(2 of 5)
NET PLAYHOUSE. Ireland's famed Abbey Players dramatize five short stories from James Joyce's Dubliners collection in "Dublin One."
NET FESTIVAL. This new weekly series starts with "Glyndebourne Journal 1967," the chronicle of a season at England's annual Glyndebourne Opera Festival in the Sussex hills 50 miles from London.
NET JOURNAL. "The Way It Is" looks unflinchingly at education in one slum school Junior High 57 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn designated by New York University's Clinic for Learning as a "combat zone" in the struggle against outdated methods of ghetto education. Repeat.
PUBLIC BROADCAST LABORATORY. A $10 million experimental series dedicated to the proposition that noncommercial television can provide a meaningful alternative to commercial TV, PBL will program two hours of cultural and public affairs each Sunday night.
THEATER
On Broadway
THE PROMISE, by Aleksei Arbuzov. Two teen-age boys meet a teen-age girl in a gutted Leningrad flat during the siege of 1942. The girl loves the would-be engineer, but he leaves, and she marries the would-be poet, but he fails. Thirteen years later, the situation is reversed. To compound the confusion, the cast is as incorrigibly British (Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Ian McShane) as the play is Russian. This particular brand of Soviet drama should have been exiled to Siberia.
HALFWAY UP THE TREE. Peter Ustinov, who wrote and directed this comedy, has chosen to view hippiedom as the social dawn of the New Jerusalem. He sees hippies as long-haired Samsons of saintliness leaning against the temple of middleaged, middle-class hypocrisy. Unfortunately, the quality of the humor is as strained as the story of a pukka-sahib general (Anthony Quayle) who out-hips his offspring.
THE LITTLE FOXES. With Director Mike Nichols at the helm, Lincoln Center has launched a revival of Lillian Hellman's 28-year-old saga of a Southern family that snarls and claws its way toward a rich hoard. A galaxy of a cast, including Anne Bancroft, Richard Dysart, E. G. Marshall and George C. Scott, gives gilt-edged performances.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD puts a Shakespearean duo in a Pirandellian situation, then confers on them Beckettian angst mixed with Beyond the Fringe humor. British Playwright Tom Stoppard's witty play is well served by the superb acting of Brian Murray and John Wood and the fluid direction of Derek Goldby.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a celebration of sinister non sequiturs in a reunion between Stanley, a cipher of a man (James Patterson), and two agents of torment (Ed Flanders and Edward Winters). A 1958 play, Party may not have as many lightning bolts of significance as Pinter's later works, but it still crackles with his electric speech.
Off Broadway