A Clearing in the Woods

Arthur Laurents is a playwright who always knows exactly what he's doing. He has been widely acclaimed for his Home of the Brave, Time of the Cuckoo, and West Side Story. Yet despite a laudable production, his A Clearing in the Woods last year enjoyed only a brief Broadway run.

Plans are underway to mount it off-Broadway during the coming season; and the motivation is justified, for this is an important play. The Tufts Arena deserves praise for giving it its Boston premiere this week.

A Clearing in the Woods is no light summer fare; it is a "difficult" play, and demands unflagging concentration. The work is highly unorthodox: there is no real plot in the usual sense of the word; and the element of time is employed in a fluid and daring way.

It is impossible to talk about this play without giving away some information that should not be disclosed in advance. At any rate, the work revolves about an extraordinarily fascinating and complex young woman named Virginia, who feels that she is "an enormous zero in the dead center of nothing." She is tormented by "three white night-mares," all of whom are personified on stage; and might well have echoed Shakespeare's Macbeth: "O, full of scorpions is my mind!"

Virginia undergoes before our eyes a sort of psychoanalysis, though there is fortunately none of the professional mumbo-jumbo that normally accompanies such matters. Through this process Virginia manages to exorcise the mental tormentors and thoughts of suicide, until she can at the end rejoice, "It is pretty here!" Thus, the title of the play not only designates its physical locale but also symbolizes the catharsis of Virginia's crowded, confused mind.

The situation might suggest the kind of triple schizophrenia recently popularized in The Three Faces of Eve; or in Burgess Meredith's controversial production of Hamlet, in which three persons depicted three facets of Hamlet's personality and spoke now successively, now simultaneously. But Laurents has gone a step further here. Virginia lives in the present. The three girl tormentors, however, are not facets of her personality but rather three historical stages of her life. Laurents has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Miller's Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre.

Anyone seriously interested in modern American drama should become acquainted with A Clearing in the Woods. It is a fine play, and some day will be generally recognized as such.

The semi-amateur Tufts actors at least work earnestly in Laurents' behalf. Regrettably, director Frank B. Hanson evidently has a predilection for a style of delivery and gesture that went out years ago.

Last week, the Tufts group showed us what all the British have been shouting about: they staged Agatha Christie's murder mystery The Mousetrap, which is still running in London after six years and holds the all-time record for commercial longevity. It is a fairly neat and entertaining piece of construction, though the characters are all clear stereotypes. But it certainly ranks lower than such other examples as Dial M for Murder and Witness for the Prosecution.