STAGE

Sweettable at the Richilieu

at the American Repertory Theatre

directed by Andrei Serban

SWEETTABLE AT THE RICHILIEU is the second of three new American plays being mounted this season by the American Repertory Theater. The results do not bode well for the future of American play wrighting.

Robert Brustein, head of the ART, is a man of taste and discretion. He knows quality when he sees it, and he will go to bat for any playwright he believes in--sometimes to the point of hyperbole. So if this season really boasts the best that America's current dramatists can muster, I suggest a few moments of silence for the passing of the American play.

The first work in the ART's series, The End of the World with Symposium to Follow by Arthur Kopit, was a recent Broadway flop inexplicably revived so that it could make an even more spectacular belly-flop here in Cambridge. Now Ronald Ribman, author of a number of underproduced plays, gets his chance to bore audiences with a work that is pretentious, muddily written, and as meaningful as a Spam commercial.

Sweettable is not a complete disaster; Ribman is a smart guy, and there are many good ideas and clever chunks of writing in this work. The superb cast and designers work hard to bring out the best of this dramatic turnip, and damned if they don't squeeze out a little dramatic blood--but it's sweated drop by drop from the brows of the actors.

Even director Andrei Serban, one of the theatrical giants of the known universe, seems to have been a bit bewildered by this piece. His usual mastry of theatrical trickery has slipped, most notably during the first scene. A woman (Lucinda Childs) wanders across the front of the stage. Behind her a piece of white scrim is blown by a wind machine, representing the white wall of a terrific blizzard. A shrill voice booms through the P.A. system, then--Riiiip!--Frau von Kessel (Elizabeth Franz) and her servant tear the scrim and stick their torsos through it. It's supposed to look clever and mysterious, these two figures popping out of the waving whiteness, but it's just a cheap and cosmetic stunt.

The lost woman, Jeanine, joins von Kessel on her sleigh. The imperious old Junker, who has obviously seen better days, won't share her blanket with the younger woman. "But why won't you share? It's not fair," Jeanine whines, symbolizing the struggle of Old Europe vs. New Europe in pathetic clarity. Of course, Jeanine wins the blanket, and the last good room at their destination, the old-fashioned Richilieu spa.

The next scene--the bulk of the play--takes place in the spa's dessert room. John Conklin and the ART technical crew deserve an extra bonus for work that went into the design of this set piece, as stunning a room as you will see in the great palaces of Europe. Conklin was also responsible for the cunning costumes, which express the personality of the characters much more stylishly than Ribman's autistic dialogue. One tactic for surviving Sweettable is to turn off your mind and float into a visual reverie.

But if you follow this advice, you will miss some of the finest acting to ever grace the Loeb Mainstage. In the past, the Achilles Heel of the ART has been in the performers. As Brustein himself has complained, it is nearly impossible to keep good actors in Cambridge with New York just a shuttle away. For some reason, though, a covey of new and returning talent has decided to roost at the ART this season, revitalizing a company that was moribund two years ago.

ART vets Jeremy Geidt (as the Machiavellian party animal Dr. Atmos) and Thomas Derrah (metamorphosed by terrific make-up into the knife wielding Latin chucklehead Boupacha) turn in some outstanding acting in the Grand Old Style. This is particularly impressive considering that they are spouting dialogue that sounds like it was written by Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw after a tankard of Johnnie Walker, a few lines of coke, and several stale pizzas were consumed between them.

The most frustrating thing about Sweettable is that it contains the seeds of a good play--or several good plays, for that matter. Ribman never decided whether he was composing a metaphor for modern Europe, a guilty-secrets melodrama, a French philosophical play or an English drawing-room comedy. So he tosses elements of all these genres into his pot, and serves up the dramatic equivalent of broccoli cheese pasta--limp, stringy, with an occasional lumpy mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst sort, in which portentous declamations about the feel of people's thighs, memories of blue centaurs, the lips of doom and similar psycho-symbolic claptrap gets tossed willy-nilly at a justifiably mystified audience.

From time to time a good idea or clever dramatic conflict appears in Sweettable. But just as the audience starts to get interested, the moment is mercilessly crushed beneath the heel of Ribman's pompous phrasing and erratic characterization. This play is bad in a painful way, as it time and again raises your expectation that something worthwhile is about to happen, then disappoints you by dropping the theme or hiding behind a convenient cliche. The wasted talents of the director, cast, designers and crew make the spectacle all the more pitiful. Sweettable never bores you; it just makes you want to whack the playwright a few times with a Riverside Shakespeare.

If all new plays were as bad as Sweettable or End of the World, I would propose banning the profession and letting the blissfully nonsensical works of Robert Wilson rule the stage. Fortunately, the last of the ART's three American offerings will make you believe that people with functioning brains still write plays in this country. Don DeLillo's The Day Room, which premiered last spring as part of the ART's NewStages series at the Pudding, was revived last week for a limited run. While breaking no new dramatic ground, it fires off brilliant metaphysical gags at a pace that would amaze even Woody Allen. If you want to watch the work of a man who knows the secrets of dialogue, suspense and humor, then flock to the next showing of The Day Room. Certainly Ronald Ribman, professional Playwright, could do worse than to buy a ticket and learn how plays ought to be written.