The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 91

THE SUN, BALTIMORE, SUNDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 18, 1970 Section PAGE 11 Vonnegut Punch Judy Show 50th Season At Theater Hopkins 0 VJ I s-, ry! moor School, Essex and Elba roads at 230 P.M. Saturday November 14 and at Pikesville Senior High School, Labyrinth road at 2.30 P.M. Sunday, November 15. Laurel And Hardy Films At Theater Sunday movies continue at Corner Theater, 891 Torth Howard street, with a 9 o'clock show consisting of the feature-length Laurel and Hardy film "Way Out West" plus three award winning Laurel and Hardy shows including the classic "The Piano." In addition Chapter 2 of the thrilling serial "The Last Frontier" starring Lon Cha-ney will be shown. Seating is general admission and tickets are $1.50.

Spotlighters Audition For Pecember Play The Spotlighters will hold auditions for their December play, "The Man Who Came To Dinner," by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman at 2 P.M., today and 8 P.M. Monday. People interested in backstage work are- also invited to attend. The play will be directed by Gary Gray.

Church Group Lists 'Bye Bye Birdie' "Bye. Bye Birdie" will be presented at 8.15 P.M. Friday, and Sunday in St. Matthew's Auditorium, Loch Raven boulevard and Wood-bourne avenue by the St. Matthew's Dramatic Society.

The principals are: Bob Grauer as Albert; Pat Gunn as Rosie; Marie Porpora as Mrs. Peterson; Charlie De Baufre as Conrad Birdie; Joyce Phelps as Kim McAfee; Dave Shannon as Mr. McAfee; Millie Serio as Mrs. McAfee; and Kit Bateman as Randolf. The musical director is Judy Shannon with production directed and choreographed by Joe Senatore.

Miller Play Begins Essex College Series "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller will open the Essex Community College Theater Series, at 8.30 P.M., Thrusday, October 29. The play, which will be presented Thursday, Friday and Saturday, October 29, 30, 31 is free. This play stars Louis Holtz-ner, Barbara Gaunt, and Eric Kolkhorst. Ed Savage, Shannon Earle, Mavor, Gayle Calhoun, Andy Persegh-in, Debbie Rhodes, and Donald Jordan complete the cast. John R.

Lyston is the director. 'Fantasticks' At Spotlighters "The Fantasticks" is being presented at 8.30 P.M., every Friday, Saturday and Sunday through November 1, at the Spotlighters Theater, 817 St. Paul street. The musical stars: Gilbert Blum, Mary Ellen Butler, Mi-, chael Davidson, Hayes Mowers, Eugene Moore, Edward Perry, Jim Eagan, Terry Gehr, Wolfe Kaminetz and George Norwell. Theater Hopkins, operating under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins University, will open its 50th season at 8.30 P.M.

Saturday with monologues and songs by British comedienne Joyce Grenfell. The program will be held in Shriver Hall on the Homewood campus. Other offerings for the season: "A Month in the Country" by Ivan Turgenev, November 13-15, 20-22, 27-29. "The Mandrake," by Nicco-lo (The Amos E. Taylor Memorial Production), Jaunary 8-10, Voices from the Black Theater, a program of the work of contemporary black playwrights, April 16-18, 23-25 30.

May 1-2. "Shakuntala" by Kalidasa, "the Shakespeare of India," June 11-13. Two bonus evenings for sub-by local March Program of ings of three manuscript plays scribers include: Staged readings of three manuscript palys by local playwrights, March Program of drama and poetry featuring excerpts from "Finnegan's Wake." All productions will be held in the Barn theater on the Homewood campus and are scheduled for 8.30 P.M. except "Shakuntala," which will be performed on the lawn at Evergreen House at 6.30 P.M. Four Performances Of 'Wonderland The Pickwick Players will open their 1970-1971 season of musicals for children with a production of Alice In Wonderland.

The show will tour the state and will be offered at four locations in the Baltimore area: the Community College of Baltimore auditorium next Sunday, at 2.30 P.M. and 4 P.M.; Slayton House in Village of Wilde Lake at Columbia, November 7 at 11 A.M., 1 P.M. and 3 P.M.; at Wood- Carline Lewis clowns with Alan Wendl in "Here Today," playing now through November 8 at Garland Theater. 'Cry Of Players' Listed tunities for strabismic byplay. And so he has to act whatever Is bizarre or fatuous or fat-headed about his man; He can't fall back and get cozy with a psyche gone crazy.

