Three Plays

At the very end of his life, Yeats returned to the theatre. He was still haunted by a desire to restore singing and dance as the poet's arts, and he wrote a number of experimental plays in which the plain style and plain fables of his poctic maturity were worked into music and motion. In the best of these stylized dramas, he achieved a formal perfection and a dramatic force that make plays constructed only of words seem wooden and drab by comparison.

"The King of the Great Clock Tower" is such a play, a balance of music, words, motion, and geometric line. And last night's production in Dudley House kept the balance beautifully.

The play opens on the balanced set: attendants speak, and the actors enter. The Queen wears a beautiful and impassive gold mask, and she sits, motionless. A Vagabond enters and tells the King how he has loved the Queen, never seeing her, and how he has sung to men along the roads of her beauty. Looking upon the silent Queen, though, he finds that she is

Neither so red, nor white, nor full in the breast As I had thought.

But he will continue to praise her idealized beauty; he has heard that the Queen will dance for him and kiss his poet's mouth. Angry, the king orders him executed, and the severed head is brought onstage. The Queen moves, and slowly begins an elaborate dance. The lips of the poet's head sing, and the Queen kisses him. Suddenly the king pays her homage, and the attendants end the play:

O what is life but a mouthful of air? Said the rambling, shambl'ing travelling man; Yet all the lovely things that were Live, for I saw them dancing there.

It would be rude and stupid to ask meanings of this beautiful structure; the play's words and themes do not from a logical unit, and its point is beyond words. The point is simply the climax of motion and artifice, the Queen's dance.

Amy Greenfield's dancing and choreography are eccentric, and at times a little awkward, but she dances very well. She portrays the sensuousness, the fear, and the rigid dignity of the Queen with perfect confidence. Her dancing is stiff, but dramatically right; when her fingers open stiltedly you think of them as somehow organic, like something growing in jerks. Lance Morrow is grave as the fearful and proud King, and the music and the direction complement the motion nicely.

"Purgatory" is the second Yeats play, and it is done equally well. This is a return to words alone, an exercise in concentrating enormous action into a handful of lines. The meter is irregular, there is no choral interlude, only the talk of a peddlar and his son standing before a gutted house. The talk shimmers with movement and tension: we watch the house become alive with terrible memories. The peddlar has killed his own father in this very house, and a family cannot purge itself of a crime its blood passes on. Each generation reenacts a family sin until the last measure of evil is payed out. Having killed his father, the peddlar now kills his son, perhaps to set his mother's ghost to rest. David Gullette is the peddlar, the ruined and driven old murderer: his is a sly and yet dignified performance. And Harry Smith, his son, is capable.

David Cole's "The King's Child, the King's Child, Ah!", a short play in four scenes, is a delightful piece of self-indulgence on Cole's part. Cole is a junior, whose play "How I Worked It With the Bush" displayed the same kind of wit and competence as this new play, an elaborate piece of buffoonery about a King Midas who is granted his wish. "How I Worked It With the Bush," though, was a more controlled piece of comedy.

There are times when Cole's humor (which largely consists in ingenious shifts from classical speech to slang to officialese) becomes a little wearing. Portions of his play are difficult to follow, and some of the scenes where Midas is allowed to philosophize and act the tragic hero actually become serious. Fortunately Midas (George Larson) is a fine comic actor, and for the most he plays his role with a bogus sincerity that is just right.

The gods who grant Midas his request are excellent, and make you wish Cole would write a real unpretentious comedy some day. I wonder if Harvard is good for somebody as clever as Cole; it's filled his head up with a set of allusions it will take him ten years to forget. But, pedantry aside, Bacchus and his father Silenus are two really engaging comic characters you won't forget: Bacchus (who is crowned with myrtle, but wears shades and is hip) is William Keough, who is almost as good as Allan Mandel, the drunken old God who gives imitations of Mars trapped in the net at parties, and who chases sea nymphs. At the play's end, Midas--a tragically wiser king--is standing dolefully orating about life and aspirations; and back of him, the two cavorting Gods dance their way offstage, Bacchus still wearing his sunglasses.

Caroline Cross directed the two Yeats plays, and Joel Crothers did a fine job of direction on Cole's farce; both made excellent use of the small space in the Inner Court at Dudley House, which is a wonderfully intimate place in which to watch a play. I can't think when I've seen such generally competent productions. The Dudley House players seem very sure of themselves.