ON BEING A CRITIC (2)

At first, I felt a bit uneasy about taking on the task of reviewing since I had been an actor. It felt almost like treason. On the other hand, I saw the opportunity to give a boost to the acting community, who were all fighting had to bring in audiences in a town that was already over-entertained.

I looked at it also as a form of consumer service. If something was really crap, I could warn readers to save their money.

I forget whether it was Walter or Jean Kerr who made the distinction between reviewing a work or writing a review. In either case, the point was that reviewing the work was a serious and sincere effort to inform the potential audience of the merits and demerits of the piece, while writing a review was an exercise to show how witty and clever one could be often at the expense of the subject.

Most of the time, I had the greatest regard for John Simon and Kenneth Tynan. But both could on occasion write lines that were nasty and uninformative. Simon on Nicol Williamson's 'Hamlet,' saying that “----played the King as though he were expecting someone to play the Ace,” of Tynan's diatribe about Barbara Streisand's nose in a show she starred in. These were things I avoided at all costs.

One of my favorite venues was Theater Center Philadelphia, down on Fourth Street in the fabric district. The producer, Albert Benzwie, had come fron Germany, where he had worked with Bertolt Brecht. Over the time the company was in existence, he did most of Brecht's plays. One memorable piece was Macchiavelli's “Mandragola,” a classic Commedia dell' Arte piece by the notorious schemer. It was very good.

What wasn't was “The Rise and Fall of Phineas T. Nozzle,” which was precisely as bad as you would expect it to be. They also premiered the stage version of “Extremities,' which became a film which helped put Farrah Fawcett in the serious actress category.

There's an interesting sidebar to that. By this time I was married to my second wife, who also had a theater background. We were both trained in stagefighting, and we noticed on opening night that the lead actress had some very real and very nasty bruises on her legs from the attempted rape scene. We arranged to coach the cast on some techniques to avoid future injury and later spent some time going to theater seminars where we did stagefighting classes.