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| Estelle Parsons, Lenny Baker. |
"In Lieu of Reviews"
For background on how this previously
unpublished series—introducing all mainstream New York shows between 1970 and
1975—came to be and its relationship to my three The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage volumes (covering every New
York play, musical, revue, and revival between 1920 and 1950), please check the
prefaces to any of the earlier entries beginning with the letter “A.” See the
list at the end of the current entry.
BARBARY SHORE [Drama/Mystery/Politics] A: Jack Gelber; SC:
Norman Mailer’s novel, Barbary Shore;
DS: David Mitchell; L: Roger Morgan; P: New York Shakespeare Festival; T:
Public Theater/Florence S. Anspacher Theater (OB); 12/18/73-1/27/74 (48)
Based on Norman Mailer’s second novel, this drama--performed by a topnotch cast--is set in a
Brooklyn boarding house and concerns a group of people living there. Mike
Lovett (Lenny Baker) is a young writer. McLeod (Rip Torn) and Hollingsworth
(Lane Smith) are men with secret pasts. The former was a revolutionary who kept
a mysterious, valuable, but unspecified object when he left the “movement.”
There is also a sexy, blowsy, middle-aged landlady (Estelle Parsons).
The action deals largely with the intense efforts of
Hollingsworth to interrogate McLeod, thus evoking an air of mystery which makes
the play akin to a thriller. However, the talk very frequently concerns dialectical
arguments on Marxism, making the atmosphere more political than suspenseful.
Gelber’s adaptation seemed too “weighted down with ideological ballast”
to suit Mel Gussow, and failed to maintain interest in either its ideas or
persons. The play was entirely too “vague” for Walter Kerr, and the characters
more “abstractions than people.” Of the pretentious language, Kerr said, “there
is scarcely a sentence that wouldn’t dissolve into a mist at the flick of a
fingernail.”
Previous entries:
Abelard and
Heloise
Absurd Person
Singular
AC/DC
“Acrobats”
and “Line”
The Advertisement/
All My Sons
All Over
All Over Town
All the Girls Came
Out to Play
Alpha Beta
L’Amante Anglais
Ambassador
American Gothics
Amphitryon
And Miss Reardon
Drinks a Little
And They Put
Handcuffs on the Flowers
And Whose Little
Boy Are You?
Anna K.
Anne of Green
Gables
Antigone
Antiques
Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead
Applause
Ari
As You Like It
Augusta
The
Au Pair Man
Baba Goya [Nourish the Beast]
The Ballad of Johnny Pot