The Vortex of Evil

By T.E.Kalem

THE ORPHAN

by DAVID RABE

Viet Nam is a dark, broody obsession at the heart of David Rabe's three dramas. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel turned a man into an infantry cog and spun him off to combat and death. In Sticks and Bones, which CBS refused to air after complaints from local stations (TIME, March 19), a blind veteran returned to his bland-as-cornflakes family and found that they could not stomach his 20-20 insight on the U.S. and the war. In The Orphan, at off-Broadway's Public Theater, Viet Nam is not actively present except as Rabe attempts to relate it to the problem of evil throughout human existence. Often as silly and awkward as it is ambitious, the play nonetheless bears the mark of a dramatist who dares and cares.

The bulk of the play is a retelling of the Oresteia legend, and it makes for some restive or torpid listening depending on the playgoer's mood. The basic story line is intact. With his fleet becalmed on the way to Troy, Agamemnon (W.B. Brydon) sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to win the gods' favor. His embittered wife Clytemnestra takes a lover, Aegisthus, who murders Agamemnon upon his return from the war. The dead king's son, Orestes, goaded to revenge by his sister Electra, proceeds to murder his mother and Aegisthus. Rabe has drastically minimized Electra's role, but he provides two Clytemnestras, possibly to differentiate the mother's grief from the lust and vengefulness of the mistress (Rae Allen).

The strained pseudopoetic rhetoric and portentous declamatory style remind one of Maxwell Anderson scaling his molehills of dramatic verse. An intermittent sidebar monologue features an innocuous-looking Manson-family girl casually relating the horrors of the Sharon Tate murders with a lubriciously contented purr. Together with the repeated cue name of My Lai and references to the slaughter of innocents, of whom Iphigenia is the first, Rabe's intent is clear to the point of didactic overkill--to make the curse and crimes of the House of Atreus appear to be the inevitable pattern of all human behavior.

To the Greeks, the Oresteia was an exemplary tale of moral downfall designed to evoke pity and terror. Rabe's tone is pejorative, like that of a prosecuting attorney who is pressing play goers to confess that all men are bloody-minded beasts. There is no court of appeal in The Orphan. God is dead, absolute power has produced absolute corruption and society is a cracked veneer of hypocrisy.

With such a grim, bleak view, relentlessly abetted by Jeff Bleckner's stolidly reverential direction, there is little room for such diversionary tactics as entertainment or such revisionist behavior as love and the spontaneous response of one human being to another. Only one actor seems to escape the arid dogmatism of the evening--Marcia Jean Kurtz as Clytemnestra the mother. When she pleads for her daughter's life, she reveals a tenacity and a tenderness that banish all curses and shame all crimes.

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