Moynihan Helped to Smooth Way For Kodak-FIGHT Reconciliation

Daniel P. Moynihan, director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Affairs, catalyzed negotiations which resulted in an agreement last week between Eastman Kodak Co. and the Rochester, N.Y., Negro organization, FIGHT.

He helped start the talks and perhaps helped speed them up, without ever actually taking part in the negotiations. Many observers think that the agreement smoothed over a situation which might have led to Negro rioting such as occurred in Buffalo last week.

The tense situation stemmed from an incident which took place last December. FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today) is a militant Negro organization, representing 110 Negro groups. It was organized by professional radical Saul Alinsky as a sort of "union" to demand more jobs for unskilled, slum-dwelling Negroes.

Since September, FIGHT has been demanding that Kodak hire and train 6000 unskilled, unemployed Negroes. On December 20, a Kodak assistant vice-president signed an agreement with FIGHT on just those terms. But the announcement of the agreement came as a complete surprise to Kodak executives, who immediately repudiated it.

Relations between Kodak and FIGHT deteriorated, and after January 10, negotiations broke down completely. Ironically, Kodak has been a model company and set an example for the whole country in its programs to hire and train Negroes.

In May Moynihan went to Buffalo to address some Harvard alumni. His friend of 25 years, Story Zartman, who was assistant counsel to Kodak, induced him to come to nearby Rochester.

Moynihan spent a day with about 16 Kodak executives, including Board Chairman Williams S. Vaughn, Company President Dr. Louis D. Eilers, and various vice-presidents. Moynihan says only that their discussions were "entirely friendly, very frank and useful."

"I was there," he says, "became the problem involved people who were poor and happened also to be Negroes. At no point did I make any comment whatever on Kodak's relationship with FIGHT. In no way was I there to try to tell them how to handle these relationships." Moynihan simply briefed the Kodak men and talked helpfully ing; and she doesn't seem to understand what she is mouthing much of the time. Dorothy Tristan's Helena shows a wider vocal range and considerable skill as a farceuse. When she pleads to Demetrius, "Give me leave...to follow you," she waddles on her knees with comic aggressiveness; and when Lysander describes himself as "touching now the point of human skill," she instinctively grasps her breasts in self-protection.

The mischievous elf Puck is the thread that weaves in and out of the several plots and groups of characters, and holds the work together. For this, Jerry Dodge is unflaggingly admirable. When he says, "And here the maiden, sleeping sound,/ On the dank and dirty ground," his way of dropping vocal pitch on the second line is hilarious. He darts about like lightning, and scampers up a tree as easily as a cat. Indeed, at the core of his performance are postures, gestures, and movements drawn from classical ballet. Although he is understandably not in a class with Arthur Mitchell, who is so extraordinary a Puck in the ballet version of the tale, he is still a splendidly equipped dancer and mime as well as actor.

To James Valentine are entrusted two small roles. As Hermia's father Egeus, he has been directed to overplay disastrously by means of a wheezing delivery. A little of this goes a long way, but he turns the theatre for a while into a vertiable asthma clinic. He also turns Philostrate, master of the revels, into an amusingly effete redhead.

Visually, the production has much to delight the audience, though there is nothing to suggest the Athens specified in the text. William and Jean Eckart have designed a set of six tall white poles, to which are added holed panels, like cheese slices, and fluted sails for the court scenes. When affairs shift to the woods, a trainload of glittering white plastic streamers hangs down like so much Spanish moss.

Robert Fletcher has garbed the aristocracy in Empire costumes of the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on brown, white, and gold. The two love-smitten maidens wear identical low-necked, high-waisted white gowns, with a blue sash for Helena and a pink one for Hermia. The "mechanicals" are outfitted in rough reds, oranges, and yellows. Fletcher had, paradoxically, a field day with the forest folk--Titania and her fairies in green and pink, the bicorn Oberon and his winged retinue in sequined blues.

Tharon Musser has provided lovely lambent lighting, though its technical execution is distractingly jerky. At one point, taking a cue from Titania's words--"The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye;/ And when she weeps, weeps every little flower"--she has all the pendent vegetation come alive with tiny lachrymal lights, while the fairies march out carrying hand torches. A beautiful way to end the show's first half.

Conrad Susa's music for the several dances, songs, and general background is pleasant enough, though it certainly cannot be accused of subtlety (but, then, neither can Mendelssohn's marvelous score). I do wish he had not had recourse, for the shimmering fairies, to the vibraphone; this is too easy, and I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the instrument is inherently vulgar. Susa's score does not come up to the one Marc Blitzstein wrote for the 1958 production. (It is sadly ironic that Blitzstein and director Jack Landau, who contributed so much to the joyous success of the earlier show, have both since become victims of bizarre, brutal murders.)

Near the play's conclusion, Theseus states, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact." In the current version, there's plenty of lunacy, plenty of love, but precious little poetry. For this Cyril Ritchard must be held largely responsible. He should have faced up to the fact that his attempt to do almost everything himself was, like his own anatomy, characterized by an inability to see his own Bottom