Off-Broadway does things by halves most of the time, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. A playwright may get his hands on a fresh or exciting theme, but through clumsy craftsmanship, inept direction or an amateurish cast, the stage effect will be fumbled. Conversely, acting skills and staging techniques of a high order will sometimes be lavished on trivia, or the feeblest works of fine playwrights, or plays on tired subjects.
This season, off-Broadway has been particularly plagued by one-halfmanship, and its strongest impact has been the feeling that an off-Broadway evening is far from wasted yet less than richly satisfying.
The Self as an Unmade Bed. The good half of Telemachus Clay is its brilliantly evocative staging, the indifferent half its overfamiliar theme—the quest for identity, based on a personal history that sounds the way an unmade bed looks. Playwright Lewis John Carlino (Cages) uses the name Telemachus to invoke the son of Odysseus who could not draw his father's great bow. Carlino's Telemachus is illegitimate, and he searches for the lost father and the fullness of manhood in his Spoon Riverish home town and later in Hollywood.
This quest is electrically charged by Director Cyril Simon. Eleven actors sit facing the audience as ingenious lighting plays over them to orchestrate speeches and scenes like music, so that the playgoer feels that he is experiencing the thematic flow of the hero's life —lyrical, staccato, abrasive, brassy and blue. There are remarkable impressionistic renderings of states of feeling: the disembodied rush of a transcontinental train sucked through the vacuum of night, the empty-souled writhings of some Venice Beach bopniks. But in the end, the hero still seems incapable of drawing the bow of manhood.
The Playwright as Label. The one-halfmanship of buying a playwright's brand name on a piece of inferior work is illustrated by Jean Genet's The Maids. Two maids (Lee Grant and Kathleen Widdoes) dress up in their mistress' finery and plot her murder by poisoning her tea. The mistress (Eunice Anderson) avoids drinking the tea. One maid commits suicide, and the other expects to hang. For Genet, the theater is an instrument of the outcast's fantasized revenge: his characters ritually murder the authority they hate and envy by donning the vestments of the powers that be and play-acting their roles. In The Maids, this proves to be no more scarifying than little children playing grown-ups in their parents' clothing.
A popular half-form is the adaptation, half novel and half play. A novel has the time to grow imperceptibly, like a tree, acquiring added rings of meaning. A play is more like a duel or a trial. In a brief two hours it must draw blood or render a judgment.
This pitfall has trapped J. P. Donleavy in adapting his novel The Ginger Man, although he has fashioned an arresting amoralist as his antihero. Sebastian Dangerfield (Patrick O'Neal), an American studying law in Dublin, is life-prone and dead beat. His head is more often in his cups than his books. He is one of Nature's seductive heels, and in the most brilliant scene in the play, he seduces a mid-thirtyish spinster whose tempestuous flesh mocks her primly parochial morality.