Old Play in Manhattan

The Alchemist (by Ben Jonson; produced by the New York City Theatre Company) is an almost ostentatiously neglected comic masterpiece. It could, without doubt, be shorter. But 300 years after it was written and long after alchemy/- went out of fashion, the play still teems with hard, bawdy, farcical fun; still gives that well-mated couple, greed and gullibility, a handsome thrashing; still rushes ahead with a plot that the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge adjudged "one of the three most perfect" in literature.**

Last week The Alchemist was given a lively airing--as the first bill in the New York City Center's spring theater program. Set smack in Jonson's lusty London, the play tells of three high-flying cheats, one of whom professes to be an alchemist, and of the brisk trade they drive. Dupes and sharpers alike are finally discomfited; but first the alchemist is sought out by every kind and condition of hopeful, from a modest lawyer's clerk who has an itch to gamble to the City knight, Sir Epicure Mammon, with his sumptuous and stupendous visions of sensuality:

I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft: Down is too hard . . . Then, my glasses Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse And multiply the figures, as I walk Naked between my succubae . . . My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agat set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. My footboy shall eat pheasants . . .

/-Chiefly an attempt to turn base metals into gold by chemical means. **The other two: Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones.

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