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| Rachel Roberts, John McMartin. (Photos: Van Williams.) |
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| George Ede, Rachel Roberts, Ralph Drischell. |
One of three plays
produced by the short-lived New Phoenix Repertory Company during the 1973-1974
season, The Visit allowed musical
theatre director Hal Prince one of his infrequent opportunities to stage a nonmusical
play. Swiss dramatist Durrenmatt’s 1956 tragicomic morality play, his
best-known creation (seen on Broadway in 1958 as the opening production
at the renamed Lunt-Fontanne Theatre), was given a somberly atmospheric
staging, emphasizing its bitter theme of retribution for old wrongs.
Set in the dying
German town of Gullen, it follows a visit there after many years of Clara
Zachnassian (Rachel Roberts), a former resident, now the world’s wealthiest
woman. Clara offers the townspeople a fabulous sum of money if they will execute
Anton Schill (John McMartin). Schill, a respected citizen, got her pregnant
when she was 17 and then rejected her. The dilemma faced by the town provides a
striking situation expertly exploited by the playwright’s fanciful, sometimes
bizarre, cast of characters.
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| Merwin Goldsmith, Bill Moor, John McMartin, Ralph Drischell, John Glover. |
Most critics welcomed
the revival, but John Simon was perturbed about the decision to use Maurice
Valencey’s loosely adapted version of the play, which he called an “abortion.” There
was sharp disagreement over the production’s quality. Clive Barnes, Walter Kerr, and
Brendan Gill, for example, thought the direction excellent. Said Barnes, “Mr.
Prince’s staging catches the play’s mystery and sense of corruption with a
dazzling ease.” The sparse setting was deemed effective by some, Barnes calling
it “absolutely right for the swift-moving play.” And the acting, especially by
Roberts and McMartin, was generally considered superlative.
On the other hand,
John Simon and Harold Clurman thought the direction “amateurish.” Simon said the
result was “a tedium composed in equal parts of pretentiousness and ineptitude.”
There was, he added, a notable absence of humor. He and Clurman also
disparaged the sets as unimaginative, and had little good to say of the
performances, which included contributions from Peter Friedman, Bill Moor,
Ralph Drischell, George Ede, John Glover, Merwin Goldsmith, David Dukes,
Richard Venture, Curt Karabalis, Thomas A. Stewart, and Valentine Mayer.
Despite the critical
disagreements, Prince won a Drama Desk Award for his direction, and Ken Billington
landed a Tony nomination for his lighting.
A problematic musical
version of The Visit, starring Chita
Rivera, visited Broadway in 2015. My review can
be found here.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: Vivat! Vivat! Regina.
