Repertory: Puppet Shows

The theater is the only ailing immortal. It cannot die, but it dreams incessantly of some dramatic Lourdes where the healing miracle of instant greatness will occur. In recent years, the hoped-for Lourdes has been the regional theater. It has failed to revitalize U.S. drama, even though it has provided entertaining and illuminating evenings for multitudes of people.

A significant theater seems to require the kinetic tempo, the minute-to-minute violence and conflict, the constant intellectual bombardment and diversity that can exist only in a great city. The prime fallacy behind regional theater is the notion that architecture induces art, that bricks breed genius. After more than a decade of assiduously erecting culture structures, not a single sizable talent has emerged from the regional theater. Far from assembling able dedicated ensemble companies, the regional theater has merely spawned a theatrical bureaucracy of so-so actors and so-so directors who are not above displaying a sly slapdash contempt for their so-so audiences. The rank mediocrity of most resident companies has been camouflaged by some New York drama critics, who put down Broadway commercialism and confect gorgeous fictions about the distinguished dramatic art and high esthetic integrity that they have discovered in Nome, Keokuk and the lower Gaspé Peninsula.

One of these much-touted troupes, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, has now arrived in Manhattan. ACT is distressingly average, and its three-play fare is flaccidly representative of regional-theater programming: one funny (A Flea in Her Ear), one classic (The Three Sisters) and one warmed-over Broadway Provocative (Tiny Alice). When he worked off-Broadway, ACT’S director William Ball was a sensitive, scrupulous directorial craftsman (Under Milk Wood, Ivanov). With his own company, Ball has become a puppetmaster who makes his players dance more than they act.

As to the plays, Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice cannot really be revived since it was never alive. The only scene with any vitality is the venomous opening interchange between a cardinal and a lawyer who were once schoolmates. The metaphysical blah about God, saintliness and martyrdom are as obfuscating as ever. On opening night, an astute 14-year-old girl summed up all that needs to be said of Tiny Alice: “I hate plays with hidden significance.”

Like all of Chekhov, The Three Sisters is open to several interpretations, but to make it insipid, boring and silly requires Ball’s gall as well as his company’s ineptitude. As the guest director of Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Gower Champion manages to intrude defects on the play that it never possessed. Feydeau was to the French bedroom farce what Einstein was to the theory of relativity. With gimmicks and gaucherie, Champion botches all of Feydeau’s intricately precise equations of who-is-sleeping-with-whom-be-hind-which-door? As far as ACT’s trip east is concerned, a molehill has come to Mohammed.