Timebends (92 page)

But he got his first real whiff of Chairman Woods's angry opposition to the very theatre he was supposed to be leading when, rather than wait a year or two for the Vivian Beaumont Theatre to be finished, Whitehead asked the chancellor of New York University to lend, for a dollar a year, the land on which to construct a temporary theatre on West Fourth Street. Completed almost overnight by builders who specialized in steel industrial warehouses, this inexpensive structure had incredibly good acoustics and a bare concrete ambience that quite accidentally expressed the actual poverty of this maligned and ultimately doomed attempt at a public New York theatre. The metal roof would leak on opening night, and on that afternoon of the
After the Fall
premiere, Whitehead and I went out on Sixth Avenue to buy a pair of screwdrivers and screwed about six rows of seats into their brackets.

The fury against the whole attempt destroyed it finally, especially when the Lincoln Center board had no firm principles with which to resist criticism that was mindless enough to include the allegedly rotten choice of actors for the company. That the roster featured Jason Robards, Jr., the still unknown Faye Dunaway,
David Wayne, Joseph Wiseman, Salome Jens, and the young Hal Holbrook did nothing to mute the abuse. Mistakes were certainly made, some of them bad ones in the selection of plays that were not right for the company, but probably the worst miscalculation was to give the appearance of making grandiose plans when in fact it was all an experiment that should have proceeded as quietly and privately as possible until the company had found its voice and some degree of self-assurance.

Despite everything,
After the Fall
continued to play to very high attendance. A beleaguered Whitehead and Clurman were soon knocking on my door for another play, and with my weakness for solidarity, as well as the tempting availability of what I knew was a superior acting company, I began
Incident at Vichy
and completed it in a short time. This, like the inception of
A View from the Bridge
in Marty Ritt's invitation, seemed to indicate that had I been fortunate enough to live in a period when a high-level repertory or art theatre existed, I would certainly have written more plays than I had. The very prospect of struggling through the difficulties of casting and production in the commercial theatre, and the often frivolous junking of years of work after a single thoughtless review, have cast a pall of futility over the enterprise of writing plays, at least for me. And I am sure I am not alone in this.

The root of
Vichy
came from my friend and former psychoanalyst Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, who had hidden out in Vichy France during the war, before the Nazis openly occupied the country. But all I recalled was the bare outline of his story: a Jewish analyst picked up with false papers and saved by a man he had never seen before. This unknown man, a gentile, had substituted himself in a line of suspects waiting to have their papers and penises inspected in a hunt for Jews posing as Frenchmen.

There was a second root in an old friend of Inge's, Prince Josef von Schwarzenberg, senior surviving member of a very ancient Austrian noble line, who had “declined” to cooperate with the Nazis and had suffered for it during the war. He was a source for Von Berg, the prince in my play who steps in to take the place of a condemned analyst. It was not altogether a romantic idealization, for in some absurd yet logical way Josef von Schwarzenberg embodied an elemental resistance to the fascist spirit, which is fundamentally one of enforced vulgarity in all its forms. An elegantly tall bachelor allowed by the postwar Austrian government one wing of the Schwarzenberg palais in which to live out his life, Josef could
look out his window and muse upon the massive five-story marble Soviet monument to the Russian soldier while hopelessly scolding his last remaining servant, who padded through the halls wearing white gloves as he served inedible spaghetti. Between subsidizing string quartets and scrounging gas money for his Peugeot, he managed to create an image of cultural integrity that seemed a moving proof against subornation by every kind of power. Schwarzenberg's breath came faster and his hand shook excitedly as he listened to a Mozart sonata on his old record player or read a verse from some new poet's work. He would rush off to mass with his papal decoration, the Golden Fleece, hanging from his neck, and then to Inge's mother's for a bowl of rice as he believed only she could cook it, then to a séance of mystical contemplation with Arnold Keyserling, about whose ideas he had immense curiosity, but as a Catholic, no belief. Having denied the Nazi movement the glory of his name, he never considered any other course; there had simply been no choice, and he could not imagine deserving the remotest sort of credit for his dangerous refusal. That he had spent much of the war doing menial work in France he hardly regarded as a punishment. What I found fascinating in Josef was a mixture of worldly discernment and a naive, almost thoughtlessly pure moral code that perhaps only one so protected in youth could possess, and that measured the corruption the world took for granted.

