Double Bill at the Loeb

The Lesson

Of the two plays that opened Wednesday night at the Loeb Drama Center, one became an instant blurr in my memory, and I trust the Loeb will be able to get over it as easily. The other--Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson,--pretty much redeemed the evening.

For The Lesson, in addition to being an awfully funny play at times, gives Susan Channing a chance to count. Her arithmetic -- her whole performance, and that of Jeff Tambor as the professor, combine to produce a better than average production of a thoroughly enjoyable, if admittedly minor, work. Unlike Rhinoceros, The Lesson spouts its humor without simultaneously secreting an overdose of social commentary.

David Wheeler, the director, has added a mixed bag of incidental touches to the play. His staging of the scene in which the professor gives the pupil imaginary ears and noses works brilliantly. But as a whole the play is sustained by two fine performances proceeding independently of any overall conception. Tambor and Miss Channing, in fact, seem on occasion to proceed independently of each other as well.

As the professor, Tambor undergoes a gradual, but very definite, transformation. At the start he is all bungling whimsy in the Ionesco tradition. By the end he has gone into and emerged from a villainous trance. Yet all the while Tambor maintains the academic quality suggested by his long, white, fake hair.

Miss Channing plays her part almost purely for laughs, and with reason. I thought her performance in Shaw's Arms and the Man less than convincing at times, but in The Lesson she can do no wrong.

Joyce Sonnenblick appears as the professor's maid in a complete break from her role in the Shaw. But, again, she appears to have been cast much more appropriately; she becomes just the sort of ineffectual individual the part calls for.

The one set in The Lesson is a real loser. Admittedly the repertory form limits expanse as well as expense, but a charcoal-black flap can make a pretty ugly stage. Still, everything in its place. The Lesson is a competent, funny production -- everything, in short, that its companion one-acter is not.

The Breasts Of Tiresias

Guillaume Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias is a strange play, and at the Loeb it has been given a strange production. Or maybe disorganized is more like it. With myriad props and set-pieces to work with, the cast has something of a field-day, but for all their running around they give more of a reading than a performance.

Daniel Deitch imparts amazing energy to the part of the director, who introduces and narrates the play. He and Elizabeth Cole, as the woman or man of the title, make much more of their parts than do most of the cast, who look -- and this may not be far from the truth -- as if they were let loose into a jungle as unknown to them as to the first-night audience.

Breasts was written as a departure from accepted dramatic forms. And even as produced at the Loeb it provides an earful, and an eyeful, of fantastic gimmicks. But that's it. Amore vacant, less inspiring set of gimmicks cannot be imagined.

The scenery, which would be crucial to any production of the play, is successful insofar as it conveys the eccentric spirit of the author. A kiosk -- inhabited by Miss Sonnenblick of The Lesson -- and a backdrop of babies are the most effective items on a vast scenery roster.

I confess to an ignorance of the play which the Loeb production did absolutely nothing to alter. Yet it is by all odds a harmless experience, and fortunately a short one. In fact the whole bill is short; an hour and three quarters or thereabouts. The Lesson serves satisfactorily as a curtain-raiser; the Breasts of Tiresias, if nothing else, brings the curtain down again.