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| Joan Van Ark. |
This rarely revived early Pirandello work (not to be confused with Jean Renoir's classic 1939 film of the same title) was presented by
the New Phoenix Repertory Company in a version that intrigued somebut that others felt might have been
better done. The 1918 play intrigued the critics for its treatment, not of the
usual reality-versus-illusion theme of the Italian playwright’s work, but of
the conflict between reason and instinct.
Silia (Joan Van Ark) is the instinctual woman, one who lives
for her feelings and impulses, while her detached, intellectual husband, Leone Gala
(John McMartin), lives for a life dominated by the cool forces of rationality.
He shows no evidence of jealousy even when he knows his friend Guido (David Dukes) has been
having an affair with Silia at the luxurious apartment he has provided for her
as part of their separation agreement. Rankled by her husband’s indifference
(actually a mask for his jealousy), Silia wants him to die, and contrives a
situation in which he is forced to challenge to a duel a master swordsman and
marksman over an alleged insult offered to Silia. Playing as he does by the “rules
of the game,” Leone arranges matters so that Guido, his second, must fight the
duel and thereby die in his place, a victim of what T.E. Kalem called “the
deadliest rule of all: a husband’s right to kill his wife’s lover.”
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| John McMartin, David Dukes. |
The Rules of the Game,
the play being rehearsed at the start of Pirandello’s classic Six Characters in Search of an Author, proved
to be a suspenseful, intellectually invigorating exercise, but
the consensus was that its performance left much to be desired. According to
Clive Barnes, “the acting was not quite good enough for this strangely stylized
comedy of ill manners. When Mr. [Paul] Scofield played Gala [three years earlier, at
London’s National Theatre], he played him with a frozen indifference and a
blazing intellectuality that was almost a moral force. . . . John McMartin . .
. has little of this certainty. His metallic voice charmingly bumbles on, and
he is almost pathetic as a betrayed husband about to be led to his doom. . . .”
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| Joel Fabiani, John McMartin, Charles Kimbrough. |
Harold Clurman, opining that the company simply lacked the actors to pull this play off, said that the husband’s role needed “a 40-year-old John Barrymore . . . and all the Phoenix can provide is John McMartin, a character actor best in the impersonation of clowns, weaklings and dotards.” T.E. Kalem, however, had other thoughts, pointing to "a polished cast paced by the sensitive honesty of John McMartin's performance makes the evening hum with suspense."
Barnes added that Joan Van Ark “is perfectly admirable
within [the play’s] own conventions but lacks the capricious willfulness of
Pirandello's actual heroine. The only character who truly stood within the
actual play was the Guido of David Dukes, half‐elegant barfly and half‐Mafia
scion . . . , who wanders through the action like a somnambulist closed‐liddedly
intent on some unknowing destiny—a pawn to the great playwright in the skies.”
Other cast members of note included Peter Friedman, Charles Kimbrough, Ellen Tovatt, Munson Hicks,
and as one of the “neighbors,” a young actress named Glenn Close.
