Entertaining, for It's Not Surefire

'Summertime' Shows Generation Gap, Lacks Form

By Emerson Batdorff Watching Summertree” at the Drury Theater of the Cleveland Play House. where it opened last night. is. like listening to modern music. slightly unrewarding.

It has scintillating places here and there but. like modern music. it is

purposely put together with no beginning. no middle and no end. While it always is perfectly clear what the play is about, it winds up back where it started, having said nothing that has not been said better before and without any climactic

occurance.

It's a protest in three

acts by Ron Cowen who wrote it when he was 22 (he's aged and is now 23) and it sets forth his view of the generation gap and the mess in Vietnam. It won the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award in New York and has had considerable critical acclaim.

You have to given Cowen credit for avoiding stereotypes about the generation gap. But he did not avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification that are a part of the stereotypes; hence his characters lack reality.

Yet he managed the enormous difficulties of shifting from a back yard to a battlefield to a college campus with never a hitch, using internal matter alone and not intruding on the audiince with overt stage setting.

plays.

His fights with his parents (his father doesn't want him to be a musician, his mother fears he is a homosexual, although I never figured out why) his love of his girlfriend, his playing with a small boy who obviously is at least part-time himself as a tot, all appear before our eyes too.

The words are often stilted. People don't talk like that even in deathbed flashbacks and the characters are written shallowly.

While the antiwar, antiestablishment message is obvious, the entertainment value too often is obscure. A play should not be a text or a sermon, or it should disguise it if it is.

In the larger sense it is unrewarding, except in terms of personal satisfac-

This is no small achievetion, to tell your story in a ment. way that is interesting only to people who already are on your side.

The whole works takes place on a stark set dominated by a huge tree in the young man's back yard. Here he is dying as the play opens, a victim of Vietnam and a war he didn't believe in. His life flashes before him as it often does in books and

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It's a mixed bag we have here. You can glory in "People count their lives in wins and losses," but you also get stuff like, "I want to say goodbye to the back yard."

In this entirely artificial situation most performers come through splendidly and the direction by Mario Siletti makes the most of the limited activity the talky script allows.

Gregory Abels bounds around properly as the young man, but he knows

but little about dying of a

gut wound, and neither does the author. Peter Ostrum is surprisingly good as the young boy.

The roles of the parents are curious ones for they are written in an oversimplified fashion (apparently this 22-year-old author didn't understand old age, say 44) and they are taken as well as they permit by Vivienne Stotter and Richard Oberlin.

The tree is a splendid visual creation of Marla Nedelman, who did the set, but unfortunately as a utilitarian rack to hang a swing on it sways and brings audi ence giggles.

What was most entertaining about the evening was that the play was not a surefire Broadway comedy, the likes of which has haunted the Play House far too long.

I saw "Summertree” at a preview. The audience was receptive, almost breathless. Although I was not quite as receptive and not breathless at all, I made

it through the evening without snarling.