New Plays: I Never Sang for My Father

Unless his name happens to be Sophocles, the best thing a playwright can do with the Oedipus complex is to forget it. Purporting to explain the irreconcilable clash of son with father, the Oedipus complex, dramatically speaking, tends to reduce conflict to impasse. This is both the substance of—and the trouble with—Robert Anderson’s new Broadway play, I Never Sang for My Father. Sometimes poignant, sometimes sentimental, always earnest, it essentially presents a static emotional impasse.

Father (Alan Webb) is a curmudgeonly tyrant nearing 80, marching with faltering step and bristling temper into his pitiable dotage. He has sapped the life out of his wife (Lillian Gish), bullied his middle-aged son (Hal Holbrook) into something resembling psychic impotence, and barred his door to a daughter (Teresa Wright) because she married a Jew. Except for the sense of mortality that makes every dying old man a portent of what lies in store for all humanity, there is no particular reason for anyone to care about this father. But Holbrook wants to love him, and tries. The effort mostly takes the form of talk —on filial duty, on paternal sacrifice, on the family ties that chafe as they bind. Instead of a shock of recognition, there is merely the camera click of domestic snapshots that might turn up in any middle-class family album.

Wine of Life. Toward the play’s end, this tepid dramatic tap water is briefly but movingly transformed into the precious wine of life. The old man, raging against the dying of light, is finally silenced by a stroke and wheeled into death, a skeletal zombie in a hospital chair. Alan Webb, 61, who played the 97-year-old poet in Williams’ Night of the Iguana, might have been invented for this role. It is not only physical decrepitude that he conveys but also the humiliated fury of a proud, spirited and ruthless man cowed by the gradual loss of mind and authority.

In the difficult dual role of son and narrator, Hal Holbrook makes his transitions with unobtrusive ease and is touching and vulnerable in his desire to receive the blessing of love from his father’s untender hand. A play that wears its heart on its sleeve and small muscle in its script has been given whatever discipline, order and form it has by Alan Schneider, currently the busiest and most versatile director both off-Broadway and on. Whether he groups his actors with a painter’s eye or makes a scene spin like a boy’s top, his direction is impeccable. The only flaws are in the play, which renders unto Freud the dramatic initiative and vision that should belong to the playwright.