fashion, and each blackout brings on the string quartet. At first the music seems endearing. Later, the juxtaposition becomes ominous as the waltzes seem more and more like a smiling mask shielding a leper's face.

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