THEATER

NIGHT, MOTHER, by Marsha Norman (Golden Theater, New York). "I'm through talking, Mother, says Jessie Cates, refusing to be diverted from her announced purpose of killing herself this eve ning. "Feel fine. I waited till I felt good enough." The win some, chatty Thelma Gates (Anne Pitoniak) and her stolid, epileptic, divorced daughter (Kathy Bates) share a loveless existence that Thel ma's "Let's rearrange the furni ture!" doesn't inspire Jessie to con tinue. Before she carries out her intention, Jessie just wants to make sure her mother knows how to work the washing machine, which days the milkman comes, whom to phone for helo.

Marsha Norman's new play, which has won this year's Pulitzer Prize, fulfills the promise the dramatist showed in Getting Out. Through the deceptive surface appearance of modest, well-made kitchen drama, `night, Mother reaches startling depths of angry pain. Nothing could be more harrowing than the cracking of the mother's chirpy facade at the play's center, unless it is her chilling recovery of trivial poise as she con sults her daughter on what to say to relatives and neighbors about her suicide. "I'll talk about what they have on, that's always good," Thel ma decides. The performances, un der Tom Moore’s direction, are not quite ideal. Pitoniak overindicates Thelma’s infantile wheedling to the point of shtick; Bates lapses into generalized softness in passages of reminiscence. But at their best, both actresses deliver Norman’s caustic dialogue with shattering impact.

WALTER CLEMONS

You CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman (Plymouth Theater, New York). In high school productions of You Can I Take It with You, one expects the ingenue and the grandfather to look vaguely the same age, but it comes as a surprise on Broadway. The current revival of the 1936 Kaufman-Hart play, directed by Ellis Rabb, has big names in the familiar roles—Jason Robards, Elizabeth Wilson, James Coco, Colleen Dewhurst and Maureen Anderman—but the roles they play do not necessarily suit them.

The Sycamores, as everyone knows, are a lovable and eccentric family who do exactly what they please. Grandpa (Jason Robards), who quit Wall Street years ago because it bored him, putters about with his pet snakes and attends commencements at Columbia University. His daughter Penny (Elizabeth Wilson) writes plays because a typewriter was once delivered to the house by mistake. Her husband Paul (Jack Dodson) and his friend Mr. DePinna (Bill McCutcheon) make fireworks in the basement. One of Penny and Paul’s daughters, Essie (Carol Androsky), is studying ballet even though her teacher, Boris Kolenkhov (James Coco), says “she stinks.” Her husband Ed (Christopher Foster) was a dinner guest years back and just never left. Maureen Anderman plays Alice, the other daughter, who is in love with Tony Kirby (Nicolas Surovy), the son of a Wall Street banker (Richard Woods). When Tony’s stuffy parents meet the wild Sycamores, Alice’s hopes for marriage briefly vanish.

Ellis Rabb knows how to whip along the action when the writing gets thin, but the evening is a disappointment. The actors don’t ever really come together as a group in the seamless way that this kind of light comedy needs, and the reason is surely that a number of them are miscast. Neither Maureen Anderman, a sensitive and intelligent actress, nor Carol Androsky is really an ingenue. As a Russian grand duchess, Colleen Dewhurst can’t hold on to her accent any more than James Coco can to his; both give the sort of | walk-through performances you’d expect in summer stock. The best performances in the show are by Jason Robards and Elizabeth Wilson, although it takes the maximum suspension of disbelief to allow that she is his daughter.

MOIRA HODGSON

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS, Theater, by Neil Simon (Alvin Theater, New York). After two Broadway failures in a row—a revival of Little Me last year and Fools the year before—Neil Simon has struck oil again, right in his own backyard. In this wistful, autobiographical comedy set in Brooklyn during the Depression, he has also created his most original and delightful character: himself as a fifteen-year-old misunderstood genius who, when he isn’t delivering jeremiads on the indignity of having to run errands to the corner store, struggles to decide whether to be a great writer or a major-league pitcher.

