The Cafe La Mama is a downtown experimental theater club open to members and to membership, which serves uninteresting coffee and often serves interesting plays.  Six of those plays have recently been performed in Copenhagen and Paris by a troupe of five young actors.  The troupe is now presenting them - as "6 From La Mama" - at the Off Broadway Martinique in two bills of three plays each.

The first bill, which opened last night (and which I saw at its last preview) begins with "Thanks You, Miss Victoria" a monologue by William Hoffman.  A rich and sybaritic young man is forced to go to work for his stockbroker father.  On his first morning he amuses himself by telephoning in answer to a thinly disguised advertisement - in a girlie magazine - by a sadistic woman looking for a slave.

The supercilious youth makes the call as a gag after a telephone bet with a friend.  But in the course of the long conversation with the woman, of which we hear one side, he finds himself carried away into conviction, into discovery about himself.

As exegesis of a passage in Krafft-Ebing, the play shows some craft that does not ebb, but the transition from gaga to absorption is played with insufficient power by Michael Warren Powell.

"This is the Rill Speaking" is by Lanford Wilson, who recently had a double bill of one-act plays produced at the Theater East.  The present play is an album of souvenirs from a small-town boyhood - sketches of different families, adolescent encounters and escapades - with the author presumably as a character.

The material is clearly seen and tenderly recalled, but it is overly familiar - snippets of "Our Town" spiced with sexual candor.  A special difficulty, with autobiographical material of youth is that it often poises the perceptions of the author against the lesser perceptions of the other characters; he sees more about them than they saw in themselves and him.  But the author sometimes forgets that this experience is now put before an audience whose perceptions may at least equal his own.

In this multi-charactered play, each of the company has several roles, slipping from one into another and back again without costume or make-up change.  The ladies, Jacque Lynn, Colton and Marie Charba, play at the level of good acting students.  A tousle-haired youth named Victor LiPari supplies some nice bucolic flavor, and touches of authenticity come from Kevin O'Connor.

The major contribution here is by the director, Tom O'Horgan, who staged all the plays in both bills.  Mr. O'Horgan shows a fundamental directorial gift: the ability to see in a script the physical unfolding that will articulate its essences and rhythms.  He also has some understanding of acting and can evoke the best from his his players, whatever their respective abilities.  This play is limited by the limitations of its cast, and, additionally, there is in Mr. O'Horgan's work more evidence of talent growing than grown; but the talent is there.

The third play, "Birdbath" by Leonard Melfi, starts and continues for some time as a good exercise in realistic snobbery-pathos.  A Greenwich Village poet works in a cafeteria as a cashier.  A bus girl - timid, virginal, unbright - is attracted to him and innocently but romantically goes to his room with him.

He does not entice her; he doesn't begin to grow amorous until after he has had some drinks.  Their conversation makes acceptable comedy out of their differences in background and experience.  Then, suddenly, after she, too, has had some drinks, she delivers a sudden and staggering confession.

This shatters the little play, because nothing in her behavior or character has given us the slightest hint that she is capable of the act she admits.  At least, if she had done it, her subsequent behavior would have been much different, we feel.

The surprise seems the authors attempt to give his play a strong finish.  Fifty years ago, the artifice would have been merely some sort of mechanical plot twist; here it is a psychological revelation, but it is equally a theatrical twist.

As the young man, Kevin O'Connor is again authentic, with a relaxed and forceful stage presence.  One may say that Mr. O'Horgan, through the agency of Miss Charba, gives a reasonably effective performance as the girl.  Miss Charba seems to be doing adequately what she has been coached in, but a sense of personal force is missing.

The net of these three plays is some disappointment, not only because each play has shortcomings but because one expects work that is more adventurous in concept and method from the playwrights of an experimental theater.  Here the principal difference from a conventional bill of little-theater one-act plays is in some frank language and some sexual reference.  Even Mr. Hoffman's play is simply a "take" on a familiar shape of short play.

But (there is no point in being coy about this) I have already seen the second bill of three plays, which open tonight, and, in general, I found them more rewarding.  More about them tomorrow.
 

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