On to the Triple Crown

By T.E. Kalem

THE CONTRACTOR

One of British Playwright David Storey's avocations is painting, and as a dramatist he depicts still lifes. His detractors emphasize the "still"--nothing happens in a Storey play. His admirers emphasize the "life"--everything that constitutes the experience of a lifetime has been distilled into two hours of stage time. When playgoers choose up sides, their vehemence, all by itself, testifies to one thing: we are in the presence of a playwright of consequence.

Though it was written prior to Home and The Changing Room, The Contractor may be the best play of the three. Few dramas exemplify with greater purity the classic concept of a beginning, a middle and an end, while adhering as well to the unities of time, place and action. To be sure, nothing much happens. In Act I, some workmen put up a spacious lawn tent for the wedding of their boss's daughter. In Act II, they decorate it for the bridal-reception party. In Act III, they clear away the debris of empty champagne bottles and strike the tent.

The metaphor is not the meaning. What emerges subliminally from The Contractor is that life runs the inevitable course of the rising and setting of the sun, that it moves with deceptive torpor yet is shatteringly brief, and that the sum of all its tediously accumulated fractions is a melancholy zero.

Rather depressing stuff, some may argue. In reality, it is not. This is partly because Storey peppers the play with a fusillade of humor, much of it of the caustic one-upmanship variety at which the British have few equals and no superiors. In The Contractor, as in The Changing Room, Storey reveals himself as a celebrator of communal male effort. The task of playing a rugby game knits the men of The Changing Room together in pleasure and in pain. The task of putting up and taking down the tent in The Contractor is not a stage charade. It is real and intricate work, a team effort that requires the subordination of individual and abrasive personalities to the communal effort. That is why Storey's casts always look like veteran ensemble companies. They have to be to get the work of the play done.

This also reveals why Storey is a stage animal down to his bones and marrow. In any satisfactory theatrical experience, any single member of an audience feels a communion of spirit with those around him. That is how audience emotion builds so that the entire theater seems to erupt with laughter or stills to a rapt, absolute hush.

The cast is splendid to a man, but perhaps special praise should be meted out to Joseph Maher as a backbiting, working-class cynic, to John Wardwell as a much put-upon boss who reads his balance sheet of life in red ink, to Reid Shelton as the stoic foreman once jailed for embezzlement, and to Kevin O'Connor as a sweetly compassionate, but unsentimentalized, stuttering imbecile.

In the 1970-71 season, David Storey won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best play with Home. In '72-'73 he won again with The Changing Room. As of now, he has an all-but-unbeatable lead toward winning a triple crown. .T.E.Kalem

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