The one-act play is like the short story. Each form, because it is brief, can convey tremendous intensity, yet this same brevity only allows an author to hint at a theme. Seldom has he time to develop an idea into more than a mere skeleton. For this reason, both forms often lead to triteness or to a vagueness that goes nowhere.
Especially difficult is the "short-short" story or play. Shopping and Waiting, by James Schuyler, the first of four plays given by the Poets' Theatre, is a five-minute piece that is scarcely more than an esoteric joke. A supernatural toy dealer mystifies tow earthly patrons with his clairvoyance; the scene closes when a predicted disaster comes true. The dull dialogue of Kenneth Donoghue, the dealer, and Jack Rogers, a customer in his second childhood, is enlivened only by the facile-clowning of Sonia Grant.
While Schuyler's play illustrates the danger of triteness, The Man Who Walked in a Ray of Sunshine, translated by Roger Shattuck from the French verse of Rene Char, shows how an interesting idea can be obscured by too conscious a striving for economy. Set at the gates of Heaven, the play concerns a cocky young man who dances to seduce an angel sent to judge whether he is worthy of admission. He fails; she dances away and lets him fall, and a jury of humans, sitting outside the gates, exits in disgust at the rejection of its fair-haired boy. Char should have given his jury further development. It seems to represent the repressed sensuality of prim, proper humans, yet other intepretations are equally plausible.
As the angel in the pantomime ballet, Bronia Sielewicz is regal and lovely; on the other hand, Rod Davis, the protagonist, is slow and awkward in a role that calls for deft, light dancing. Monotonous narration by Jack Rogers also slowed the play's pace.
The two remaining plays on the program were both excellent. In Three Words in No Time; Lyon Phelps, through effective wiring and imaginative staging gives new life to an idea that is certainly common enough. Phelps' theme is that man's greatest moments, the instants of highest creativity or most meaningful experience, are wholly out of time. Two women attend an art show and see a picture showing Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Melville's wife. The two authors step from the picture--Melville in anguish over a passage of Moby Dick and Hawthorne trying to capture an image. As a ticking clock stops and time stands still, both men are inspired.
Such a plot is old and shop-worn. But Phelps arranges effective byplay between the figures in the painting, the artist, and the two women spectators. He allows Hawthorne to speak a long monologue filled with poetry that is at times truly beautiful; yet if it were no for the warm voice and delicate diction of Edward Thommen, so long a speech would have seemed dull. Robert Heavenridge, as Melville, and Martin Halpern, as the artist, are quite good, while Mathida Hills, playing the first woman, perfectly captures the terrified shyness intended by Phelps, and Elinor Fuchs is wonderfully funny as her coarse, insensitive companion.
Although scheduled first on the program, Reuel Denney's September Lemonade was given last, and it should stay in that position, for it is one of the funniest pieces to be seen around here in a long time. With deftly worded satiric verse, Denney takes pseudo-intellectualism, in the form of an art-struck girl and her ineffectual beau, and ridicules them by contrast with a gauche, loud sister and her equally flamboyant lover.
Mathilda Hills comes back on stage as the dreamy sister. Her beauty and skillful use of overstatement make her immensely appealing, while Sonia Grant, as the other sister ("I'm only easy to talk to because I talk about movies") is about the best comedienne in Boston.
Denney's satire is a fitting comment on all of the "Four Plays for a Plain Stage." Deliberate obscurity and a false esoterica make the first two seem dull and meaningless. On the other hand, Three Words in No Time and September Lemonade show how well the one-act form can be used.