The last thing wrong: Vonnegut has done what 1 thought he never would do; he has not only let himself preach but he has let us catch him doing it. the doctor looks at the anti-lered walls and muses, "All this unending death." We don't need nudging like that not from Vonnegut, who's burned whole cities without batting an eyelash. Imaginative Mind But if the play has to cope with these burdens, it also brings to the theater something the theater desperately needs an imaginative mind which is not the same thing as an inventive one. An inventive mind makes things up anything, everything. An imaginative mind doesn't.

It looks around at the insane world we inhabit and reports as it is, tells us what is new; but it tells it in unmournful numbers that none of the rest of us would ever have used. We saw it before, we believe it now, but we'd never have said it that way. An imaginative mind makes the same contacts we do, but it never recites them in our terms. From the beginning of the evening hear a person, not a play wrighting computer, not a news bulletin on television, but a man whose neurons and dendrites click together differently from our own. Here is this half-wild man, this voice, this wind-from-theplanets voice, unexpectedly and impudently and familiarly and back-slappingly and despairingly speaking to us out of a one-of-a-kind head.

It's exhilarating at first, and then, when we see how much is wrong with the play. But we can't turn away from it just because it makes mistakes. There is no point in the evening when we are not in the presence of uniqueness. We may resist certain maneuvers, but we have got to surrender to a presence. Vonnegut's noises, his colors, are Punch By WALTER KERR the first thing he does is take him to a wake to see a corpse.

He is angered when his wife suggests that he is really beginning to train his son to kill him. But before the worst can happen, the devil gets him, the devil being intelligence in the form of his wife's last-minute education and her doctor-lover's quiet refusal to seek death before it decides to come. Thus the outline of the-play. It is overlaid, as is Vonnegut's habit, with other mythological caprices. But don't be fooled.

This is Punch, the puncher, and what awaits him is hell. There are at least three things wrong with the play, and one much more important that is right. The play is structurally ambivalent about death. A number of quite jolly interludes take place in a heaven composed of spotlights. There Wanda June, who was nothing to do with the play except that she has been killed by an ice cream truck, sings girlish songs in her pretty white frock.

In heaven everyone is content, happy really to be dead; even the hero's third wife has enough to drink to keep her drunk. But with death so omnipresent, so inevitable, and so the main line is undercut. Does it matter so much that the hero is a killer if his victims are cheerful enough to be out of it and if we are all going to be killed anyway by ice cream trucks? The hero's killing comes to seem a bit redundant; we can't become much exercised about him, or even interested in him, if he's only expediting what's bound to come willy-nilly. Trace Of Black Magic The thrust of the hero is-further dulled, made to seem not terribly dangerous, by the fact that the role is neither, as well-written nor as well played as the others. Every- one else on stage has inherited some trace of the special Vonnegut black magic, the evil eye that slowly winks at us to say that we are one and all as charming as we are mad.

Doctor Keith Charles reaches out in the middle of a conversation about a birthday 'cake to check the salesman's eyelids, possibly for traces of paranoia. Nazi Louis Ture.me, in heaven, is plotting a way to bottle revenge and sell it like 5 schnapps or Coca Cola. But Kevin McCarthy is too tied to his single literal function in the play-the obsolescent he-man obtusely reasserting himself-to throw off many of the manic glints of temperament that separate Vonnegut's damned fools from other men's ciphers. McCarthy is too square a performer, too straight forward a performer, to sniff out oppor- There are all kinds of sounds in the dark between the chopped-off scenes, some on earth, some in heaven, that are cavalierly, merrily, wantonly stitched together to make Kurt Vonnegut's first play, "Happy Birthday, Wan-da June." Aviary sounds, jungle sounds, carousel sounds and one I thought 1 identified but still can't swear to. Every so often I think I heard a quick crack! with a slapstick followed by the harsh, high squawk that has always signified that Punch, of Punch and Judy, is being swatted again.

Nothing is made of this. Nothing, that is, except the play, "Happy Birthday, Wands June" is a Punch and Judy show acted out by pretended people. In case you've forgotten the real content of any Punch and Judy show, it adds up, simply, to this: Punch kills everybody, one by one, until the devil gets him. And so, on the stage at the Theater De Lys, the hero, a Hemingway hunter who's been lost in the jungle for eight years, comes home to resume his boisterous bloodletting. The green felt walls of his unhomey apartment are already studded with past trophies, the heads of elephants and rhinos.

The doorbells, gifts of the real Hemingway, are animal voices-4iyena for the back door, lion for the front. The "hero" has had three earlier wives, at least two of whom he has robustly driven to death by drink. He is now ready to devour his current spouse, a former car-hop in a hamburger heaven who has been picking up college degrees in his absence. He is going to destroy her by wiping out her intelligence. Hell Awaits He snatches sabers off the walls to deal with his wife's recent suitors, a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a quiet physician.

