Theater: First Nights in Manhattan

The theater, on and off Broadway, got under way last week with imports. The Affair, British and new, scrupulously tracked justice through a lair of university dons. A Man’s a Man, German and old, eerily demonstrated the process of brainwashing before the term had even been invented.

The Affair, faithfully adapted by Ronald Millar from the novel by C.P. Snow, is set in the leather-chaired somnolence of a common room at Cambridge, and makes it crackle with the charges and countercharges of a courtroom trial. Dramatically, the play accumulates tension without generating passion. But for the theatergoer who is willing to forgo emotional nourishment, it provides a stimulating mental feast.

As The Affair begins, the High Tables of the university are still rocking with an intellectual scandal that will not down with the port. Donald Howard (Keith Baxter) has been judged guilty of scientific fraud, having apparently faked a research photograph in his fellowship thesis, and a court of dons deprives him of his fellowship. Since Howard is a boor whose better-Red-than-well-bred political stance and personality irked most of his colleagues, his departure is viewed as good riddance. But his spitfiery wife Laura (Brenda Vaccaro) is certain of his innocence, certain that he has been victimized for his fellow-traveling ideology. She pleads with Sir Lewis Eliot (Brewster Mason), a renowned lawyer and former university fellow, to reopen Howard’s case and fight for his reinstatement.

Eliot can find small ground for doing so until a Roman Catholic physicist, who detests everything Howard stands for, uncovers new evidence of the pariah’s probable innocence and rallies Eliot and a few conscience-nagged colleagues with a cry of “justice for the enemy.” As he rounds up the necessary votes for retrial, Eliot encounters the various motives-sly, cynical, stoic, self-serving, selflessly decent—that sway all would-be judges of men. How all-too-human such motives can be is suggested with delightfully doddering comic precision by Edward Atienza as an ancient Senior Fellow who believes that he is being bypassed on suspicion of senility. The retrial exonerates Howard, but the terms of reinstatement outrage the implacably” anti-Establishmentarian Laura (Howard rather implausibly leaves his wife at this point), and the fact of reinstatement disgusts the right-wing bursar, who abominates “such men.” To C.P. Snow, both characters symbolize the extremists of the world who keep the men of good will from achieving global harmony.

Snow’s good will tends to erase his good sense toward the end of The Affair. He has Lawyer Eliot deride the proposition that “character and belief go hand-in-hand.” But is a head-hunter’s character unaffected by his beliefs? Snow goes on to suggest that all that separates the West from the Communist world is “a fog of prejudice” that can be dissipated by compromise. This is to ignore entirely that the character of the West has been molded by belief in the rule of law, and the character of Communism has been shaped by belief in the jungle claw.

This speciously reasoned finale mars, but does not mangle The Affair. Impeccably performed, it pungently evokes its donnish milieu and nobly invokes man’s tireless quest to make justice prevail.

A Man’s a Man, by Bertolt Brecht. The greatest modern German playwright was baptized in the gore of World War I as a teenager, received his first pay in the cruel, inflated German currency of the ‘205, thrust into world-wandering exile the day after the Nazis burned the Reichstag, and died in 1956 in East Germany as a kept culture idol of the Communists. Brecht distilled this life experience into a kind of hilarious horror, a black-biled comedy of terrors. He sprayed his poison-cww-laughing gas impartially on every virtue and every vice. Something in his sardonically cynical spirit suits the temper of the age, but he would not posthumously command the world’s stages if he were not a marvelously exciting playmaker.

That excitement is stylishly projected from the stage of the Masque Theater, where an Eric Bentley adaption of a 1926 play of Brecht’s, A Man’s a Man, has been given a taut and inventive production. Galy Gay (John Heffernan) sets out to buy a fish for his wife. By day’s end, he has been dragooned into impersonating a missing army machine-gunner named Jeraiah Jip. By play’s end, he is a blood-bloated killer whose only self is the print on his identity card.

Man uncannily foreshadows the technique of brainwashing, tinkles a 20th century dirge over the death of the individual. A honky-tonk piano sets a cabaret mood. Placards worded like silent-movie captions cue the scenes. White chalky masks symbolize mass man as an interchangeable part in the social assembly line. “One man is no man,” says Brecht.