Yes Is for a Very Young Man

Perhaps literary figures shouldn't write. Perhaps they should just conduct salons, help budding talents bud, and occasionally murmur sage epigrams. Then their writing couldn't tarnish their legend and we could be content to read about them in nostagalgic memoirs and intellectual histories. But unfortunately Gertrude Stein did write a bad undramatic play and all the skill of a fine repertory company isn't enough to save it.

Stein wanted to show that Occupied France was very much like Baltimore in the Civil War--families and friends divided in sympathies, but still carrying on together. So she wrote Yes Is for a Very Young Man "in the spirit of the plays I had loved as a child, the plays of the Civil War."

Which is fine except that the Civil War plays of her late 19th century childhood weren't very good. They took an essentially dramatic situation and did nothing with it. They fitted on a few melodramatic devices and let the emotional associations of the audience create their own effect. Gertrude Stein had too much taste, or timidity, to include the melodrama, so Yes is for A Very Young Man has nothing but a situation: a family of divided loyalties in Occupied France and their American friend live through a tense war and manage to more or less stick together. Change the setting to Baltimore or Algeria, it would probably be the same. A war is a war is a war.

The dialogue is refined, clever, and painfully polite. Steinian repetition abounds. The diction floats high above the reality of war. Any emotion must be deduced from the situation, not seen in the characterization.

Director David Wheeler struggles manfully with all this and at least makes watching the play tolerable. But he can't supply suspense and emotion where they don't exist. His actors read the overly precious lines as realistically as possible, and the humorous scenes are more successful than the painfully low high drama. Paul Benedict, with a comic deadpan, plays the resistance fighter husband of a wife from a crumbling aristocratic background. He's terribly funny but not strong enough to make his convictions plausible. Lisa Richards as his wife does an outstanding job with a whining, pathetic character.

But Benedict and Richards, along with Bronia Stefan's insufferable but accurate portrayal of an American woman, have essentially static roles. The only character given a chance to change is Burris De Benning's Ferdinand, the "very young man" of the title. He gets to change from an overserious young man given to posing to a slightly more mature man, overserious and given to posing. De Benning ages the four years well enough but by the last scene I was no longer interested.

The acting was smooth, the staging deft; Robert Allan's set was tasteful, but the play was lousy.