And he is ready to finish off his son, too, by acquainting him with the look and the exhilaration of death: Petula Clark Disappointed Petula Clark has had her fill of American pictures, especially the ones in which she's starred. She holds the same opinion of VGoodbyeo Mr. Chips" as many She didn't like it. "We had a vision and a feeling about 'Chips' Miss Clark -says. "And it was a wonderful feeling when we started.

Gradually, though, we felt the concept changing as production went along and, by the. time the movie was released it wasn't at all what we had hoped for." sented at the 11 East North Avenue theater through Sunday, November 15. Performances have been scheduled for 8.30 P.M. on Tuesday through Saturday; 2 P.M. and 7.30 P.M.

on Sundays; and 2 P.M. on Wednesday, October 28. For additional information call the Center Stage box office, 685-5020. Peabody Bookshop Plans Film Festival Thf PghnrivRrnkshnn will present a film festivaFat 1 P.M. and 3 P.M.

Saturdays through December 19 in the Cathedral Room, over the shop, at 913 North Charles street. A second series, to begin in January, will present interna AMUSEMENTS AMUSEMENTS "A Cry of Players," with Rae Allen as Anne Hatheway and Peter Strauss as Will Shakespeare, opens at 8.30 P.M. Friday at Center Stage. The production has been directed by John Stix and features Peter Bailey Britton as Sir Thomas; Frederick Coffin as Berry and Gilbert; Carolan Daniels as Jenny; Bert Houle as Roche; Wil Love as San-dells; John Newton as Fulk; Dan Priest as Hodges; Henry Strozier as Kemp; Dan Tyra as Richards and Old John, and Sophie Wibaux as Arthur. Other in the cast are Sally Cotton, Barbara Frank, Douglas Jones, Robert R.

Reilly, Jonathan Slade and Sharon Kovens and Mandy Roll alternating in the role of Susanna, Shakespeare's daughter. Settings have been designed by Eldon Edler, with costumes by Jay Scott and lighting by Charles Vanderpool. Music for the production was composed by Richard Peaslee. sAfter Friday's opening, "A Cry of Players" will be pre- If ever this mad, mad, mad, mad world neeaenjit'tf tional features and shorts. AMUSEMENTS AMUSEMENTS VJOflu AMUSEMENTS and Judy noises and colors, abrupt, primary, murderous, childlike, funny in the sense of funny-I-thought-I'd die.

The play falters; I find the thwack and the quack irresistible. fNew York Time News SerrlcuT IT'S NOW! STANLEY KRAMER' Hairing SPENCER TRACY prasntl ahrEJnrlhifarrtfuirmaB MICKEY ROONEY DICK SHAWN PHIL SILVERS AMUSEMENTS "IT'S A HAD, 1.1 AD, HAD, itaririf In tfprnbttieil erdir MILTON BERLE sin mm STANLEY KRAMER prrsenis "IT'S A MAD, MAD, BUDDY HACKETT TERRY-THOMAS MAD WORLD ETHEL MERMAN JONATHAN WINTERS I MAD, MAD WORLD" 1 CMIltnnt to lUMhllrH tin EOIE ADAMS DOROTHY PflOVlNE PETER FALK- JIMMY DURANTE mine ERNEST (Oil TENTH SMASH YEAR Richard D. Byrd's THE DRUNKARD Tha Greatest of All Melodrama After 26 Year Run On Weit Coast Stye Jlapiiousiessth-tch 2:30, 5:30,8:30 1235430 WEDNESDAY THRU SATURDAY OCTOBER 21-24 it we md tcfttnpfiy fey produced dtfeclefl by iwntu in WILLIAM liK TANIA ROSE STANLEY KRAMER ULTRA PANAVISIONWECHIIICOLOB Rai.rl4 thru llnrtnH Artists Now! At a theatxe near you! (Imile North of Beltway Lutherville Exit 26 1252-52561 "A Riot" Gardner. Sun Oncma II 2:45.5.45. 8:45 CINEMA I CINEKA II fWCXXXt PIKES STRAND THE PLAYHOUSE Featuring Pee Kern's Owlilli linn CM' Mailt SI i Jean Harlow Loretta Young PLATINUM BLONDE Jolin Earrymore Carol Lombard TWENTIETH CENTURY 421 MIS the Kanmounr6650 "Penny Brleht" 3 7 2:30,5:30, 8:30 47o-66V5 "EmDhat cally Uinat I Gavin I SongS GENE WILDER, news Amer.

