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| Stephen Elliott, Elizabeth Wilson, David Birney, Colleen Dewhurst. |
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| Lou Gilbert, David Brney, Colleen Dewhurst Elizabeth Wilson, Stephen Elliott, Priscilla Pointer, Philip Bosco, Sydney Walker. |
Even the casting of Colleen Dewhurst, one of the leading
stage players of her time, in the role of Shen Teh could not noticeably improve
the generally dull quality of the Lincoln Center company’s production of Brecht’s
parable play about the nature of good and evil. Set in a Chinese city, the work
was presented in a bland presentation that was met with almost unanimously
bored responses. Critics like Stanley Kauffmann and Richard Watts were
unimpressed by the play’s dry, unaffecting, placidly ironic personality. The direction of Robert Symond, one the
company’s leading actors, was too dreary to paint the show with even a hint of theatrical
spirit.
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| Colleen Dewhurst, David Birney, Priscilla Pointer. |
The interpretation, noted Clive Barnes, was overly
realistic, insufficiently theatricalized, musically deficient, and
heavy-handedly translated. Its performances seemed dead, according to Walter
Kerr, and the revival was yet another example of the American theatre’s failure
to do Brecht justice.
Dewhurst’s notices were disappointing. Kauffmann stated that
she played her role (which requires the actor to play two contrasting
personalities, one generous, the other rapacious) by alternating “between Joan
of Arc . . . and a ‘camp’ gangster,” an approach that failed to provide her
with the “comic-ironic tension” she presumably sought. A rare positive view
belonged to Barnes, who noted that Dewhurst “had just the right radiance as the
good woman, and . . . [she] also captured the impersonality of the alter ego,
Shui Ta.
The very large cast also counted among its members Lou Gilbert, Philip Bosco, Sydney Walker, Ray Fry, Elizabeth Wilson, Robert Phalen, Dan Sullivan, Elizabeth Huddle, Frances Foster, and Tandy Cronyn, most of them regular members of the Lincoln Center Company. On the other hand, Dewhurst was not, being an outside star jobbed in for the occasion.
This was the play’s first revival locally since its New York
premiere at Off Broadway’s Phoenix Theatre in 1959.
