Tufts Theatre Opens

In a program note, The Great Big Doorstep, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is referred to as "a wholesome antidote to the heavy exposure of Deep South Depravity to which readers and playgoers were already being subjected." The fallacy in this statement is that, while depravity can at least cause a warm tingling sensation up and down your groin, the only emotion induced by prolonged exposure to innocuousness is sheer boredom.

Doorstep, at the Tufts Arena through this Saturday, concerns itself, if not the audience, with the problems the Crochet family in Louisiana encounter in trying to raise money for a new home. In order even to make the show bearable an extremely high level of acting is called for, especially in the parts of Mr. and Mrs. Crochet and their daughter Erie. This level the Tufts group does not provide. They fail, both in their line readings and in their movements, to convey any real feeling. Marilyn Rawlins as Mrs. Crochet fails less than the others. But the largest share of the blame should be laid at the feet of director Marston Balch, who has utterly failed to produce any unity, either of accent or of movement or of relationships in this performance. Tom Davis' picturesque and technically impressive set deserves high praise.

As its first production of the season the Arena Theatre last week presented the New England premiere of two plays by Eugene Ionesco, The Lesson and Jack, or the Submission. Ionesco's major thesis is that people simply are incapable of communication through the medium of language. Words are not understood, or have different meanings to different people. The tragedy of Ionesco's world is that people think words have meaning, try to use them to communicate and, hence, fail completely to know anything or anyone. The language of this world is the cliche and the pun. The normal reply is a non sequitur. As might be imagined, Ionesco is not an easy playwright to stage. Tufts handled him with courage and imagination, doing a fine job with Jack, and a perfectly adequate lesson.

The Lesson deals with a professor who has the unfortunate habit of murdering his pupils. He requires truly virtuoso acting, and Frank Langella just wasn't quite up to it. The professor is required to grow continuously more irritated, and concurrently more forceful, throughout the play. Ideally the process should be completely smooth but Mr. Langella crammed almost all of the change into one instant. As the pupil, Myra Mailloux handled the contrasting decline of her socialite poise with greater smoothness. Alice Lindbergh as the maid who has seen this happen 40 times was good.

The ending of The Lesson contains one of the great stage directions of all time: The professor "finds a big knife, invisible or real according to the preference of the director." Director Bernard Shaktman took the invisible knife, but that still did not justify the professor's leaning on it.

Mr. Shaktman did a number of things to Jack. Perhaps the most important of these was to change the setting from a dingy room to a circus. The atmosphere of pure glitter and no meaning could not have fitted the situation better. The family of a clown strive first to make him admit to a love of hashed potatoes, and then to get married. This apparently signifies acceding to the ordinary world. Mr. Langella was excellent as Jack and Dorothy Gurvitz was outstanding as his sister. Karla Feinzig as the girl he is to marry was beautiful, but not terribly good in the crucial seduction scene. Again Tom Davis' sets were very good.