The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 123

pi 'l flWr 5Af A section i hum fiuiaueqjam 4inqmror entertainmentart Sunday, April 26, 1987 A play depicting an endangered species: WASPs His new TV series on PBS considers what makes the Constitution tick. -tin By Douglas J. Keating Inquirer Stall Writer Near the beginning of The Middle Ages, playwright A. R. Gurney stipulates the playing of the hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." When E.

Digby Baltzell read the play, mention of the venerable Protestant hymn brought to mind an image from his youth. "I can just see 400 kids in St. Paul's School, in that beautiful English chapel, singing that hymn," Baltzell said Perhaps Gurney, too, saw those youthful singers in his mind's eye while he was writing The Middle Ages, which opens Wednesday in a Philadelphia Drama Guild production at the Annenberg Center. Both he VP''' Js jQ I and Baltzell, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, attended the exclusive preparatory school in Concord, N.H., an educational congruence that reflects other similarities in their lives. Both the playwright and Baltzell come from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families, and each has made a career of writing about and criticizing that WASP background.

Gurney has written several plays about the social group (The Middle Ages is one; another, The Dining Room, was produced by the Drama Guild three years ago), A Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell a WASP like the author of "The Middle Ages." In a coming segment of "In Search of the Constitution," Moyers talks to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. his premiere broadcast, Moyers (left) talked to historians (from left) Forrest McDonald, Michael Kammen and Olive Taylor. BILL MOYERS IN CONTROL 0 and Baltzell has done three books.

In one of them, The Protestant Ethic (1964), he coined the acronym 'WASP, by which the group has since been popularly and somewhat pejoratively known. In their writings, both Gurney and Baltzell contend that the WASP has lost its sting. Once the caste of the country's movers and shakers, the class is nearly extinct, they say. Even though many individuals with a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background hold positions of importance and influence, Baltzell says, they no longer share a strong sense of community with others of like background, and the class as an identifying trait of individuals of achievement, civic responsibly and respectability is a thing of the past. "They built a great civilization; they built this country, but they aren't doing it now," Baltzell said of WASPs.

The action in The Middle Ages takes place in the trophy room of a club in a large Eastern city. At the beginning of the play, in the late 1940s, the club is a bastion of WASPdom, a place at which WASPs communed with one another and isolated themselves from those they regarded as the lower and less respectable classes. At the play's end, in the late 1970s, the club has admitted non-WASPs and has been bought by the play's principal character, Barney, a rebellious son of a traditional WASP father. Barney, who purchases the club with money he made -dealing in pornography, is not sure if he will raze the club or open the membership even wider. At any rate, he plans to marry his old girlfriend, who is divorcing Barney's brother and whose Jewish parents (See WASPS on 11-H) tionist," he was also the justice who wrote the majority opinion in Roe vs.

Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion. This was not, Blackmun points out, "the kind of opinion the cliche of a conservative is supposed to hold I'm not a great feminist, in the sense that some people are, but in many ways, it's simply undeniable that Iworaenl have been second-class citizens." Blackmun adds" that, given the conservative climate of the country today, Roe vs. Wade "could very well be overturned." Moyers spends this hour, titled "Jus-(Sce MOYERS on 13-H) with fancy graphics and celebrity testimonials. He opts instead simply to talk to knowledgeable experts about the Constitution, folks who have differing interpretations and opinions ideas we can bounce around in our own heads. Throughout, Moyers remains soft-spoken but acerbic, channeling the discussion in sly, subtle ways.

For example, Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun is the ''star" of today's episode on WHYY, the second in the series. The 78-year-old Blackmun is his own man. Typecast, as he notes, as "a conservative a strict construc benefit of the doubt. It's like watching Dad take that car apart: Maybe he really can figure it all out.

Moyers: In Search oj the Constitution, airing today at 4 p.m. on Channel 12, puts the Constitution back together for us. It hums along nicely it's the zippiest documentary series in recent memory. This is startling, given Moyers' subject a 200-year-old document, no matter how influential to our lives, would not seem the stuff of good television. Fortunately, Moyers has resisted the temptation to trick up the Constitution By Ken Tucker Inquirer TV Crilic With his crinkly eyes and warm, reedy voice, Bill Moyers is the dad we'd all like to have: smart but soothing, totally un-hip and totally comfortable with that fact.

But where your dad is interested in figuring out why his car shimmies when it's on the Schuylkill, Bill Moyers is interested in figuring out what makes America tick. So when Moyers decides to return to 'public television with a 10-part series about the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution well, you give him the An unsentimental focus on America iilSilsilsli wmmMmmmmm tant to one's appreciation of the image. What unifies the work of these 12 artists is an intense involvement with people in routine circumstances. With most of them, this involvement approaches an intimacy that obviously involves considerable trust on one side and affection on the other.

