During the Fall

FOLLOWING THE LATEST stage trend of religion-mongering, Arthur Miller has given us yet another modernization of the Bible, specifically the early portion of Genesis. Despite the recent appearance of so many productions on the order of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Miller's script seems clever enough-or may be just familiar enough--to win sympathy. In a Biblical context, somehow even the worst puns and the broadest slapstick can be funny. As a topic for comedy, the Bible is like sex: embarrassment or guilt provokes laughter where the mere humor of a joke might not. Needless to say. The Creation of the World and Other Business abounds with puns on the colloquial uses of "God," "the devil." "heaven," and "hell," as well as references to Adam and Eve's early sex life. The best of the humor is either trivial ("Pull up that leaf!" God admonishes Eve as he prepares to curse her) or virtually slapstick.

Even in fairly major details. Miller has departed from the precedent laid down by the Bible and Paradise Lost. Introducing Freudian psychology, he suggests that God's subconscious created the Tree of Knowledge and that Eve fell into temptation out of penis envy. He also implies that Cain was actually sired by Lucifer, and he ends the Cain-and-Abel offering scene with a chaotic and completely inexplicable orgy in which Cain starts fucking his mother" (as the Devil so delicately puts it). On the other hand. Miller remains remarkably true to Milton in his portrayal of Lucifer's character. Extremely clever, fiendishly ambitious, capable of persuasively logical argument, he is personally attractive in a snakey sort of way. In the end, the Devil loses the fight against God but wins the audience's sympathy.

The early arguments with which Lucifer tries to wheedle power from God seem facile and merely clever, but toward the end he makes us question the justice of a God who, with full foreknowledge, tempts Cain to kill Abel. Played as a pretty-boy smart-ass by the top-billed Hal Holbrook, the Devil resembles a cross between a quick-talking, shifty-eyed lawyer and a slightly hip John Wayne. Holbrook appears appropriately serpentine even as he swaggers with self-esteem, but perhaps he could temper his over-confidence a little, considering he flubbed his lines at least three times on the second night of performance.

THE NEW-YORK-JEWISH TONE that both Miller and the actors give to a number of the characters seems humorously anachronistic and at the same time strangely apt in the Old Testament context. "Schmuck!" God addresses Adam as he prepares to oust him from the Garden of Eden. Adam himself, portrayed by Bob Dishy as the typical Brooklyn boy, has an endearing pose--hands holding his sides at rib level, elbows jutting directly out--that simultaneously recalls an ape-man and a street-corner adolescent. The angels of Mercy and Death find their modern Jewish counterparts in benevolent grandfatherly Lou Gilbert (with his receding halo of puffy, white hair) and rabbinically pessimistic Lou Polan.

Abel is an all-American, clean-cut, prep-school said, while his older brother, physically more elongated and with a correspondingly more attenuated sensibility, represents the introspective adolescent. Like Eve, who persists in pestering God about why they can't eat the apples. Cain asks too many questions. Miller's creation of an intelligent Cain helps explain his fate: in Biblical morality, those who seek to rival God by attaining knowledge become the sinners.

No author can update the first part of Genesis without confronting the problem of how to treat the Biblical notion of Woman, but Miller, although aware of the problem, remains ambivalent. Susan Batson's acting makes Eve a sympathetic character--she is not only beautiful, with a body like a pre-Columbian statuette and a mane of luxuriant waist-length hair: she is also vitally strong Her husky voice and panther-like blackness rescue her from being a cloying sweet Eve, and she generally overcomes even the most romantically sentimental of Miller's lines. The author, however, doesn't quite know what to do with Woman. While he makes her more intelligent, more innovative, and less obedient than her husband, he sometimes presents her as the stereotypical housewife, nagging her husband or planning the dinner instead of praying.

MILLER'S EVE FORCES the apple into Adam's mouth--a more violent corruption of innocence than either Genesis or Milton dared to attribute to her. On the other hand, he implicitly justifies her behavior by showing that she has been treated badly by God from the start. This deprivation, however, primarily consists of not being given a penis, and that leads us back to a basically male-oriented view. Like the Bible and Milton before him, Miller presents Woman as the more blameworthy sinner. One can only go so far, after all, in pacifying Women's Lib before losing the original theme. Miller has tried to keep a foot in both camps, and the stretch has turned out to be too far.

If the original writers of the Bible had trouble deciding where to stop telling a never-ending story, Miller has had even more. He ends on a note of optimism undoubtedly intended to inspire love and hope. But after Lucifer's final pyrotechnic display of attractive logic, it is difficult to accept a simple-minded homily that makes no attempt to answer any of the philosophical questions raised in the play. Perhaps Miller expected to encounter an audience full of implicitly believing Adams; but he would have done better to prepare for a few doubting Eves and Cains.