Wednesday, June 10, 2020

150. THE ENCLAVE. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

Peg Murray, Barton Heyman, Tom Happer.

For background on this series and a list of previous entries, click here.

THE ENCLAVE [Drama/Friendship/Homosexuality] A/D: Arthur Laurents; S/L: Robert Randolph; C: Robert MacKintosh; M: Stephen Sondheim; P: Edgar Lansbury, Joseph Beruh, qne Clinton Wilder; T: Theatre Four (OB); 11/15/73-12/2/73 (22)

The title of this play refers to a plan adopted by a small group of longtime friends to set up a number of closely related domiciles by renovating an old but architecturally interesting part of the city. All are sophisticated, witty, upwardly mobile New York stereotypes: a doctor, an architect, a black man married to a white woman, and so forth. All, except the 40-year-old Ben (Barton Heyman), who’s gay, are married. When Ben reveals the he wants to move into the enclave with his 25-year-old lover (Tom Happer), his shocked friends refuse.

That such knowing urban types should so vociferously dismiss a homosexual friend’s proposal to live with his boyfriend was considered a major authorial misconception. The drama may been “well drafted and bitchily witty,” as Clive Barnes wrote, but the premise was dated and out of place in a smart city setting. “Have they never in their lives been acquainted with homosexual couples,” asked Walter Kerr, “that they should so suddenly turn into dithering, emphatically blushing children?” Kerr also noted that Laurent’s insistence on overstressing the lover’s “forthrightness” transformed him from an admirable character into a “lout,” seriously damaging the play’s purpose.

The tendentious play got further in over its head as it gradually laid bare the sexual hang-ups of all the other, supposedly normal, members of the group. This left the gay couple to feel happily superior to the emotional wreckage their revelations caused.

Ably staged by Laurents himself, the good cast provided especially fine work from Peg Murray as a brassy wife, Hayman as Ben, and Laurence Hugo as a funny, fey doctor. Aficionados familiar with the artistic relationship of Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, going back to West Side Story, will note that the background music was by the latter.