The subjects photographed are for the most part people we've met before, perhaps through the daily newspaper or weekly magazine a farm family on bath night, deliriously joyful high school seniors on graduation day, neighborhood kids on (See SOZANSKI on 16-H) paean to This Great Land of Ours. It's something less grandiose but also something better, an incisive and empathetic examination of random moments in the daily lives of ordinary people. The 12 photographers selected by curator Martha Chahroudi are in part social docu-mentarians, but they're also interested in refining photography's formal language to enhance perceptual acuity. That sounds a bit "arty," I suppose, but we aren't dealing with "art photography" here. Neither arc these photographs much concerned with specific locales; in most cases location, while contributory, isn't impor By Edward J.

Sozanski nuuircr Art Critic In this bicentennial year, one must expect the city's cultural institutions to put on appropriately patriotic faces. How else can one explain why the Philadelphia Museum of Art has served up an exhibition called "Twelve Photographers Look at US" as a bicentennial event? The cutesy title makes the exhibition sound like a week on the road with Charles Kuralt or William Least Heat Moon. Be forewarned, though; "Twelve Photographers," which runs through July 5, does not describe contemporary America in all its kaleidoscopic variety; it is not a 1 mrmmitim 1 minnniirii.a New jazz recordings that track the directions of the innovators who set the tone for the '70s Nick Nolte as Texas Ranger Jack Benteen in his new movie, "Extreme Prejudice." At the heart of the part To feel their road's roughness, Nolte patrolled with Texa Rangers. By Francis Davis Special to The Inquirer Conventional wisdom has it that, the 70s were a bleak time for jazz. With John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington dead, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in seclusion for much of the decade and Wynton Marsalis still a long way off, jazz lacked a readily identifiable figurehead.

Jazz nightclubs were closing their doors, jazz radio stations were switching formats and independent late 30s or early 40s, with wcll-estat lished stylistic traits. Henry Threadgill Sextet and New Air. Not to overlook the solos of alto saxophonist Threadgill and brassmcn Rasul Sadik and Frank Lacy, what are most exciting about the Henry Threadgill Sextet's You Know the Number (RCA Novus are Threadgill's band settings, which are Charles Mingus-like in their ratio of organization to spontaneity. Album of the year? It's too (See JAZZ on 17-H) Index jazz record labels were hurriedly selling their back catalogues and their once high ideals to the highest corporate bidders. With hindsight, however, it's possible to reinterpret this travail as an inevitable part of jazz's still evolving progress lrom a semi-popular to a full-scale art music.

At the very least, the 1970s should be remembered as the decade in which an impressive number of gifted young musicians embarked on careers, mindful of the odds against them. In addition to dramatizing jazz's resiliency, these musicians dramatized the music's baffling range their ranks included rock sympathizers as well as bop purists, circumspect modal impressionists as well as daredevil avant-gardists. Despite this diversity, it's possible to identify the widespread trends of the period. Collectivism, as represented by such groups as Air, the Revolutionary Ensemble and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, set the ideological tone of jazz lor much of the '70s. But toward the end of the decade, far-sighted composers such as Air's Henry Threadgill already were breaking ranks with the lcaderless co-ops to re-establish the composer as sovereign band helmsman.

The capsule record reviews that follow can be read as progress reports on some of these '70s newcomers, most of whom are now in their A rfh I ft ffl By Desmond Ryan Inquirer Movie Crific LOS ANGELES If you were a burglar specializing in luxury hotels, the 22d floor of the Sheraton Premier would not have been the place to be on a recent spring afternoon. The cavernous suite near the elevators seemed much too small for its occupants. Four very large Texas Rangers enough for a quorum if not a posse sat around drawling over their Cokes and occasionally peering out at the endless sprawl of the San Fernando Valley below. And these rangers were not alone. They loomed over Nick Nolte, who at 6 feet, 3 inches boasts the size and physique of an NFL linebacker and is hardly inconspicuous himself.

Next to Nolte's handmade cowboy boots was a redundant reminder of who the good guys were around here. An expensive lily-white Stetson had a place of honor on the coffee table. "I never owned a hat like that in my life $.370," said Joaquin Jackson. "Nick saw I got it after the movie was finished." The movie is Extreme Prejudice, a boisterous modern western from Walter Hill in which Nolte stars as Texas Ranger Jack Benteen. And if in speech, manner and movements Benteen bears an uncanny resemblance to Jackson, a 21-year Ranger veteran who patrols 400 square miles of rugged country deep in the heart of Texas, it's entirely intentional.

Like Robert De Niro, Nolte is an actor who is almost obsessive about research as a way of getting inside a character. He hung out for weeks with detectives in San Francisco for (See NOLTE on 4-H) To Maximilian Schell, lives sometimes seem like feature films. Last week, his 1984 documentary on the lije and film career of Marlene Dietrich opened in Philadelphia. Page 8-H. Last-minute changes by television stations update the TV Week supplement, Page 13-11.

Classical records 9-H Movie directory 2-H Country music 10-H Pop albums 5-H 6 Nolle with Maria Conchita Alonso in the film, a modern western. Tenor saxophonist Ricky Ford, whose latest work is "Looking Ahead." 18-H Going-om guide 6-H Radio today.