Word: playlets
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...keep trying to write about Rome as though it provided some very significant analogy to America. Remember John Gunther producing that book about Julius Caesar? Teddy White wrote a play, too, about crossing the Rubicon. Even Hemingway, in the midst of covering the Spanish Civil War, wrote a grotesque playlet about the three Roman soldiers who had just crucified Christ. One of them keeps repeating, "I tell you, he was pretty good in there today...
...demonstrating that secret sins don't disappear simply by being confessed. The only real difficulty with the piece is that Feldner seems afraid to take himself seriously (his them is after all an unfashionably moralistic proposition) and so, with every chance he gets, he pokes fun at the playlet's melodramatic fabric...
...playlet takes place on an idyllic Sunday in an idyllic country town, where strollers shower coins and smiles on the local beggar, and husbands treat their wives with adoring deference. Eventually, in all the town's houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon...
This conventional theme might serve for a Tennessee Williams playlet. It might even be turned into a decent ballet, but not as Cranko has tarted it up. Poème inconsistently wobbles between crude parody-guests at the party flounce offstage in a way that was clearly meant to be amusing-and lush sentimentalism. The four lithe male dancers who play the diva's lovers are coyly dressed in skintight body stockings and continually swirl enormous Art Nouveau capes about themselves like pretend matadors at a gay beach...
...second playlet Matthau is a case of acute satyriasis billed as Jesse Kiplinger, Famous Hollywood Producer. When his New York schedule frees him from 2 to 4 p.m., Jesse books overcoy Muriel (Barbara Harris). He had stolen her maidenhood 17 years earlier in suburbia; now he wants to return to the crime, if not the scene. Acting under an assumed mane, the red-wigged Matthau is a Narcissus whose self-love is contagious. But Muriel is immune until Jesse discovers the secret: big names. Dropping them like rose petals, he strews the path to the bedroom...Frank Sinatra...Paul Newman...