THE CHILDREN
 |
| Fern Sloan, Bob Balaban, Kevin McCarthy, Terry Kiser. |
"In Lieu of Reviews"
Reviews of live theatre being impossible during these days of the pandemic, THEATRE'S LEITER SIDE
is pleased to provide instead accounts of previous theatre
seasons--encompassing the years 1970-1975-for theatre-hungry readers. If you'd
like to know the background on how this previously unpublished series came to
be and what its relationship is 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 entries beginning with the letter “A.” See the list at the end of the
current entry.
THE CHILDREN [Drama/Art/Death/Family/Incest/Nudity/Rural]
A: Michael McGuire; D: Paul Schneider; S: Marsha Eck; C: Theoni V. Aldredge; L:
Arden Fingerhut; P: New York Shakespeare Festival; T: Public Theater/Other
Stage (OB); 11/28/72-1/21/73 (64)
A foggy exercise
in abstruse, symbolic playmaking that received nay votes from the critics for
its unfathomable manner, uninteresting characters, and inflated air of
self-importance. Steaming with images of incest and painting (at one point a
girl poses nude for her artist father), and with characters who may not be who
they seem to be—is the daughter really her mother or the father not really the
father?—the play’s dense, stream-of-consciousness dialogue drove the critics to
distraction.
Set on a Midwestern
farm, the story concerns the passing away of an offstage figure, a beautiful
woman who is surrounded in her last moments by her husband (Kevin McCarthy), a
former lover (Terry Kiser), and her son (Bob Balaban) and daughter (Fern
Sloan).
Clive Barnes
discerned glimpses of “real characters and situations” within the play’s dimly
lit recesses but Walter Kerr asserted that it “sounded like a convocation of
drugged parakeets.” John Simon called The
Children “a pretentious, verbose, deliberately and vapidly arcane piece of
megalomaniacal mystification.” Even a cast of leading New York actors could do little to rescue this play from oblivion.
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
Barbary Shore
The Bar that Never Closes
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
The Beauty Part
The Beggar’s Opera
Behold! Cometh the Vanderkellens
Be Kind to People Week
Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill
Bette Midler’s Clams on a Half-Shell Revue
Black Girl
Black Light Theatre of Prague
Black Picture Show
Black Sunlight
The Black Terror
Black Visions
Les Blancs
Blasts and Bravos: An Evening with H,L.
Mencken
Blood
Bluebeard
Blue Boys
Bob and Ray—The Two and Only
Boesman and Lena
The Boy Who Came to Leave
Bread
A Breeze from the Gulf
Brief Lives
Brother Gorski
Brothers
Bullshot Crummond
Bunraku
The Burnt Flower Bed
Butley
Button, Button
Buy Bonds, Buster
The Cage
Camille
Candide (1)
Candide (2)
The Candyapple
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion
The Caretaker
La Carpa de los Raquichis
The Carpenters
The Castro Complex
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Changing Room
Charles Abbott and Son
Charley’s Aunt
Charlie Was Here and Now He’s Gone
Chemin de Fer