Andorra

Robert Ginn has chosen a good play and done pretty well by it. So has his east. No one--not even a walk-on--need be ashamed of his performance. A few have speeches, even whole scenes, to be proud of. But it wasn't great. The Adams House Drama Society's production of Max Frisch's Andorra is solid, and unmemorable.

The trouble is that Ginn doesn't have any first-rate actors, and he hasn't the skill as a director to make a first-rate production without them. In a few places Ginn fell down when he shouldn't have. Why couldn't he at least have staged the fight scene believably? But for the most part it wasn't his fault.

The biggest problem is that there's no one in the cast with a good sense of timing. I admit I am prejudiced: I am obsessed by timing. Perhaps I make too much of it. But it does seem the key to power and effectiveness and tension and drama and all those other things critics mention when they've been impressed but they don't know how or why.

Andorra is a play critics are likely to say that sort of thing about productions of. I can't and tend to think the poor timing's why.

The ostensible theme of the play is anti-semitism, but it's wider than that. It's a psycho-political horror story--rather like The Visit--and involves an enormous amount of character development on the part of one Andri (Carl Nagin). Except for Teacher (Marc Temin) and Barblin (Julie Tolliver) the other parts are basically designed for character actors.

Here's where the timing comes in. With the exception of Charles Braun as Doctor and Leonard Sussman as Priest, the actors in this show do not develop regular enough patterns of expression and reaction. They talk with the same voices and swagger or strut the same way, but the rhythm of their speech, the length of time they take to respond aren't consistent. They don't, as they might, provide sure indications of the temperaments of the characters.

In talking to each other the actors don't jump many cues. But they don't play off each other as they might, varying tone and cadence to indicate apprehension or guilt or relief. In the inter-scene monologues a few actors came close to this kind of rhythmic expression of emotion. But together they don't.

Nagin and Temin and Miss Tolliver have harder jobs, but they fail for many of the same reasons as the others. In the scene where Teacher comes home drunk and tries to talk to the insolent, isolated Andri, Temin and Nagin could have developed a beautiful pattern of slurred overture and acid rebuff. They merely mixed lines and frustrations. The last scene between Barblin and Andri might have built to a striking conclusion. Nagin and Miss Tolliver strove and fumbled, but without precision or notable effect.

Individually, Miss Tolliver turned in the evenest performance of the three. Temin has an annoying habit of representing fear or trauma by having a tightly-reined, slow-motion epileptic fit. And Nagin relies too much on twisting his neck and anguishing. Once an actor has anguished a couple of times he doesn't tell you much about what's going on inside him the next three dozen times.