Strangely Bland

PEOPLE WILL see the new play Strangers for Bruce Dern, but they'll be surprised at how the stage softens him, neutralizing the eccentricities on which he has built a fascinating film career. Sherman Yellen's drama, about the stormy relationship between Sinclair Lewis and journalist Dorothy Thompson, might have been written as a dull screen biography of a famous American, but Hollywood stopped investing in those bland tear-jerkers decades ago. So it winds up on Broadway, with a film star intent on "flexing his acting muscles" in a role that taps a fraction of his considerable talents.

Dern has his detractors--people who think he perpetually overacts. He might, but that's what makes him so interesting. Most comfortable in "psycho" roles, Dern's bulging eyes and thin, strangled voice convey inner torment and rage better than any film star today. He frequently suggest a cross between Anthony Perkins and Jack Nicholson--a homey, sardonic, seventies Norman Bates--and those quivering depths make his comparatively restrained performances in The Great Gatsby and Smile teeter devastatingly on the brink of an explosion. But in his all-out roles--in Silent Running, Black Sunday, Coming Home-- Dern makes an art of modern crack-up: shaking, sobbing, barnstorming, often hitting false notes, losing control, making us fear that both the actor and the character will spill over simultaneously, capturing the peculiar self-consciousness of a real-life breakdown, where neither the "audience" nor the "actor" knows where the pain ends and the performance begins.

The role of Sinclair Lewis in Strangers has all the individual ingredients for a bring-down-the-house, Tony-award-winning performance, but they never coalesce into a complex, recognizably human character. Yellen hasn't given him any shading; the role is all in the snappy dialogue with nothing in between the lines. Lewis and Thompson (Lois Nettleton) bicker through an interminable "seduction" scene in her Berlin apartment, fly off to Moscow where he gets drunk and insults the Commies, return to Berlin where he gets drunk and insults her, get married and move to Vermont where she misses her journalism and he can't write, fly back to Europe where she exposes the German Third Reich as evil and violent while he collects the Nobel Prize, gets drunk and insults her, fly back to America where she's a national heroine and he gets drunk and insults her...

THE TRAGEDY, according to Yellen, is that Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, two brilliant writers and decent, caring human beings, were unable to know each other, to love each other. He attempts to explain Lewis' problem in the final scene, where Dern, who has gotten drunk and become violent, sits strapped in a straitjacket and launches into a lengthy monologue as Lewis's father, revealing the old man's perpetual dissatisfaction with his son. The speech should be a tour-de-force--Dern does a beautiful job with it--but it is so empty in concept, so obvious in construction, that it reveals nothing except the playwright's desire to wrap things up neatly.

Much of Strangers concerns itself with Lewis's failure to write anything of merit after winning his Nobel Prize. The writer who loses his ability to write is an agonizing, highly personal subject that has rarely been handled well on stage--probably because it attracts writers who themselves are struggling to write something, and this subject allows them to be miserably self-indulgent and generally unperceptive.

Yellen can write amusing dialogue, but the jokes rarely have anything to do with the characters, and most of the "meaningful" lines are slick and stilted: "You drink to be more than yourself, but it only makes you so much less than you are," "I don't know how to love," etc. The play never casts light or the writing of Sinclair Lewis, and the characters are not sufficiently human or interesting enough to survive without the glamorous names. There's nothing inherently "dramatic" in Strangers except that the two leading characters talk a lot and the rapid flow of scenes--her apartment, to a cafe, an airfield, Moscow, Nazi Germany--evoke a diluted Julia.

Arvin Brown's production takes its time, shuffling and limping through a theatrical desert. The flaccid blocking and extraordinarily ugly sets place the burden of interest on the two leads. Lois Nettleton gives a conventional performance as Thompson, but within the artificial confines of her role she suggests a human being surprisingly often, her voice choked with pain and confusion, then rising with conviction, bearing the weight of her husband's illness as the character and the actress plow on with the strength and courage of an old trooper.

DERN BEGINS merrily but uninterestingly, engaging in Yellen's witless but stubbornly persistent banter. He gets to be boyish and lewd and folksy, to plead and be charmingly self-deprecating, to do lots of nightclub imitations (accents were Lewis's specialty), to get drunk and be irrepressibly untactful, exposing the hypocrisy of others, to despair and age and writhe in agony. Dern does well, especially considering he's been off stage for 19 years, but the quality that makes him special, that sometimes seems too intense for the big screen, is imperceptible on stage. You'd think that his body and features would be sufficiently mobile to make Dern a great stage actor, but Yellen's writing, for all its superficial energy, never allows him to take off. Yellen's Sinclair Lewis is so completely within Dern's range that apart from the physical demands of stage acting--the need for unbroken concentration, projection, etc.--this could be almost a vacation for him.

It takes considerable artistic and economic courage for an established film actor to return to the stage--even in a "safe," commercial play like Strangers. But Dern has worried enough about being typecast to take that risk. Perhaps his publicly expressed feeling that there are similarities in background, education and personality between himself and Sinclair Lewis led him to overestimate Strangers, to judge it a far more significant play than it is. But Strangers does not serve the "daring" that we associate with even his most typical film performances, and perhaps no play in the commercial theater can. Film stars have always gotten by with more limited performances than stage actors, and if Dern wishes to escape from the kind of role he does best, he will have to undertake a more demanding role in a far more daring play.