Genius, Menace and Chicanery

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, RICHARD CORLISS, Gerald Clarke

From three gifted playwrights, the topics and blessings are mixed

LAUGHING STOCK

It must have occurred to everyone who has ever tried to teach a course in creative writing: What would happen if an authentic genius somehow stumbled into class? But it is Romulus Linney who has finally done something wonderful with the notion. In P.M., the masterly miniature that is the centerpiece in this evening of one-acters off-Broadway, he places at one end of the seminar table a prim-looking teacher (Frances Sternhagen) whose lack of success as a novelist has not yet sapped her idealism. At the other end sits Bufford Bullough (Leon Russom). Bufford looks like Thomas Wolfe, writes like William Faulkner and carries around with him in a cardboard box the burden of his dreams: a thousand-page manuscript and a bottle of booze. It is hard to say whether the other students (Peggity Price, Jane Connell) are more appalled by the erotic spew of language in Bufford's work or by the way their teacher reaches across the barriers of age, sex and class to acknowledge the right of great gifts to wrap themselves in socially unappetizing forms. What one can say is that her act of commitment to another committed writer turns rich comic turmoil into touching drama.

At 53 still one of the American theater's most mysteriously buried treasures, Linney, who also teaches writing, is obviously speaking from the heart here. Laughing Stock's other short plays are slighter: an anecdote about death and telephones and a shaggy-dog story about an old woman's discovery that her 70-year marriage was founded on a sly joke. But they too are marked by Linney's singular talent for stating wild ideas with high, simplifying intelligence and for drawing deft portraits of the half mad in which not a line is misplaced or wasted.

--By Richard Schickel

OTHER PLACES

The dialogues in a Harold Pinter play are pitched battles between speech and silence. The speaker marshals all the resources of colloquial language--wit, wheedling, anecdote, abuse--while the listener waits out his opponent and, often as not, wins the battle by withholding approval, by being as silent as God. Such, too, is the uneasy symbiosis of Playwright Pinter and his audience. In these three short plays that Alan Schneider has mounted off-Broadway (two of them first performed at London's National Theater in 1982, the third earlier this year), Pinter dramatizes this relationship through three memorable audience surrogates, each a displaced person from an intellectual twilight zone.

Victoria Station, the opening skit, is an edgy conversation between a perplexed London taxi-fleet dispatcher and a maddeningly vague, or vaguely mad, cab driver (Kevin Conway). One for the Road, set in an unidentified police state, offers the horrific spectacle of the torturer as business executive, bantering with his victims as he sends them off to be flogged, raped or killed. In A Kind of Alaska, a middle-aged woman (Dianne Wiest) awakes from a 29-year siege of sleeping sickness to confront a reality at pathetic odds with her memories and hallucinations. Dispatcher, torture victim, woman, all struggle valiantly to understand a new world of menacing mystery.

In Alaska Pinter has taken a TV-movie disease-of-the-week subject and alchemized it into a searing, sympathetic portrait of a lost soul who must seek solace in the dreams and embarrassments of an idyllic girlhood. Wiest's performance is an astonishment. Every word she speaks rings with both a child's self-possession and a flinty woman's solitude; each step she takes is as shaky as an inebriate's on a tightrope in a high wind. And Pinter, by daring to be accessible, has fashioned a small miracle of a play.

--By Richard Corliss

THE GOLDEN AGE

For every great writer's widow or lover who wants to destroy letters and diaries containing the secrets of the past, there is some literary snoop who longs to publish them. Such a struggle is the theme of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and that marvelous 1888 novella is in turn the inspiration for The Golden Age, A.R. Gurney's comic update, which opened on Broadway two weeks ago.

In Gurney's version, the precious papers are a lost chapter of The Great Gatsby in which Gatsby manages to bed Daisy Buchanan. Irene Worth is Fitzgerald's former mistress who protects that cache, and Jeff Daniels is an English instructor who will do anything, including going to bed with Worth's homely granddaughter (Stockard Channing), to obtain it.

Gurney (The Dining Room, The Middle Ages) has a sure sense of structure and an ear for dialogue. But his play is irreparably flawed where it veers away from the original. In James' story the old woman never mentions any letters and finds out only at the end what her boarder is after. "Ah, you publishing scoundrel!" she hisses. In Gurney's play, the woman demands that the young man write her biography and teases him with Fitzgerald's lost chapter. Her anger when he tries to sneak away with it makes no sense. Her character is ultimately unbelievable, as is that of the instructor, who conveniently falls in love with the granddaughter and forgets Fitzgerald. Worth is, as ever and always, in supreme command of the stage, and Channing and Daniels are both capable performers. John Tillinger's direction is competent and Designer Oliver Smith's Manhattan town house is lovely. The problem here is the playwright, who should have followed the master's plan all the way or not at all.

--By Gerald Clarke