Inge and I had decided on one of our visits to her family in Austria to go to Radomizl, the Polish village near Kraków from which all my grandparents had emigrated. Inge's father eagerly got out his military maps and under his magnifying glass found a Radomizl in the Ukraine. Soon after, the Polish ambassador to Austria, a theatre buff, invited us for lunch to rave about what he thought a fabulous production of
After the Fall
in Warsaw, and happily invited us to visit a Radomizl in western Poland, nowhere near Kraków. Now Josef showed up to announce that in a Bohemian province once owned by the Schwarzenbergs was a Radomizl that he remembered well from his youth, and that he insisted was the town of my origins. “But I'm sure it wasn't in Bohemia,” I said. “But you can't be sure,” he laughed, “so you have to choose your Radomizls, and you must choose mine! For all you know, we are related!”

We never made the trip to what now seemed an arbitrary hometown, a nowhere. And besides, if by chance I did hit on the right Radomizl, my relatives were not likely to have survived the Nazi
conquest. All the Radomizls, and all the towns like them, were now
judenfrei.

Harold Clurman's production of
Incident at Vichy
in Boris Aronson's almost mythic police station was quite beautiful, but such was the ongoing contempt for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts that it was given an unexcited if respectful welcome. Within a year the London West End production by Peter Wood, with Alec Guinness playing the prince, fared far better. I found it necessary, incidentally, to explain to the British actors—hardly twenty years after a war that had come closer to destroying England than any calamity in a thousand years—what the Nazi SS had been and what it had done. The past has simply ceased in our time, maybe because too much is changing too fast.

The play would have a curious history. The first of my works to be banned in the Soviet Union, during one of its anti-Jewish convulsions in the late sixties, it was optioned in France by three different producers, each of whom decided to relinquish the rights for fear of resentment at the implication of French collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitism. Finally, in the early eighties, Pierre Cardin produced it in Paris, but the defensive bitterness of the reviews was unmistakable. Norman Lloyd's production on national public television, directed by Stacy Keach, is probably the most expressive one I have seen.

It was not until 1987 and the Gorbachev liberalization that
Vichy
finally made it onto a Soviet stage, produced by the same Galina Volchek whose 1968 Maly Theatre production had been shut down the night before the premiere, after six vastly successful previews. This time, a
Moscow News
reporter phoned me and in an excitedly happy voice asked such questions as “What do you think is the significance of this play being produced in Moscow after twenty years? What is the message of the play?” And finally, “We wish to assure you that your answers will be published unedited verbatim thank you very much.” And indeed they were.

I often learned something about the state of the world's mind through the various receptions of my plays, and new perspectives about our theatre have come from the past thirty years of travel. In 1965, Laurence Olivier listened incredulously as I reported the Lincoln Center Repertory debacle. “But you'd hardly begun! We were seven years in Chichester building our company before we ever opened in London. And got roasted fully twenty-five percent of the time. And no one thought to suggest the whole thing ought to be scrapped. It's incomprehensible!” But he reckoned without American instant culture.

Olivier was doing
The Crucible
in London, and for two months now we had been in correspondence about a dialect for the characters. His production, with Colin Blakely as Proctor and Joyce Redman as Elizabeth, had a nobility that was at once moving and austere. The actor playing the octogenarian Giles Corey made me wonder how such an aged man could still possess such energy, but he turned out to be in his twenties. What I would not forget was a long silence at the beginning of the second act when Proctor enters his farmhouse and washes up and sits down for dinner. It must have lasted many minutes as Elizabeth served him and then went about her chores, the absence of speech itself the proof of their hurt pride, their anger with one another, and somehow their mutual regard, too; and at the same time it drew the mounting fear of what was happening in Salem Town into this house. From such exactness, what passion!