AMUSEMENTS Ma AMUSEMENTS Quackser ThAPPIIMESS IS A QUACKSER FORTUNtf 'Eerr rortunenasa It P.M." cousin in the Bronx DAILY AT (he No1, 1 ChtrlM 2:30, 4, 30, 7 30. 1o837-l3A 1949 1954: SUNDAY THRU WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 25-28 "'Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx' is a plot about man vs. progress with a twist. If it has been too long LIMITED ENGAGEMENT ACADEMY AWARD WINNER I THE KING KONG 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 since you've left a theatre with a smile on your face then I Four Cornert Carbaret Theatre Cocktails and Dinners Served NO. 6-0414 JorreHiville Pike and Paper Mill Rd.

Air Conditioned Jacksonville, Md. Broderick Crawford Joanne Dru suggest you see 'Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx' Northat Charles I837-I9S61 0 vwv and get a bonus because it has a gentle humor that makes you hanny all over." vy. aww Don Daily Record ALL THE KING'S MEN Humphrey Bogart Van Johnson Jose Ferrer THE CAINE MUTINY i TWO PART MOOUCTMN OF LEO TOLSTOY'S mwnu hum omwiiatkm imm- cxo miiaik iy umihmtu. a The World's Most Specfacufar li UMC PICTURES PRESENTS A SIDNEY GLAZIER PRODUCTION GENE WILDER Quacliser Fortune has a cousin in the Bronx THURSDAY THRU SUNDAY OCTOBER 29-NOVEMBER 1 LIVE! IN PERSON! JUST 3 MORE DAYS! rPARTI MTASHMNDANMCI THC BATTLE WAUSTUIITT Rita Hay worth Orson Welles STARTS OCT. 21st.

PARTE -KITUMMDPHnf. TWIUtWHCM MOSCOW" NAVViL PRODUCTIONS present 5 THE LADY THE ENTIRE PRODUCTION OF "WAR AND PEACE" WILL BE SHOWN IN TWO PARTS. EACH PART WILL BE SHOWN FOR ONE WEEK! TICWETS MAY IE WWCHAStO SEPARATELY rO IACM PAUT Burt Lancaster Montgomery Clif Deborah Kerr Frank Sinatra TOWER I CMAALCS Cf NTEft JFtMM CAU539-225J lor Group DiicounM CHILDREN AND STUDENTS WITH IDENTIFICATION $1 FROM HERE TO ETERNITY TKa North at Charles 1837-19561 2:30.4, 1950l1934: Sun. Night 7:00 P.M. PRICES Baltimore Civic $4.00 MONDAY THRU THURSDAY NOVEMBER 2-5 FUN SCORES Also, Mv KMng, Sib Croft BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN II Judy Holliday Broderick Crawford BORN YESTERDAY Clark Gable Claudette Colbert IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT AT CIVIC CENTER Tickets Also Available at Hochschild Kohn Stores and Other Ticketron Locations i of TUESDAY, NOV.

7:30 PM WEDNESDAY, NOV. 4 SOLD OUT! THURSDAY, NOV. PM FRIDAY, NOV. PM 8:00 PM '1954 Cc 1954: TICKET $4.25 $2.75 Junlon 16 and under $1.00 discount Tutsdoy, Thursday 7:30 P.M., Friday 4:15 P.M., Saturday 10:30 A.M.. GOOD TICKETS ON SALE AT BOX OFFICE SATURDAY, NOV.

AM 2:30 PM PM FRIDAY THRU TUESDAY NOVEMBER 6-10 AW on Sale wherever Colombia Record are told Ml JRED KEEMN SUNDAY, NOV. 12 PM PM FOR INFORMATION CALL (301) 752-8306 GROUP DISCOUNTS: Call Dottit Fleetwood (301) 377-5889 MACMURRAY OLSON WYNN It D.3!.3.Ii:s ISC a a A fll A ww Marlon Brando Mary Murphy THE WILD ONE Marlon Brando Eva Marie Saint ON THE WATERFRONT spr 'tiling pjaza R'IIwivEi in STAGECRAFT COURSE Learning By Doing Adults Teenagers Limited Class Of 15 Sponsored by Vagabond Players Workshop Series Theatre, U. of near The Lyric Learn Majjerraft with an experienced cene designer, DON BAILEY, of Columbia n'rsiir. aBr" Jill Uk PROGRAM STARTS HURRY! MAIL THIS COUPON TODAY! Make check or money order payable to Disney on Parade and mail with stamped, self addressed envelope to: Disney on Parade, Civic Center, Baltimore, Md. 21201 adult ticket! at aa.

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o-iu i XI 0 Rrei-lrr Now! VILlAGEReittwn Relitwji. Shp. Or. tn Varabond Players co Mrs. 1-j PUKVItl RTflS School Road 21234.

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