Matthew Broderick as Eugene Jerome does Simon proud with his hilarious portrayal of the tortures of pubescence. Hunched over like a question mark in knickers, sneakers, and a sleeveless sweater, whether talking back to his mother, agonizing over his beautiful cousin’s thighs, or discussing A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, he is Broadway’s most delightful new performer.

Elizabeth Franz (lately Sister Mary Ignatius Off Broadway) is excellent as Eugene’s mother, who delicately whispers the names of diseases (“He had.. .tuberculosis") but whose voice cuts like a buzz saw when she is angry. Zeljko Ivanek is touching and amusing as Eugene’s older brother, coerced nightly by his exasperating sibling into questionand-answer sessions on sex. The rest of the cast are excellent too, under Gene Saks’s direction, which is so smooth as to be invisible.

Brighton Beach Memoirs is sentimental in spots, and here and there uncomfortably earnest, but most of the time it is very funny. Neil Simon is not getting laughs with gag lines in this play; his comedy comes straight out of his characters.

WAYNE LAWSON

K2 by Patrick Meyers (Brooks Atkinson Theater, New York). The much-talked-about set for this play is both its major virtue and its major problem. Ming Cho Lee has designed a sheer mountain face, a sweeping wall of ice, superbly and eerily lit by Allen Lee Hughes, which dominates not only the stage but the entire theater.

Stuck on a narrow ledge on the side of this mountain are two climbers, Taylor (Jeffrey De Munn) and Harold (Jay Patterson). The question is whether they can make it down. Harold has had his leg broken in an avalanche, and a second slide sweeps away some crucial supplies. The two cannot survive another night, yet there is only rope enough for one to descend.

As the day progresses, Taylor twice scales the mountain with crampons and ax in hopes of retrieving additional rope. Both actors are extremely talented, but their dialogue is banal and cliche-ridden, often to the point of being embarrassing, and the characters are one-dimensional: Taylor is a hardhitting D.A. who goes to singles bars; Harold is a kindly, idealistic scientist and family man.

Audiences know that sets and props aren’t “real,” and overelaborate ones can actually bother them more than if they are called on to imagine everything for themselves, especially when there’s not enough in the writing to divert them. The mountain in K2 is certainly menacing. But it also intrudes. A nervousness takes hold of the audience as De Munn painstakingly makes his first ascent of the Styrofoam side; but at the same time everyone knows perfectly well that the stuff that’s falling isn’t snow.

Even though we never come to believe in the characters, K2 is oddly moving. The set exerts a fascination all its own.

M.H.

THE MIDDLE AGES, by A. R. Gurney, Jr. (Theater at Saint Peter’s Church, New York). This neat, antiseptic play takes place in the trophy room of an affluent men’s club between 1945 and 1980 and concerns the romantic ups and downs of two couples a generation apart. Here crazy, rebellious Barney falls in love with Eleanor, learns that she is marrying his wimpy brother, schemes to get her back, eventually does. Here, too, Eleanor’s social-climbing mother meets Barney’s prissy widowed father, schemes to win him, does so with ease. And here Barney and his father finally make their peace, by which time Jews, blacks and women (as members) have been admitted to the club.

Like The Dining Room by the same author, The Middle Ages is 90 percent schema and 10 percent drama. Both owe the air they breathe to Thornton Wilder, but neither has any of the earthy smell that permeates Our Town. The Middle Ages is also deeply in hock to Philip Barry, whose bright, upper-crust tone, when applied by Gurney to such subjects as women’s lib, pornography, and racial prejudice, makes them sound like so many non-issues—bases touched to indicate the passage of time.

Whatever detractors may say, though, The Middle Ages will probably live for years in community theaters: with one set, four paper-doll characters, no smut, little thought, and lots of changes of upper-middle-class party clothes, how can it fail?

Under the direction of David Trainer, who also directed The Dining Room, Ann McDonough and Andre Gregory are amusing as Eleanor and Barney’s Wasp dad. Less successful are Jack Gilpin as Barney and Jo Henderson as Eleanor’s mom, a Patricia Nixon look-alike. The most solid thing about The Middle Ages is the fine set, by John Lee Beatty.

W. L.