On the plane going over I read in the
Times
that Vincent Riccio, a member of the New York State Legislature, had been indicted for keeping on his payroll a woman who had never done any work. A prison sentence was possible.

It was now more than ten years since Riccio and I had spent nights together in the Bay Ridge streets. I had read about his election to the legislature a while ago, and I thought there was something anomalous in the only Republican social worker I had ever heard of becoming a regular politician. He had always angrily condemned personal ambition in the social work hierarchy; was it because he had some of it himself?

Now I thought of him sitting on a car fender in the purple light of a Bay Ridge evening, a gutsy former navy boxer with slick black hair and overlarge dentures replacing his own knocked-out teeth; in between teaching the hoodlums how to block punches, he had tried with a finesse I envied at the time to lead them out of their forest ways to live among peaceful people. His accurate analyses of the social workers' moral hypocrisies passed before me as I stared at the newspaper. Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

Soon there was a short paragraph reporting him convicted and jailed. Then another, some months later, that he had died, cause unstated. I wondered if it was all the confusion brought on by too many options. Who would have thought that back in the fifties, working the Bay Ridge streets to head off another mindless gang war, he was actually living his best of times?

* * *

You know you have reached a certain age when irony dominates whatever you see. When I spoke and wrote against the Vietnam War, it felt like a rerun of the Spanish Civil War with new actors, a movie of defeat that I'd seen before. In the militancy of the sixties, the black awakening, the thrilling alienation of the times, I saw the seeds of a coming new disillusionment. Once again we were looking almost completely outside ourselves for salvation from ourselves; in the absolutely right and necessary rebellion was only a speck of room for worrying about personal ethics and our own egoism. At fifty and counting, I tried to block out the echoes of past crusades, but it was impossible.

The Price
was in part an exorcism of this paralyzing vision of repetition. Two brothers, one a policeman, the other a successful surgeon, meet again after an angry breakup many years before; the time has come to divide the family's possessions after the father's death. Grown men now, they think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice, and they part unreconciled. Neither can accept that the world needs both of them—the dutiful man of order and the ambitious, selfish creator who invents new cures.

Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and life seemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusions because truth was too costly to face. At the end of the play Gregory Solomon, the eighty-nine-year-old used furniture dealer, is left with the family's possessions, which he has purchased from the brothers; he finds an old laughing record and, listening to it, starts laughing uncontrollably, nostalgically, brutally, having come closest to acceptance rather than denial of the deforming betrayals of time.

There are scenes in
The Price
that I especially love for the memories they bring back of David Burns, an inspired lunatic with an oblique sense of the ridiculous that threw all life into a long perspective. It was a troubled production, and rehearsal threatened to disintegrate one afternoon when Arthur Kennedy, Kate Reid, and Pat Hingle—three-quarters of the cast—got into an angry argument with the director, Ulu Grosbard. Suddenly Davey appeared onstage above the others, who were in the auditorium; he was wearing his hat, jacket, and tie, but his trousers were draped over one arm, and he was looking with alarm at his wristwatch.

“My God, I forgot,” he called out to no one in particular, “I've got a baby in an incubator in Philadelphia!” and rushed off the stage like the White Rabbit. The argument ended then and there, swamped by this marvelously sculpted ridicule of man's foolishness.

In Philadelphia, I had to take over the direction myself, the growing differences having become irreconcilable. In New York, finally, with opening night forty-eight hours away, I was sitting in the front row rehearsing Pat Hingle and Kate Reid. It was about seven fifteen, and the preview audience could be heard out in the lobby. Arthur Kennedy came up behind me, leaned over, and whispered, “Davey's been taken to the hospital with a kinked colon. He's going to be operated on tonight.”