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Tuesday, November 14 WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Since his TV conversation with Eric Sevareid just two months ago, Eric Hoffer's salty comments on the contemporary scene have been quoted by the President and the man on the street alike. Tonight, a rebroadcast of "Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind."
THEATER
On Broadway THE LITTLE FOXES. An admirable revival of Lillian Hellman's 1939 play in Lincoln Center demonstrates how securely bricks of character can be sealed together wilh the mortar of plot. Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, Richard Dysart and Margaret Leighton are expertly guided by Director Mike Nichols through gilt-edged performances as members of a family afflicted with a vulpine itch for plunder in the turn-of-the-century South.
WHAT DID WE DO WRONG? A ponderous put-down of the contemporary foibles of young and old falls on its face as it peers into the generation gap. Devotees of Paul Ford may be amused by their idol in a hippie getup, but others will consider Wrong? more absurd than theater.
HENRY, SWEET HENRY lured theatergoers into picking up $400,000 worth of tickets in advance of its opening. These venture-capitalists have a dismally disenchanting evening in store for them. The musical concerns itself with a pair of schoolgirls who spend off-hours spying on a concert-stage idol (Don Ameche). When he is not pounding the keyboard, he dallies carnally with suburban and urban matrons. The music is tuneless, the lyrics witless, and the dances could pass for mass hopscotch. What less can one ask?
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD takes the little men of Shakespeare and transforms them into the little Every-men of Beckett. In his American debut, British Playwright Tom Stoppard, 30, offers an agile, witty play that snaps with verbal acrobatics and precisely choreographed dances of the mind, while coming heartbeat close to the pity and terror of mortality. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood are phenomenal, and Derek Goldby's direction has tensile strength.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY is nine years old and Harold Pinter's first full-length play. Brought to Broadway for the first time, it is as highly individualistic, if not as technically poised, as his later works. The playwright cuts through the conventions of accepted stage behavior and the rules of the well-made play to expose the cruel and the comic, the frighteningly familiar and the terrifyingly unknown in each man's existence.
AFTER THE RAIN is an eggshell of a play from an egghead playwright. John Bowen borrows and embalms theatrical modes and ideas from Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Peter Weiss and colors them in a fashionable shade of apocalypstick. As the tyrannical leader of a Noah-like band of survivors from the flood of 1969, Alec McCowen is convincingly diabolical as he plucks open the soul of a power maniac.
Off Broadway