The Hammer of the Mountain

The Hammer of the Mountain, by Firman Houghton is subtitled "A Grave Comedy in Three Acts." The feeble pun on "grave" is the only display of wit in Mr. Houghton's thick, pretentious, muddled and terribly fashionable play. The first act, thanks largely to Stephen Aaron's direction, had promise. The setting was an old abandoned farmhouse used simultaneously as a secret meeting place for a pair of lovers and the headquarters for mock army maneuvers, and the dialogue, some of it funny, is about what is real (the war games) and what is not (Isabel, the girl, waiting for Charlie, her lover). Really, of course, Isabel is real and the army illusion. And so on.

The play bogs down when the focus shifts from this utter frivolity to a pretention of seriousness. There is twisted passion, a love triangle, a murder, an earthquake, havoc, destruction, despair, and, finally, incomprehensibility and boredom which Mr. Aaron's broad comic direction could do nothing to alleviate. There are no points made, no point of view maintained, and I have a suspicion that there were none intended. Mr. Houghton tries to be Pirandello, but perhaps because he is attempting to be fashionable, he cannot fuse the poetry of the language and the dramatic technique into a real and original point of view.

I suspect that Stephen Aaron was as much affronted by the script as I was, for his direction displayed no sympathy with Mr. Houghton's more serious moods. His direction was geared to the slapstick in the play, and he seemed, both in his acting and direction, embarassed by its seriousness. The stage was always full of actors in motion--slick, sometimes funny, and always pointless motion. It was a desperate attempt to breathe some life into the production, but all the energy seemed somehow irrelevant. Unfortunately, even the slapstick often lost effect because it lacked the one vital element of slapstick--timing. The actors achieved varying degrees of mediocrity, and the set, by Donald Soule, seemed sturdy.

A review run after a play has closed, especially when the play was as unimportant as The Hammer of the Mountain, may seem gratuitous, but while the Loeb is in its current state of indecision on basic policy questions, each play presented is important. The Hammer of the Mountain was the Loeb's first "professional" effort: Mr. Houghton professes to be a writer; Mr. Aaron is the Loeb's Assistant Director; Mr. Soule is its Technical Director; and the actors were not drawn from the Harvard undergraduate body.

The current debate about Harvard theatre seems to center on the extent to which faculty and outside professionals should insure high quality productions, and The Hammer of the Mountain is the first evidence which has been offered to support any of the theoretical arguments. It is not the final evidence, but it tends to indicate that professionalism does not insure anything.