LEGEND OF LOVERS, a play by Jean Anouilh, translated by Kitty Black,
Staged by George Mallonee; designed and lighted by Ed Wittstein; music
by Richard Chodosh; costumes coordinated by Joe Codori; revived by James
Thornton Hall and Andre Goulston; production stage manager, Geoffrey Brown.
At The Forty-first Street Theatre, 125 West Forty-first Street.

Father................................Ford Rainey
Orpheus...........................Ron Leibmen
Walter................................Mel Haynes
Cashier.................................Elida Brito
M. Henri........................William Larsen
The Girl..........................Marcie Hubert
Another Girl...................Francis Conroy
Manager...........................Russell Bailey
M. Dulag.........................Edward Asner
Eurydice..........................Freya Mintzer
Mother..........................Louise Larabee
Vincent..............................Dolph Sweet
Mathias.............................Jerome Ragni (sic)
Hotel Waiter...............William Bramiette
Clerk.................................Steven Shaw

In Jean Anouilh's "Legends of Lovers" the style is all.

The production that opened at the Forty-first Street Theatre last evening represents a second look at the bittersweet drama M. Anouilh wrote during World War II.  Another English version of it was performed here in 1951.

In a small theatre with young actors under the pensive direction of George Mallonee, "Legends of Lovers" is more attractive than it was eight years ago.  As the modern Orpheus and Eurydice, Ron Leibman and Freya Mintzer are enchanting - rhapsodic, starry-eyed, wistful and resigned in the succession of moods M. Anouilh describes in this fable.

When they meet in a railroad station and fall in love and escape by themselves to a shabby hotel room, it is the rest of the world that seems unreal.  For Mr. Leibman and Miss Mintzer turn their lovers' avowals into the center of the universe.  Everything that goes on around them seems mean and contrived.

In the Greek legend, Eurydice dies; Orpheus persuades death to restore her to him.  But death extracts one condition: Orpheus must never look at her.  M. Anouilh has restated the legend in terms of a romantic street musician and the soubrette of a provincial theatre troupe.

In form his play is like an improvisation.  The secondary characters, taken from the periphery of life, are amusingly sketched in sardonic pencil strokes.

The Greek legend suits M. Anouilh exactly, or at least the Anouilh of the desolate years of the German occupation.  He savors the sweet taste of love.  But he has no faith in it.  He sees the canker in the rose.  He admires, perhaps hr longs for, the ecstasies of love.  But he does not believe in their permanence.

The death wish hovers over the picture of young lovers.  Everything is delicate, impulsive and sensuous, and much of it is exquisitely humorous.  But it is doomed by the essential tragedy of life; and M. Anouilh seems to say, death is the solution to life that is pure.

As an expression of an elusive mood hovering somewhere between reality and another world, the production and the performance are admirable.  Ed Wittstein's transparent settings of the railroad and hotel partake of a general impression of impermanence; and the few strokes of music in the background remind us that we are participating in a legend.

In his direction Mr. Mallonee has extraordinary talent for moving secondary characters around the stage, isolating action in one spot, then picking it up again somewhere else in a different key, never losing the sense of dark sorcery.

In addition to Mr. Leibman and Miss Mintzer, the cast includes Ford Rainey, who gives a versatile and vastly enjoyable performance as Orpheus' father; Louise Larabee, who misses none of the satire in her characterization od a vulgar and voluptuous mother to Eurydice; William Bramlette as a cynical hotel waiter; William Larsen as an angel of death in a straw hat, and Elida Brito, who sits behind the cashiers desk like an enigmatic odalisque.

Given a strange, underwritten script about the falsity of life and the mercy of death, the actors, most of them from the Columbia players, could hardly play with more taste or sensitivity.  But one more thing has to be said: "Legend of Lovers" is so languorously pessimistic that as a piece of theatre it hovers between life and death.  As an exercise in writing and acting it is admirable.  But it has little substance.  It is like something three steps removed in time, space, and literature.
 

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