A Story Already Told

BACK THEN, a whole lot of people spent a whole lot of time getting high in their back seats and listening to The Mommas and the Poppas on their way up north to some field. Richard Nixon was president, Lyndon Johnson was the old enemy and the thing to do was to fight the establishment. The dream still survived, long after John Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead and buried. People in Cambridge marched down the streets when there were bad troubles in Birmingham and people in Birmingham marched up to Washington when there were bad troubles in Saigon.

Everything you read, everything you listened to, everything you did, or didn't do, had meaning. People wrote about the horror of the war, young men walking off air transports into the steamy jungles of Southeast Asia to be swallowed by something invisible that they called Charlie. People talked about the war, a silly war they said, and then they wrote some more. They dug up the records of the past, searching for new meanings where the scholars said there were none to be found. Paul Sills stumbled upon them though, buried in childhood copies of Grimm's Fairy Tales and cloth-bound editions of Aesop's Fables, and he brought them to life in a new kind of show that he called Story Theatre.

In New York and Los Angeles, they had seen things like it, but nothing quite the same. Actors and actresses not only spoke their lines but narrated their actions, too. "The fisherman went back to the seashore and called out for the flounder," the fisherman said as he went back to the seashore and called out for the flounder. Just a small bunch of actors handling some of the oldest stuff in the world and changing roles as quickly as the lights dimmed and came back up.

Action on four sides of every stage, sparse furnishings--a table one moment and a mountain the next--costumes that moved with the action; a return to the acting troupe that prided itself on its adaptability and valued self-sufficiency and independence more than anything else. Relevant theater that did not struggle for its relevance like a myopic woman fingering a porcelain sink for her dentures. "Childish" stories that moved adults. Theater that told its audience to listen, because it had something to say.

Though whole segments of the original still hang together today, Story Theatre's unified whole disturbs a 1980 audience more than it excites. The messages of Sills' world--"watch out, don't be fooled, they're out to get you"--still ring true, but ten or more years of being fooled and being gotten have hardened us to their tone. If the theater's stories have sobering messages for the audience, the whole production is supposed to be uplifting, to reassure us that the bastards won't get us again. But at the end of the evening, when four cast members pick at their guitars while the remainder clap their hands to the tune of "Here Comes the Sun," all the audience can do is shift uncomfortably. The music is not bad, but it is foreign.

DIRECTOR JON PRINCE has curiously chosen to update the stories themselves, while maintaining the '60s quality of the original production. What made this show work in 1970 was Sills' combination of unadulterated language and a natural environment. The environment is still natural--at times this production oozes Woodstock--but Prince has trampled on some of the stories, adding characterizations that some of his actors can't handle and moving back and forth from the narrate-your-own-action to insert-a-narrator form. Story Theatre asks the audience to suspend itself for a couple of hours and asks a small group of talented actors to make eight different characters in ten different tales believable. If it looks simple to do this show right, it's not, and Prince's style makes it even harder for any troupe to carry it off.

Like any melange of little shows tied together by a moral string, this production has its ups and downs. It succeeds when the more talented troupe members play off one another as they move about Peter Miller's functional (if noisy) set. Sam Samuels, Courtney B. Vance and Ralph J. Zito manage most of the evening's best moments, switching roles adeptly and keeping their characters under control. Vance plays animals effectively: as the ass in "The Bremen Town Musicians," he carries you down the road with him and as the flounder in "The Fisherman and His Wife" he slithers wonderfully, bellowing his anger. If Vance's performance is strained in both "Henny Penny" and "The Master Thief," his miming is marvelous and his body movements lithe. Samuels and Zito bring delightful innocence to roles that demand naivete. Samuels performs best in the show's opening sketch, "The Little Peasant" and Zito demonstrates considerable skill in "The Fisherman."

Where Prince lets a tale carry itself, the show succeeds but when he lets the company get carried away, the story gets sacrificed for momentary laughs. Katharine Kean is screamingly funny in the title role in "Henny Penny" but as she clucks her way around the stage for 20 minutes, the story gets lost. Cornelia Ravenal fancies herself a character actress, as she switches obnoxiously from mediocre southern to annoyingly silly to inconsistent Eva Gabor in a series of tales. John Smith's problem is different but the results are the same; in "The Little Peasant," Smith plays a tough-talking, thumb-sticking cowboy; unfortunately, he carries the role with him as Cocky-Locky in "Henny Penny" or the count in "The Master Thief."

BITS AND PIECES of Story Theatre, resting on a sound technical basis, work well and bring the tales to life. In other parts however, Prince's troupe buffs the stories with several coats of shlock and the actors can do little to salvage the intended meanings and morals. Confusion reigns at the end of "Henny Penny," as the cast sings and rocks to the Vietnam ballad "What are We Fighting For" while Foxy-Loxy ships the birds off to who knows where. It's easy to suspend cynicism and read between the still-fresh lines of the simple tales, but ten years later, Story Theatre's sociological comments seem sadly out of date.