Word: zoning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Zone" was, to my mind, a miserable failure. In this first portion of the triptych, the Soldier (David Dukes) makes a pact with the devil. He sells not only his soul, but also his body; or, at least, this is implied by the play's personalization of the Devil as homosexual sadist...
...Zone" offers this forced convergence of "high" and "low" humor, which is too naturalistic to be absurd and too pregnant with symbolism to pose as farce. The "high" humor of the Devil as Angel finds expression in a scene in which an Old Man and an Old Woman solicit his aid in bringing their daughter back to life. The sarcastic expose of superstition is vitiated by a focus on the campy quaintness of the old couple and the vulgarity of their revivified daughter (Alaina Warren). The mixing of styles proves particularly annoying in Felder's early appearances as the Devil...
...Zone 2 relieved my anxieties by veering straight away from the central problem of the play (the disparity between the stature of its hero and the magnitude of his "education"). "The Occupied Zone" was all surface, and the surface was very exciting. This portion of the play, while psychologically the least probing, was artistically the most inventive. The Hero becomes ensnared in the kinky problems of Mrs. Schmidt-Gordon, a twice-widowed owner of a rooming house. Mrs. Schmidt-Gordon murders, by mistake, her daughter Dulcy (Joan Tolentino). She had intended to decapitate her Cinderella-like daughter Gloria, played with...
...FINE balance between film and stage action used conjointly in Zone 2 is lost in Zone 3, "The Frontier." Here, the one-time deserter is shown as an old man, a famous general named Chestnut. Propped in an army trunk, he seems likely to die any minute and the comic foils around him-and Army press agent, his wife, his girlguide daughters "One-Eyes," "Two-Eyes" and "Three-Eyes" -play no logical role in this moral crisis. Perhaps, if only for that perverse reason, they are more interesting than General Chestnut himself. The old Man guffaws, clutches his chest...
...applaud once Chestnut's body was removed from the stage. The plot threads were that tenuous. A few glimpses of Chestnut as a baby, cub scout and young man were projected on the wall of the house, but these seemed only token gestures after the exciting film work in Zone 2. With greater selective judgment, Criss could have shortened this play by one hour and made far better use of his extremely gifted actors. Where he did venture into experimentation, he had solid backing from John Jacobson's lighting and Brian Kaufman's film sequences. But, I fear, to have...