The Tiger and the Horse

If ever a play needed some illegitimate sparkle this is it. The plot is dreary, the dialogue less than brilliant, the social commentary, such as it is, hackneyed, and the melodramatic third act objectively unconvincing. The Tiger and the Horse calls for flamboyant acting and highly imaginative direction. The current company provides neither in sufficient measure.

Set in the present, the play concerns emotional paralysis, moral commitment, intellectuality, and connected problems of an academic family. There is a great deal of peripheral wit. The cast got some good laughs out of it, but necessarily couldn't make much emotional capital.

In a play with so little subtlety--as far as I'm concerned so little truth--perhaps the best the minor actors can do is make their characters interesting. But David Dunton, as Sir Hugo Slate, is only conventionally stuffy. And Johanna Madden, as Mary Dean, is more cheaply attractive, more easily written off, than necessary.

Howard Cutler, as the poet type, Louis Flax, only whined and slouched and looked pained. And Patrician Hawkins made of Stella Dean no more than a chaste version of Louis; she even slouched the same way.

Not that Cutler and Miss Hawkins should necessarily have resorted to pecularities of style to hold the audience. But as their lines, played straight, are awkward at best, they might have tried to strike a few more sparks. Flax's rage never impressed me, his perplexities never touched me. Neither did Stella's.

As one might almost guess, Flax eventually gets Stella pregnant, offers, somewhat unhappily, to marry her, and is refused. At the end of the play, after the baby has been born, they do decide to marry, chucking their scruples in the last act of crisis. But neither their emotional estrangement nor their reconciliation are any more than indicated. I know, by the fact that he was folding diapers and that she was ignoring him, that Louis was being humble and Stella distant. But Cutler and Miss Hawkins never convinced me of their characters' feelings.

John Toye, as Jack Dean, fails for lack of warmth. Admittedly, he is a very reserved man, spoken of as a saint, but if his final resolution to stand by his half-mad wife is to be believable, he must seem thoroughly sympathetic as well. Occasionally Toye managed fits of humanity, but they only seemed to contradict his general callousness.

What the others miss, Emily Levine very nearly accomplishes completely. As Dean's peculiar wife, who loves him but feels they are never "associated," who wrestles with evil demons in the night, and who finally goes crazy, she is both affecting and amusing. She plays her mad scene with intelligence and restraint, pitching it just right emotionally. And if her speech about evil and beauty doesn't follow anything in the play, that's Bolt's fault.

No doubt director Michael Ehrhardt deserves a good deal of credit for what is good in this production, for it is marred more by listlessness than by overall inconsistency of tone. The relationships between the characters are all defined correctly; they are just not portrayed with much feeling.

Still, I wish Ehrhardt had let loose his imagination on some more elaborate staging, though perhaps he felt limited by the Agassiz stage. And I wish he had played up the inescapable melodramatic element more. Either through hesitation or integrity his production is less entertaining than it might have been.