'All the King's Men'

Robert Penn Warren is an accomplished novelist, but a poor playwright. His stage version of ALL THE KING'S MEN, which is made of snippets from the book, could be called Brechtian if it were at all successful, but it isn't. Instead, all its hundreds of tine little scenes misfire, and its connective device of a nagging professor, brought in as a foil to Jack Burden, the novel's narrator, simply irritates. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as a College Outline of the book, and only serves to remind one of how very good the book is.

You know those cute little German barometers which tell you what the weather's like by popping either Hansel and Gretel or the Old Witch out at you? Well, that,s the way the staging was originally conceived for this production of ALL THE KING'S MEN. On opening night all the little scenes shot out of the back of the stage at precarious speeds, while the sets swayed and teatered precariously. But since then, the sets have been revised and simplified. By Saturday, the production was fairly smooth, though one still wonders why Mr. George Hamlin, Armistead, the set designer, picked such a technically complex play in the first place.

The Summer School Players have several first-rate actors this summer (Paul Barstow is back, and that is nice; David S. Cole and Samuel Abbott have moved in from the winter Gilbert and Sullivan troupe), and a lot of very enthusiastic people, but none of them seems very happy in his role in this play. Tom Griffin is monotonous (and bored?) as Jack Burden; Terence Currier's Willie Stark seldom evokes any touch of the mesmeric damagoguery of the man -- although he's better once he gets a cigar in his mouth; Abbott (Tiny Duffy) has to keep fighting back the blue-blooded intonations of Lord Tolloller.

Nevertheless, even it if really is amateur theatre, this doesn't mean the Loeb production is ineffective. Once the First Act is over, the ragged edges do not seem to matter so much. The ideas come across; we become interested in -- even sympathetic with -- the characters.