I Am A Camera

Some nights, everything just goes right. I Am a Camera is very funny, but it is more than a ramshackle frame on which gag lines are hung. Playwright John Van Druten found some real people in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, and around them he built a real play. He does not go very deeply into the question he raises of hedonism versus social involvement, but it is nice to have an issue to fill the brief spaces between laughs.

It is even nicer to have Moira Wylie around. Miss Wylie plays an extravagantly dissolute floozie who somehow finds herself in Berlin in 1930, singing for her supper and doing other things for her midnight snack. Sally Bowles is a lady, or used to be; her sophistication is only an extreme from of naivete. Miss Wylie has a devastating slink and drawl for her comedy scenes, and a very effective, throaty half-sob for the serious ones. She is lovable and ridiculous and pleasantly exasperating all at once, in exactly the right proportions. Sally is a difficult role but a juicy one, and Miss Wylie does it to a turn.

As the other party in the odd, poignant relationship that is the subject of the play, Robert Jordan has less to work with. But if the author has given him little personality, Jordan has enough and to spare of his own. He takes the part in his rumpled, boyish manner, and his quiet superbness goes beautifully with Miss Wylie's flam-boyant brilliance.

Much more, of course, was going on in Germany in 1930 than the private affairs of Sally and Chris. Van Druten varies his comedy by introducing several characters who are affected by the growing Nazi power, then a cloud no bigger than a man's fist. As an earnest, worried Jewish girl, Louise Bell is excellent, though no better than Roger Klein as her suitor. Lilian Aylward plays a warm, tolerant, ignorant old landlady who for all her kindliness is a virulent anti-Semite. She is immense in every sense of the word.

Camera is a skillful, carefully constructed, modern realistic comedy: not the sort of play which gives tremendous scope for a director to exhibit his virtuosity. Jean-Claude van Itallie has not tried any tricks, but he has kept the production moving with smooth skill through John Beck's lavishly shabby set. Joseph Raposo's music borrows its manner and some of its substance from Kurt Weill, and like almost everything else about this production, it is just right.

Julie Harris' movie version of I Am a Camera is currently playing in Boston. So what?