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| Peg Murray, Barton Heyman, Tom Happer. |
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.