'Ladder' & 'Tightrope Walkers'

Anyone who thinks action isn't the soul of the drama --or who never quite understood what Aristotle meant when he said it is--should go to the Ex tonight or tomorrow and see Joel Schwartz's The Ladder and A Short History of Tightrope Walkers. Neither play is particularly good; one might easily claim that they're terrible. But they do demonstrate strikingly how much a dramatist can get away with, providing he keeps things happening.

Apparently any story, no matter how simple or stupid, can be made to hold an audience's attention. It isn't the import, it isn't the lines; it's seeing live people perform. For with the slenderest of ideas, a bit of showmanship, and the sense not to overdo, Schwartz kept more than 100 people in their seats for almost an hour and a half--and kept them from fidgeting.

Admittedly Schwartz gets a big assist from his actors, who are uniformly good. It is worth going just to see Kay Bourne. But Schwartz himself must get some of the credit for recognizing how fascinating even the simplest gesture can be, if well executed. I think, in fact, he was so fascinated he staged The Ladder to play to slowly; but he had the right idea.

That just about exhausts the plays' good points, however. There are few witty lines, and they are more than made up for by the bad ones. The humor is thin, the allegory at best obvious, and the apparent attempts at profundity embarassing.

There are occassional patches of fine writing, but when Schwartz trys to be lyric he gets gooev. And the best speech of the night is stolen from a poem by Yeats.