Old Play in Manhattan

A Month in the Country (adapted from the Russian of Ivan Turgenev by Emlyn Williams) has for some strange reason been a theatrical wallflower, while Chekhov's four daughters have constantly been given a whirl. Last produced in Manhattan in 1930, A Month remains one of those small classics that, however long kept in mothballs, keep their charming bouquet. The play needs--as the Phoenix Theater has given it--a sensitive production: Michael Redgrave has ably directed an able cast, and Emlyn Williams' adaptation is in crisply laundered English.

Turgenev's story, laid in the 1840s, portrays the life, or lack of life, on a nourishing Russian landowner's estate. The landowner's wife, Natalia, with her bright, trivial, citified mind and self-indulgent nature, is bored by her husband, and more entertained than aroused by her sophisticated neighbor. When her son acquires an attractive young tutor, she half tumbles, half pushes herself into love. Discovering that her young ward is also drawn to the tutor, Natalia jealously tries to marry her off elsewhere. Though all this gives the heartfree tutor's ego a great lift, matters get fairly strenuous for him, and he finds it simplest to go away. Others go away too, for other reasons, leaving Natalia behind with a mild case of heart break, a lady's-sized frustration.

Though at first glance Turgenev's people often seem like Chekhov's, Turgenev has a rather different angle of vision and a different art. If no more wise than Chekhov, he is more wordly-wise and more ironic. Much of A Month is leisure-class social comedy, in which sheer ennui acts as a stimulant and the yawn is father to the kiss. Where Chekhov's people bestir themselves too little or too late, Turgenev's seem overready; just because the landscape is flat or the drawing room tedious, they grasp at situations and embroider them, they self-centeredly turn dramatist themselves. But they are often worldly enough to be on to what they are doing.

The polished man of the world in Turgenev happily never ossified his pure, wistful sensibility. His insight is acute, without blind spots, but his manner is mellow, without rough spots. In A Month in the Country he exhibits egotism in a slightly golden light, frivolity with a kind of silvery tinkle. He is neither too soft, too hard, nor too overbred: he will throw in a joyfully bad-mannered, sharp-tongued doctor, played with slapping gusto by Luther Adler, and in fine contrast to the superbly projected Natalia of Uta Hagen.

With A Month in the Country, the Phoenix Theater is in its third year as the most ambitious, most professional of the off-Broadway houses. While not rich, it has both means and know-how. Among its angels are Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lindsay & Grouse, Elia Kazan; among its actors have been Montgomery Clift, Nancy Walker, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Farley Granger, Maureen Stapleton; among its directors, John Houseman, Sidney Lumet, Tyrone Guthrie.

Guided by Producers T. Edward Hambleton and Norris (Billy Budd) Houghton, the Phoenix has helped create a renaissance of the off-Broadway theater. One measure of its impact: a star of the magnitude of Franchot Tone has agreed to play an off-Broadway role most of this season in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

The guiding principle of the Phoenix is aggressive eclecticism. Theater, say its producers, "means many things to many people. The minstrel show, tent show, vaudeville, Shakespearean repertory, newly discovered European playwrights, experiments in expressionism and constructivism, a platform for a social message. the magic of Irving Berlin and of Rodgers and Hart or Hammerstein musicals . . .

To us it means all these things." Following no school, style or fad, the Phoenix in its first season walked off with a wide variety of laurels, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Golden Apple as the year's best musical, the Shakespeare Club Award for its production of Coriolanus, and an ANTA citation for having created "the most exciting theatrical news of the year."

This season, up to its eaves in work, the theater will put on 18 shows, ranging from French Pantomimist Marcel Marceau (TIME, Oct. 3) to a series of plays for new directors. Producers Hambleton and Houghton dream of making the Phoenix the most productive theater in the U.S. and "a larger than life, truly theatrical experience fortified by language that sings."

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