Mary Stage Front Once More

By Frank Trippett

DO YOU TURN SOMERSAULTS? by Aleksei Arbuzov

In this jaded day, it takes nerve to present the shockaholic public with a romance unmitigated by violence, treachery, despair, psychosis or death, not even an ugly disease. A similar risk would be to serve Kool-Aid to cocaine sniffers. Surely the hazard is doubled when the offering is built on the doings of two gerontic specimens who do not even talk dirty or expose any personal equipage more intimate than the inside of an umbrella.

Such are the elected handicaps of Do You Turn Somersaults?, which began a five-week run at Washington's Kennedy Center last week. The old parties who fret, fuss, fumble and fudge their way into twilit romance are Anthony Quayle and Mary Martin. But the play is nonetheless an event, for this is Mary's first appearance on the stage since I Do! I Do! almost ten years ago. Surely she deserves the rose-colored badge of courage, if nothing else, for choosing this comeback vehicle--a fragile work that could expire of its own sweetness without a strong dose of acting magic.

As it turns out, she also deserves only a jot less credit than Quayle for making the production work. A confection that could easily have dissolved into a soup of mawkish sentiment gets souffleed into an amusing and often touching entertainment. Director Edwin Sherin had the good sense to keep the sets minimal.

Actually, physical scenery might have been all but dispensed with. So might the premise that the action is occurring in the old city of Riga in 1968. Somersaults is one of those plays (Our Town is another) for which the audience projects the essential scenery, place and time out of its own bittersweet memory. Rodion, the fuss-budgety doctor, and his patient Lidya, an actress come down to circus cashier, could as well be in Pasadena as Riga. The true location of each is an almost impermeable condition of the solitude to which life has delivered them. The difference is that Rodion defies his loneliness from inside a husk of willful indifference to women, while Lidya denies hers with fantasies and deceptions.

How reluctant love gets born between them is, of course, the stuff of the play.

Quayle brings to his portrayal a gritty verve and charm, perfected when he did the same part in London. Martin's Lidya is a scatterbrained and whimsical sprite of a woman whose very casualness with truth seems to put her beyond Rodion's reach. Naturally, love outs -- in a scene of bubbly, moonlit tipsiness that finds the two codgers cajoling each other into doing an arthritic Charleston that would vindicate the evening if nothing else did.

Inevitably, Mary Martin has to over come the audience's expectation that some ghost of Nellie (I'm Gonna Wash That Man) Forbush will be hovering about the stage. She manages. Her one ditty is a wistful circus song that proves that at age 63, her heart wisely belongs not to memories of her glittering past but to a riper, richer present.

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