Saturday, February 12, 1972
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
'After the Fall' Falls with a Thud
By Pierre Bowman
Arthur Miller's autobiographical play, 'After the Fall,' is a work that seems interminable,
is more sodden than significant, and is distastefully exploitive of Miller's relationship with Marilyn Monroe.
It opened last night at Schofield Barracks in a USARHAW Special Services production. The play
demands a high degree of precision technically, and skill in the acting department.
The current production rises to meet some of the challenges, but all the effort is merely
squandered on a play that does not deserve to be produced. Miller set up the piece as a kind of free-form,
free-association forum for his life study, philosophies and rationalizations.
On a barren, multilevel set, Quentin's (Miller's) story unfolds, jiggling back and forth in time
with the use of extremely precise puddles of light that work fairly well in the Schofield Production.
Irving Shapiro's Quentin is occasionally effective in some of the episodic scenes, but he is
simply dreadful in monologues--and there are many throughout the play.
Jo Pruden, as Louise, Quentin's first wife, attacks her role with authority and at least delivers
her lines briskly--which is a relief after some of Shapiro's more ponderous moments.
Cheryl Conte plays Maggie (Marilyn Monroe). Miller has not written a role about Miss
Monroe. He has written a Marilyn Monroe part--a dumb blonde with a soft spot. Miss Conte occasionally
lapses into some dreadful MM parody, but generally manages to be rather effective, almost in spite of the
part. Miller has written Maggie as a woman who constantly presents herself strictly as a beautiful body,
and who saps Quentin's strength in every way.
Quentin notes that he ended up in similar failures in his marriages to both Louise and
Maggie--so there are obviously weaknesses to his character, as well as his wives. Miller, however, doesn't
even bother to allude to what the weaknesses might be. The whole affair is laced with a lot of breast-
beating on Miller's part, and ponderous statements about Communist witch-hunting. Nazi anti-
Semitisn and guilt pervade the whole play.
As the action flits between past and present, between Quentin, his ex-wives, future romances,
parents and brother, there isn't as much confusion as there is plain dullness. Quentin is simply an
unconstructive sniveler, and that doesn't make for much of a hero for the three hours and five minutes
it takes to complete the play.
'After the Fall' will run at 8 tonight and tomorrow, and repeat at the same times next Friday
through Sunday. Admission is free.
Saturday, March 13, 1972
The Honolulu Advertiser
Schofield players trip over Miller's 'Fall'
By Peter Lawrence
The U.S. Army Hawaii Special Services at Schofield Barracks is currently wrestling with
Arthur Miller's confessional drama, 'After the Fall.' The play is difficult to produce since it is really less a
work of theater than it is a public purging of playwright Miller's real and imagined sins from his
traumatized childhood through his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
'After the Fall' is a long, humorless, pretentious, confusing play in which the playwright's
mouthpiece character, Quentin, revels in his guilt through a series of melodramatic incidents and
intellectual-sounding speeches all of which point to a moral bewilderment. But the bewilderment is a private
one, and it has no sense of either immediacy or universality.
The action of the play takes place in Quentin's mind. While he speaks to an imaginary
listener (the audience), loosely related incidents from Quentin's (Miller's) life are enacted onstage. Characters
are brought on and off stage at will, as they are conjured up in Quentin's mind. And because they are
memories rather than real people, they may deliver preachy and disjointed speeches and may walk around
like zombies. These remembered characters are illustrations to Miller's autobiographical moral fable.
They serve the author's whining logic rather than respond in any recognizably human fashion.
'After the Fall,' like most of Miller's other plays, has not aged well and has begun to sound
increasingly fossilized as the years go by. This play is a drama of the 1950s, just as Miller is a man of the
1950s. The concerns of 'After the Fall' are with Freudian analysis, McCarthyism (Joe, not Eugene),
intellectual isolation, and that special kind of identity crisis associated with the 1950s.
