New Plays in Manhattan

The Infernal Machine (adapted by Albert Bermel from the French of Jean Cocteau) is Oedipus Rex revised and enlarged. The Cocteau version, which is 24 years old, does some clever satiric tale twisting, makes the story turn a psychological handspring or two, tosses in talk of music and dancing, and includes scene after scene that Sophocles did without. It uses a legitimate method of getting out of a classical rut and taking a fresh modern slant. The result is interesting without being successful.

Opening like a work even better known than Oedipus--two sentries on the battlements of Thebes have for some nights been seeing the ghost of Oedipus' father--The Infernal Machine is most brittle and playful in its long, chatty first scene, where Jocasta (June Havoc), all dolled up for a night out, flirts with young soldiers. But already the ghost of King Laius tries to warn of things to come. When in the next scene a cocky, ambitious Oedipus (John Kerr) appears and infatuates the Sphinx, he does not guess her riddle; she tells him the answer. Again there are warnings, but undeterred Oedipus marries

Jocasta. As a last warning of all, on their wedding night they are both hopelessly sleepy. In the final scene some 17 years later, Oedipus is warned again--this time against probing into the past. Everyone treats him with a kind of imploring "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no truths." But he is as dogged about disaster as he was about triumph. When at last the self-blinded Oedipus writhes and moans, Teiresias plumbs his insatiable pride: "He wanted to be the happiest of men, now he wants to be the unhappiest."

The play is fitted out with much such modern plumbing. Yet in inventiveness and impact alike, it somehow falls short. It falls short for one thing because it is so unmercifully long; for another, because it achieves no pervasive tone or attitude. It reupholsters the Oedipus story rather than reshapes it; it is too close to a stunt at the outset, too close to Sophocles at the end. And for all its merits, an intelligent production has actors who are rather at odds with their roles or at odds with each other. But perhaps The Infernal Machine suffers most of all simply for being a rewrite of the most superbly unfolded drama in all literature.

Winesburg, Ohio (adapted by Christopher Sergel from the short stories of Sherwood Anderson) turns Anderson's celebrated slim volume into far too slim a play. The book's small-town vignettes shocked readers in 1919 with insights into the neurotic crochets of lonely, frustrated Winesburghers. No longer shocking, it has been smoothed by the years into a piece of rural nostalgia, but it is still a plotless set of fragments unified by little more than the author's tone of voice and a mood of isolated lives. For dramatic focus, Adapter Sergel forfeited the rich multiplicity of characters, fastened upon the struggle of ailing Elizabeth Willard (Dorothy McGuire) to free her sensitive if needed son George (Ben Piazza) from the cramp of Winesburg and his crass hotelkeeper-father (James Whitmore) and let him go off to become a writer.

Set in the sprawling ugliness of a three-story Willard Hotel that seems to imprison the audience as well as the players, this pallid version of Broadway's Look Homeward, Angel has just enough story line for a wistful, low-key one-act play. The line goes hopelessly slack in the second and third acts when Playwright Sergel keeps falling back on his first. Even the major Anderson characters seem thin, and for a good reason. Anderson merely sketched them with evocative daubs; his adapter failed to fill them out with the detail demanded by the theater. Out of misapplied reverence for the original, he painstakingly spliced pieces of Anderson's dialogue, sometimes borrowing the words of one character for the mouth of another. When he ran out of the dialogue for big scenes, he decided to let them speak to each other in stilted excerpts from the book's descriptive prose. Perhaps authors henceforth should be warned by the Dramatists' Guild that anything they say may be used against them.

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