New Play in Manhattan

The Visit brought the Lunts to Broadway--for a rumored final visit to Broadway--in a theater piece of strikingly acrid power. Adapted by Maurice Valency from the German of Swiss Playwright Friedrich Dueurrenmatt, The Visit begins in light colors and comedy guise, suddenly to darken the face of its canvas, to blacken the hearts of its characters. A grisly fable of a woman's vengeful hate, it shows a whole community relentlessly succumbing to greed.

Highhanded, aging, fabulously rich Claire Zachanassian returns to Gullen, the impoverished European town of her birth, to pour money into its lap--on one condition. Town and townspeople can divide a billion marks if they will kill Anton Schill, the man who in Claire's youth denied that her child was his and made her an outcast and a prostitute. When the town rejects such an offer at the expense of a much esteemed citizen, Claire does not argue; she can afford, she announces, to wait.

She waits, and when Schill worries, people tell him it comes from his own sense of guilt. But he sees the whole town buying wildly, on credit; and when he tries to run away, he finds an obstructive wall of townspeople at the railway station. In the clutch of material self-interest, the town goes in for moral self-deception, until at a public meeting Schill is condemned to death. With a billion-mark check for his killers, and with Schill's coffin borne before her, Claire goes away.

Something comparably cynical in tone, and in spots even similar in treatment, went into Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Dueurrenmatt's tale of the woman who corrupted Gullen is more eerily sinister. In Madame Zachanassian, with her entourage--pet panther, youthful eighth husband, blinded perjurers. American gangsters--are the all-too-obvious symbols of a ruthless, degenerate world. Moreover, it was Claire herself who carefully reduced Gullen to poverty as a prelude to tempting it; and her revenge seems directed almost as much on the town that witnessed her shame as on the man who caused it. "The world," she cries, "made me into a whore. Now I make the world into a brothel."

With its macabre lighting and with Peter Brook's often eloquent staging, The Visit is as incredible and surrealist, yet as bluntly precise and compelling, as a dream. Right in the midst of her demands for his death, Claire will have a woodsy, almost idyllic reunion with her betrayer. The play's harsh power lies in just such incongruity, in its consistent theatricality, in its mingling of batlike symbolic figures with small-town burghers and clods, in what it graphically evokes but never exactly defines. Is it Schill, for example, that the townspeople finally kill, or is it their consciences?

A more central question is how philosophically bleak is Duuerrenmatt's own outlook? Is his an outraged castigation or an icy judgment? Is he saying how sadly corruptible is man, or calling life itself corrupt? In any case, not since Tennessee Williams' Camino Real has a new Broadway play conveyed so fanged and carniv orous a world. But where Williams traded in the very decadence and violence he seemed at war with, The Visit, whether or not philosophically in focus, never gets dramatically out of hand.

As the monstrous Lady Bountiful, Lynn Fontanne plays with a wonderfully enameled hardness, a high-styled fiendish poise. Playing Schill in a quite different style, Alfred Lunt gives a vividly realistic picture of human fright faced with the inhumanly frightening.

Paradoxically, the chilling anger of The Visit springs from the fertile, unangry mind of a bulky (230 Ibs.), cigar-smoking Swiss burgher with the tastes of a bon vivant, the genial manner of a retired cook. Surrounded by his wife Lotti (once an actress), three children, four dogs and seven cats, 37-year-old Friedrich Dueurren-matt churns out his bitter plays from a picture-postcard villa in the green woods overlooking Lake Neuchatel.

Playwright Duuerrenmatt can well afford his bucolic luxury. Almost unknown in the U.S. until The Visit (although one novel, The Judge and His Hangman, was published by Harpers in 1955, and earlier this year an off-Broadway group presented his Fools Are Passing Through), Duuerrenmatt is one of the best-known and most often performed writers in mid-Europe. Last season The Visit alone had 213 performances on eleven different German stages.

Son of a clergyman and grandson of a well-known Swiss satiric poet, Dueurrenmatt turned to drama after studying philosophy at the universities of Bern and Zurich. He settled in Neuchatel "because I wanted to be alone, far away from friends who would constantly call on me, hampering my work."

A lover of Shakespeare and Greek drama, Dueurrenmatt regards himself as a cynical realist, but adds: "I am not one of those who have lost all hope. Cynicism does not mean bitterness. If a situation is described in a cruel manner, it does not necessarily mean the author is bitter."

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