The Special Services production, under the direction of Vanita Rae Smith, depends upon the
intellectual and moral weight of 'After the Fall' to sustain audience interest. What little humor there is in the
play is ignored, and no attempt is made to relate the production to 1972 audiences. The script demands that
the characters, other than Quentin, float through the action, appearing and disappearing as in a dream.
Sometimes figures drift onstage for only a word or a line, and other times they play an entire scene with
Quentin. This feeling is essential to a production of 'After the Fall,' since it is a constant reminder to the
audience that the action being witnessed is taking place in Quentin's mind.
But in the Schofield production, you are always aware of the characters' ... [missing] ...
flow of the play and destroys what little stylistic originality there is in the work.
Irving David Shapiro, who plays Quentin, carries nearly all the action of the play. The role is
nearly impossible to perform, since it demands hours of anguish and logic, while at the same time keeping a
direct intellectual and emotional rapport with the audience. Shapiro's performance lacks dramatic range. He
shows us torment but little else and he never manages to take the audience fully into his confidence.
Jo Pruden is appropriately cold and over-psychologized as Louise, Quentin's first wife, and
Lee Brady does what she can with the Freudian role of Rose, Quentin's mother.
The setting, which is supposed to represent Quentin's mind, is a striped, multi-level affair,
which under certain lights looks oddly like rows of teeth.
While the Schofield production of 'After the Fall' is smooth and fairly polished, the
evenness of the pacing couples with the three-hour running time of the show makes for a long, lulling
evening of rather unengaging drama.
April 11, 1972
The Honolulu Advertiser
Schofield 'Dow Jones' musical play dips and falls
By Peter Lawrence
USARHAW Special Services at Schofield Barracks is running 'How Now Dow Jones,' an
amiably painless 1967 Broadway musical comedy by Elber Bernstein and Carolyn Leigh. While the musical
and the production are a testament to the unbelievable silliness of Broadway musical comedy, the
evening at the Schofield theatre is brisk, and the capacity audience at Saturday's performance had a very
good time.
'Dow Jones'--which smacks heavily of pot-boiling the earlier hit musical 'How to Succeed
in Business Without Really Trying'--has a thin little plot concerning love and success on Wall Street. But
the story is little more than a rack on which to hang a bunch of cheerful sont-and-dance numbers.
The music is pleasant but undistinguished, and the dialogue serves more to bridge the musical numbers
than to carry on much life of its own.
The Schofield production, under the direction of Vanita Rae Smith, is a workmanlike staging
of the show--crisply paced and friendly, but hardly dazzling. Miss Smith has emphasized liveliness in her
staging at the expense of intricacy.
The warm Schofield cast is headed by Joy Bowman as Kate Montgomery, the voice of Dow
Jones and the romantic lead of the production. Miss Bowman has all the necessary equipment for musical
comedy--she is vivacious and has a pleasant voice--but at Saturday's show she lacked that easy
confidence of performance that would pull an audience to her character.
Steve Cole plays Charley Matson, Kate's true love and the male lead. Cole's voice is
clear and powerful, but his performance, while it has an easy boyish appeal, lacks the flamboyant
quality the role seems to call for.
Lynn Hicks, as Kate's dizzy friend Cynthia, has the best role and gives the best performance.
Miss Hicks gives lots of zappy energy to the part, making Cynthia a real audience-pleaser. Mary Lou
Orthey dredges up a lot of laughs by snorting and tromping her way through the role of Mrs. Millhauser,
and Pat Dickson, as A. K., has the funniest single moment in the production when he sits in his wheelchair
doing a palsied no-no beneath his lap blanket. The rest of the huge cast is pleasant and spirited, even if the
acting is not always of the highest quality.
Don Allton's musical direction is snappy, but he has permitted some very shaky sounds
to come from his brass section and some unclear lyrics from many singers. And the choreography by
Sue Stinson tends to be a bit limp.
By most standards, 'Dow Jones' is not very high quality theaer. But the friendliness and
natural energy of the cast and the simple story and melodies combine into comfortable and entertaining
musical theater.
And there is no admission charge.