Bold Hand at the Guthrie's Helm

By T.E. Kalem

Three classics with a new look in Minneapolis

Sir Tyrone Guthrie, who inspired the founding of the Minneapolis theater named for him and served as its first artistic director, was a man of imposing stature and equally imposing ideals. His very first production, Hamlet, in 1963, gave the theater its credo--to strive for excellence in the classics. His immediate successors, Douglas Campbell and Michael Langham, also British, helped to make the Guthrie a kind of flagship of the U.S. regional theater movement. In recent years that image has been tarnished, but the choice of Liviu Ciulei (pronounced Leave-you Chew-lay) promises to burnish it again. A Rumanian who speaks five languages, Ciulei, 58, was trained as an architect and went on to scenic design, acting and directing in Bucharest. He did his first work in the U.S. at the Washington, D.C., Arena Stage in 1974. He is a bold innovator with a powerful sense of the visual, much like Britain's Peter Brook. To the Guthrie's great good fortune, he is off to a spectacular start.

DON JUAN by Moliere

A middle-aging enfant terrible from off-Broadway has given the Guthrie's new season its "conversation piece." Director Richard Foreman is a bit of a prankster, but he possesses a painter's eye for shaping scenes and a formidable arsenal of theatricality. He explodes one of his surprises at the very start of this revival. A thunderclap of organ music blasts through the house, sounding as though the seraphic tones of Bach had been mangled in some dungeon of the damned.

Growing light reveals a bleak gray back wall and a spectral frieze of figures who may be inmates of a prison or an asylum. Later they will coalesce into a band of Greek Furies or chalk-faced exorcists, hissing and poking little white crosses at the unrepentant libertine Don Juan (John Seitz). At times, blistering white light rakes the audience as if the entire universe of man merited a third-degree grilling.

Much of the evening is monstrously funny, but there is an odor of acrid black comedy to it, possibly because Foreman views Don Juan as "a radical with no place to go" in a corrupt society. Moliere's Don Juan is radical only in his supreme egoism. He is a law unto himself, a one-man Fifth Estate. He is as cool a rationalist as he is hot a hedonist.

He mocks all social codes as shams that bind the will. When he steals Dona Elvira (Frances Conroy) from the convent to be his wife and then abandons her, he mocks vows made to God and to fidelity. He protests undying love and proffers marriage to two peasant girls (Kristine Nielsen and Hillary Bailey) merely as bait for the gullible. He mocks his fellow aristocrats by tripping them up in the niceties of codes of honor, and his aged father (John E. Straub) by an icy disdain for filial piety.

The witness to Don Juan's exploits, and a teeming flagon of comic relief, is his servant Sganarelle (Roy Brocksmith). He makes cowardice an art form. Brocksmith has some of the elephantine grace of Zero Mostel. Seitz's Don Juan is a triumph of stylized scorn. He scuttles about the stage crab-fashion. He gazes into a mirror as if to blot out the scum of the earth. Even in wooing, he masks any show of passion. He is, for certain, a radical Don Juan.

OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder

It is relatively easy to reduce Our Town to geography, a homey, nostalgic pinpoint on a turn-of-the-century New Hampshire map called Grover's Corners. The surface of the play alone will always be strong enough to sustain it. The more hazardous and rewarding task is to pursue Wilder's deeper intention of making Grover's Corners a metaphor, a sort of way station in the multimillennial aspiration and continuity of the human race. Wilder saw living and loving and dying as stages of almost mystical illumination.

In this admirable revival, pellucidly directed by Alan Schneider, we hear the playwright's earthly voice and--something rarer--the splashless echo of pebbles of speculation dropped into a metaphysical well. The Stage Manager (Ken Ruta) narrates the spare plot line. Act I explores the details of daily life in Grover's Corners. Act II is about love and marriage, specifically that of George Gibbs (Boyd Gaines) and Emily Webb (Keliher Walsh). The third act takes place in the cemetery, where Emily, who has died in childbirth, is introduced to eternity.

Wilder's thought line is more elusive, since he couched what was most serious to him in playful hints. Take the letter addressed to a resident of the town: ''Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God." The line never fails to draw a laugh, but Wilder has offhandedly revealed his grand design. The humblest soul on earth dwells in the mind of God. In the Stage Manager, who serves as Wilder's God surrogate, the playwright gives us a clue as to what that mind might be like.

The narrator speaks in all three tenses; he is omniscient. Less than ten minutes after the play begins, a boy comes tossing newspapers onto porches. The Stage Manager knows that that boy will graduate at the top of his class at M.I.T. with a brilliantly promising career as an engineer and will die in France in World War I. "All that education for nothing," he concludes. In short, man is an unwitting instrument of destiny.

Throughout Our Town, Wilder celebrates the wonder of nature, the beauty of the commonplace and the abiding serenity of simple rituals. Why, then, do men and women take life for granted and fritter away the most precious commodity they possess? Wilder's answer comes from the graveyard to relive her twelfth birthday. She is enraptured by the moment-to-moment joy of existence and baffled that her mother is blind to it. She pleads with her: "Just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another. " Wilder seems to be telling us that love is the highest form of vision. That which and those whom we do not love, we do not see.

The pivotal characters in Our Town are the Stage Manager and Emily, and Ken Ruta and Keliher Walsh serve the play bounteously. His mode is conversational, and he seems as much the playgoer's friend as his guide. She has a quality of radiance that most befits Emily, who represents consciousness lifted to the plane of enlightenment. In this luminous rendering, Director Schneider and his solid troupe unveil the soul of Our Town.

THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare

Music seems to filter through the air like Stardust. Prospero's cell, which looks like a scholarly sea captain's cabin, is bathed in preternatural calm. On the back wall of the set, oblong and circular apertures frame ravishing glimpses of sun-bleached seashores and azure skies. Truly this seems an enchanted isle.

As if to answer Prospero's question, "What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?" Ciulei has surrounded the stage with a moat of blood. In or near it are strewn various artifacts of Western civilization: the Mona Lisa, a vintage cash register, an armless, headless Greek statue of a nude and, most disquieting, an unseen corpse in medieval armor, face down in the moat.

These furnish Ciulei with his main motifs in interpreting Shakespeare's elusive last play. Time and history ravage; art salvages and makes whole. The artist imposes order on the chaos of existence. And something more. Prospero is a kind of philosopher-king who uses his "most potent art" to foster the good, the true and the beautiful, even though he encounters evil, falsity and ugliness. If The Tempest ends on a note of wistful melancholy, it may be because the god-in-man, Prospero, can never fully tame the beast-in-man, Caliban.

This Tempest is blessedly strong in its cast. Ken Ruta's Prospero would second the dying words of Goethe: "More light!" His books are not manuals for necromancy but tools to tackle the mind's frontiers. Ariel (Franc,ois de la Giroday) does no balletic miming--a sin of the past, one hopes--but he is the virile, agile agent of Prospero's sorcery. Jan Triska's Caliban is a peasant prole for all seasons, more churlish than malignant.

Near the end Prospero breaks his magic wand and frees those within his power. In Minneapolis, Liviu Ciulei has lifted his own wand, and the dramatic revels have just begun.

--By T. E. Kalem

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