Theater: New Season–Old Play–No Hit

Traveller Without Luggage, the new Broadway season’s opening play, is a 27-year-old drama by Jean Anouilh that does not so much betray its age as it does the ineptness of the French playwright in his youth. He concentrates on outer mechanics rather than inner change. He is more concerned with proving an intellectual thesis than with pumping the whole blood of the dramatic imagination into characters that command the stage. They merely mouth the playwright’s favorite thoughts. Life corrupts. A man’s memory is a history of petty and monstrous crimes, of fond illusions lost. Only a man without a past, Anouilh seems to be saying, is free of the past.

The play’s hero (Ben Gazzara) has been abruptly freed of his past at 18 by amnesia suffered in World War I. At the age of 36, he is claimed by several families, and when he stumbles on his real relatives, he begins to loathe the self that was. As a boy, it appears, he was cruel to small animals. He hated his mother (Mildred Dunnock), and she hated him. He crippled his best friend in a fight over a chambermaid. He had an affair with his older brother’s wife (Nancy Wickwire), who is more than ready to resume it.

An able but seemingly perplexed cast can scarcely redeem itself, let alone the play. Ben Gazzara sets the acting tone of the evening with a performance of marmoreal monotony. Everyone labors strenuously over the point that Anouilh talkily belabors: to be robbed of the worst, or the best, past is not a theft but a gift. Anouilh further argues, without his later agile irony and cogent wit, that a man can indeed escape his past, which suggests that the young playwright still harbored at least one fond and vastly foolish illusion.