Teaser for Two

By T.E.K.

GREEN JULIA by PAUL ABLEMAN

All of theater is an encounter group.

The playwright issues a challenge of some kind. The audience gives a positive or negative response. The nature of the challenge tends to shape the nature of the encounter, and the challenges may vary a great deal.

One type is what might be called the Rorschach-test play, a Harold Pinter specialty. The ambiguity of his plots and the opacity of his characters' motivations leave the playgoer with the task of figuring out what the play means. In the process, each member of the audience reveals himself to himself. For playgoers who relish self-analysis and puzzle solving, the genre is extremely stimulating; others may find it both irritating and baffling.

Green Julia is a Rorschach-test play and an awfully good one. It is the first full-length drama by Britain's Paul Ableman, 45, who has previously written three novels and some 50 abstract and surrealist playlets. Like most plays of this sort, Green Julia is low on action and high on intensity of situation. The only characters that the audience sees are Robert Lacey, a young plant physiologist, and Jacob Perew, a young economist. For some time, Perew (John Pleshette) and Lacey (Fred Grandy) have shared a flat in an English university town. They also share an active fantasy life which is hilariously funny yet shadowed by increasing hysteria. In this relationship Lacey is called Bradshaw and Perew is Carruthers.

In satirical postures and caricature voices, "Carruthers" plays bishop to "Bradshaw's" priest, pukka sahib to his native, officer to his enlisted man, and schoolmaster to his pupil. The bantering wit of this role playing does not entirely disguise its hidden psychological vengeance. In these games, it is Perew who dominates and Lacey who is dependent and vulnerable.

Perew is leaving for the Far East, and we watch him try to pull one last manipulative ploy. He wants to saddle Lacey with his mistress, a promiscuous lush 14 years his senior who hangs out at a local pub called The Green Man. She is the unseen Julia of the title. Lacey refuses, but that scarcely settles the questions Playwright Ableman tantalizingly raises. Is Perew merely a heel trying to avoid emotional remorse? Is he, perhaps, more in love with Julia than he lets on, enough to want to soften the blow of his departure? Is it possible that he wants to bring a little fleshly warmth into Lacey's loveless and lonely life? Finally, as we see the ashen, tearless desolation on Lacey's face after Perew leaves, must we not wonder if they are two latent homosexuals?

These questions, which each playgoer will answer in his own way, give the play its haunting texture of actual life where paradoxes abound, contradictions prevail, and the course of events rarely parallels the fine geometry of logic. Both Pleshette and Grandy are outstanding, and Grandy, who graduated from Harvard in 1970, is possibly the No. 1 off-Broadway acting find of this season. "T.E.K.

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