By Vince Boucher .
When the musical
"Portraits" toured with the
recent Chautauqua revival,
Nebraska farmers and country
townfold repeatedly told
playwright David Bell the play
was realistic at every
performance.
The company received a
standing ovation every night.
Pretty surprising for Bell,"
who was "born in Connecticut
and bred in L.A."
"Stunned by reaction"
"I was just stunned by the
reacticn," Bell said. "They
couldn't believe I wasn't from
the land."
"Portraits" will open
Friday at 8 p.m. at Howell
Theatre as the first show of the
Nebraska Repertory Theatre.
Bell, who is a UN-L
instructor, is also directing the
play, Alan Nielsen, a graduate
student wrote the msuic and
collaborated with Bell on the
lyrics.
Seven rewrites
Bell said he wrote the first
draft of the play during two
.veeks of the Christmas
vacation. Seven rewrites later,
he said, "Portraits" was ready
for the Chautaquqa tent tour.
Nielson started writing the
music in January and had
finished the full score by May.
With subsequent orchestration,
the effort took six months.
Much of the music was
written by Nielson
independently from Bell.
Sequences separate
"It's really not detractive
because alt the musical
requeues arc separate irum
the drama," Nielson said.
Both Bell and Nielsen were
surprised at how well the play
went over on tour.
"It isn't a long show by
Howell standards, about two
and a half hours, but for
performing in a tent, we
thought the audience would be
restless," Bell said.
Rain wet stage
During parts of the tour,
the stage was wet from the rain
that leaked through the tent
and in Chadron it was 40
degrees one night while the
play was performed,
"You could see the actor's
breath "said Bell.
Both agreed that a reason
for the play's success was that
there was much for the
audience to relate to.
around Johanna, a farm girl,
whose plans to leave the tarruiy
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farm are set aside when her
mother dies.
Drifts apart
She . marries a man she
really doesn't love, Bell said,
and the relationship drifts
apart. Johanna becomes a
mother-figure for the men who
live on the farm her father,
brothers, son and nephews.
. Their problems reflect the
various desires of people who
both cherish and disdain the
land and its lifestyle, - .
In all, the play spans 76
years of a generational saga.
Bill said the play was not
difficult for him to write,
despite his background.
"I equate land as the only
thing of value worth having,
but it's a trap," he said.
Used contradiction
"There's something good
and something bad it and I
tried to get the contradiction
in the characters. Everyone in
the show curses the land as
well as loves it and many try to
escape it," he said.
Nielson added that land was
not the only trap -explored in
the play.
"It has to do with families
and marriage and human
relationships. As long as we
were able to keep sight of the
bad things, then the subject
was not about to become
hokcy, Nielson said.
Not a Nirvana
"I didn't treat the land as
some sort of earthly Nirvana,"
Bell said.
Bell said he has been
offered an option to have the
play open in New York in the
fall. Contract problems have
prevented a definite
commitment, and negotiations
are underway.
"It's still 'maybe, Nielson
said.
The staff of "Portraits"
includes Jerry Lewis, lighting
design and technical direction;
Nancy Myers, set desing; Jo
McGlone, costume design;
Daniel Stratman, production
stage manage, and Art Winter
and Phil Hammer, sound
Single admission tickets are
$3 and season memberships,
. which entitle the buyers to
four plays this summer, are
$10.
Tickets may be obtained by
call 472-2073 or going to the
box office, room 10S Temple
Building. Box office hours are
weekdays 1 to 5 p.m. through
iiiri 20 'and 1 to 8:30 p.m.
every day except Sundays June
23 through Sept. 6. ,
think of walking, think of
gentle on your
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"Portraits" composer Alan Nielson and playwright David Bell
rehearsals.
atth
Gangster
Review By Greg Lukow
Lepke and Capone are a
couple of primitive, garrish
gangster movies. Both look like
they were assembled by
morons.
Showing up as close
together as they do, they may
represent a kind of new low in
the genre's lifeline. They verify
the recent belief that all you
need to make a gangster movie
is the life story of some long
forgotten, famous or
not-so-famous hood and a good
period, set designer.
Dillinger, Lucky Luciano,
Dutch Schultz, Joey Gallo and
others were all exhumed and
now Al Capone and Louis
"Lepke" Buchalter join the '
immortalized.
New York syndicate
Lepke is a spastic story of
the not -so-famous Buchalter,
the former head of a New York
syndicate called Murder
Incorporated. The film races
through the traditional Little
Caesar syndrome as brash,
ambitious Lepke moves up in
the ranks, bumps off his old
boss and grabs a brief piece of
the big life before his eventual
(and inevitable) decline returns ,
him to ignobility.
The movie goes through a
lot of agonizing teasing around
as a build up to every avenging
gangland rub-out, so much so
that one becomes bitterly
uncomfortable as we await the
next one. . .
Unrealized character
his role of Lepke,. a
characterization that is not
feet
'A
a movEas
films dead end
only undeveloped but so
totally unrealized that it's just
a big hole in the screen.
One of the few interesting
aspects is Lepke's Al
Pacino-like wrangling of
. how-can-I-be-a-gangster-and-still-keep-in-touch-with-my-wife.
Unfortunately the movie
reduces it into terms of Lepke
saying "Call Bernice. . .tell her
I'll be late for dinner. . ." after
he has just been arrested for
the first time.
The film has a more
grotesque vitality to it than
does Capone including an
amusing in-joke provided by a
large scale shootout in a movie
theater showing, of course, old
gangster movies. The dialogue,
however, deals with a
vocabulary composed mostly
of words like wop, putz, dope,
kike and dago. The director,
somebody named Menahem
Golan, is a real camera nut who
plays around with focus racks
adnauseum.
More ambitious
Capone is more ambitious
than Lepke with producer
Roger Corman (The St.
Valentines Day Massacre) and
director 3teve Carver using a
labored, dissecting method of
exploring the Capone mystique
and his ambitious rise in the
gangster hierarchy.
Chicago czar
All we have- left is Ben
Gazzara's interesting
interpretation of the Chicago
czar, a self-centered, shoot
that works despite interference
from an over-abundance of
s
Footloose y Fancy
lowor level Douglas 3 Bldg.
Tl
relax in a dressing room between
Kleenex in his cheeks and
padding around his waist.
After the peaks of The
Godfather I and II and the
subsequent spate of
increasingly incompetent
follow-ups, I suspect that the
gangster genre, much like the
western during the past few
years, may be in for a period of
dormancy. The Godfather
examined America through the
eyes of the Mafia enterprise
while movies like Lepke and
Capone examine only the rise
and fall of over-inflated
individuals who we are fast
losing interest in.
Men mowed down
Ultimately, recalling these
two movies is only recalling an
endless string of namekss,
faceless men walking out of big
city nightclubs and shops and
being mowed down in bloody,
spasmodic slow motion
shootouts by other nameless,
faceless men sitting in cars
across the street. This rat tat
tat philosophy is purposeless
and the supposed excitement
Soon becomes dull and
numbing.
The same can be said for
the ends of both movies, with
Lepke accepting his fate in the
electric chair with, only a
subdued, ritualistic, curiosity
and Capone sitting alone in his
old age, Ids mind rotting away
with syphilis.
The irony becomes empty
anti-climax and leaves both
movies devoid of so much as a
"Mother of mercy!. . is this
the end of Rico!?"
tuesd, june 23, 1975
summer nebraskan
page 5
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