Rehearsing Dreyfus

IN 1894, ALFRED DREYFUS, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason by a military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Dreyfus never ceased to protest his innocence. The evidence against him was weak from the start and was later shown to have been fabricated. But Dreyfus was a victim of virulent anti-Semitism. His name was not cleared until 1906, after a bitter and divisive struggle between Dreyfus's accusers and the republicans, socialists and anticlericalists who, led by French novelist Emile Zola, defended his innocence.

The Dreyfus Affair forms the historical background for Dreyfus in Rehearsal, a new play previewing in Boston prior to a Broadway debut later this month. The script, adopted from the French by Director Garson Kanin, is the story of a play-within-a-play. The scene is Vilna, Poland, 1931. An amateur Jewish theatrical group is rehearsing an original play by its director about the Dreyfus incident.

The director of this amateur play has his problems. No one but he seems to understand the relevance of the Dreyfus Affair to the situation of the Jews in Poland. The actor playing Dreyfus doesn't feel adequate to play his role. The other actors all want bigger parts, and a few song and dance routines to lighten up the story.

The play-within-a-play structure of Dreyfus in Rehearsal is the basic for the show's dramatic tensions and ironies. It allows comedy to coexist with tragedy, fantasy with reality. As the players are rehearsing and kvetching about their parts, anti-Semitism begins to rear its head in their little village. Arnold the barber is the first to understand it. The director, for all his harping about the play's relevancy, is slow to understand the real threats to his own well-being.

The final act opens with an abrupt change of mood. The actors no longer can ignore the currents of anti-Semitism in the town. In a tense, fast-paced scene, two young villagers break into the rehearsal hall shouting anti-Semitic obscenities. They torture an elderly man. There can be no more doubt about what's happening in the town.

The play closes on a sad note. The young Jews have fled. The director has become a socialist in Warsaw, and the frustrated, would-be Dreyfus has fled to Germany with his wife. Germany seems a safe place to be, safer than either Poland or England. The older Jews are left to act their plays alone. They put on an old Yiddish match-maker comedy that closes with a little song and dance routine about things getting better someday. The irony is tragic and painful, for we know what lies ahead for these people.

THE MAIN PROBLEM with Dreyfus in Rehearsal is that the first two acts are not as tightly constructed as the final one. The basic ironies of the situation are apparent as soon as one knows that the Dreyfus play is being acted out by Jews in pre-war Poland. But this tension, latent throughout the play, develops no further until the final act. It is difficult to balance tragedy and comedy, and the play often lapses into a no-man's land somewhere in between. Kanin might do well to cut a scene or two. A scene with a visiting Zionist lecturer, for example, fails miserably. It neither provides comic relief nor advances the story.

Good performances are turned in by Ruth Gordon (Harold and Maude) and Avery Schreiber (Burns and Schreiber) as a pair of elderly lovers. Gordon, who is in her mid-70s, is wry, funny, and compassionate. She makes a rather small part important and worth nothing.

Allan Arbus is overly dramatic and gives the weakest performance in the production as the writer-director. He's supposed to be a starry-eyed idealist but looks more like a high-strung neurotic, and he fails to convey the seriousness of his own dramatic message.

Dreyfus in Rehearsal has promise. Its basic structure is sound, its message is poignant, and there are snatches of fine acting. Hopefully, with a little editing and some more Boston rehearsals the play will be ready for the performance that really counts--opening night in the Big Apple.