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THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH exhumes the issues of German guilt, Jewish passivity during the "final solution" and the paranoid personality of the archkiller. The play offers no fresh insights, and its best excuse for being is Donald Pleasence, whose performance erupts into a characterization much like a neurotic blood relative whom the audience can neither abide nor disown.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Tom Stoppard's reincarnations of Shakespeare's bit players are part Beckett, part Charlie Brown. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood prove themselves linguistic acrobats.
PLAZA SUITE. Neil Simon's trio of comedies stars Maureen Stapleton and E. G. Marshall as three pairs of middle-agers.
Off Broadway
THE EMPIRE BUILDERS. The late French playwright Boris Vian, in a Kafkaesque allegory about a family haunted by a mysterious sound and an equally mysterious presence, "The Schmurz," offers a dismal view of life with death in relentless pursuit.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND gather to play at a homosexual birthday party, and the melody, while at times merry, is mostly minor key. Mart Crowley's characters parry wittily and wound easily.
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. Salome Jens, W. B. Brydon and Mitchell Ryan as Eugene O'Neill figures whose dreams never see the light of day.
RECORDINGS
Chamber Music
By some accounts, the course of the string quartet has been downhill all the way since Beethoven. Yet many modern composers continue to be fascinated by the form; Igor Stravinsky calls it "the most lucid conveyor of musical ideas ever fashioned." As a number of recent releases demonstrate, the 20th century's output has been, if not Beethovenesque, at least varied, and often challenging.
HINDEMITH: STRING QUARTET NO. 3; HONEGGER: STRING QUARTET NO. 2 (Crossroads). The Hindemith was written in 1922 when the composer was 27. It exemplifies the peak of his early "linear counterpoint" style, in which often dissonant harmonies are an incidental byproduct of the vigorous movement of each melodic voice. It is a muscular piece rounded off by Hindemith's logical imagination. The Prague City Quartet gives it an appropriately rough-and-ready performance. The Honegger work, composed in 1936, is woven of more flowing lines and less urgent rhythms. The disciplined playing of the Dvorak String Quartet reflects the composer's mixture of austere classical feeling with bristling contemporary materials.
NIELSEN: STRING QUARTET NO. 4 (Turnabout). Danish Composer Carl Nielsen, who died in 1931, is gaining a hearing as a symphonist nowadays because he worked out adventurous new constructions without abandoning the expansive romanticism of the post-Brahms tradition. Unfortunately, as a quartet composer he remained rather conventional, however expert. This disk, which completes a set of the four Nielsen quartets in clean, brisk performances by the Copenhagen String Quartet, offers no more than a pleasing minor work —buoyant, masculine, at times jocosely rustic. Listeners who want only a single sample of Nielsen's quartets will find the intense No. 3 more rewarding.