Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 13

Pittsburgh Post-tfazdtc FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1979 13 Siobhan Bringing Irish Works Here 0 Y.V Vf If WtfiL! Xil'fi The tree is still there. Now there is a fence around it to keep schoolboys from taking pieces." Does she have a favorite writer? "They are all my favorites my fathers and mothers and brothers. Synge and O'Casey are great favorites. Since we are keeping the program to Abbey people, we're leaving out Beckett and Joyce. There is the chance the audience may want me to do a little Joyce.

In which case, I will." No one does Molly Bloom's soliloquy better. Joyce did write to Lady Gregory, she reminded. Miss McKenna joined the Abbey Theater company in 1944 and recently did a group of Lady Gregory's plays in London. Asked about current Irish playwrights, she praised Brian Friel. "His play' Philadelphia, Here I Come' has been filmed, but someone absconded with the up-front money or something.

In any case, the picture hasn't been released. The whole incident sounds like another crazy Irish scandal." "A Meeting by the River" co-stars American character actor Sam Jaffe, the high lama in the original "Lost Horizon" and Simon Ward, the English actor who played the title role in "Young Winston." "Sam couldn't get to rehearsal yesterday because of the heavy snow in Knoxville. He's beautiful in the play." Isn't he a bit fragile at his advanced age, the actress was asked. "Yes and no," she said. "He was recently on a hijacked plane on his flight from Los Angeles and certainly survived it all right.

We are all working hard here in rehearsals." At that moment, the movers seemed to be moving in like storm troopers. didn't sleep in that bed," the actress said to one of them. "Could I borrow a It was time to ring off with the memory of her accent still fresh in the ear. By DONALD MILLER Post-Gazette Staff Writer what you bring to the Christopher Isherwood keeps saying to me so, of course, I don't get a word in edgewise." It was Siobhan McKenna, Ireland's greatest actress, talking from a motor inn in Knoxville, at the same time she was changing from one room to another. "There is snow here, but you can't open the windows.

Even though I am changing rooms, I can't open the windows in the new room either. Oh, did you hear that fall? One of the movers dropped something I think it was glass." Through the hubbub, the beautiful voice came through tired from a very late rehearsal of Isherwood's new play "A Meeting by the River," which will open in Knoxville soon. When Siobhan (pronounced Shi-VON) was asked why a tryout in Knoxville of all places, she said: "I am not geared to New York on opening night, but to opening night anywhere." There is no follow-up to an answer like that. Miss McKenna will be stepping out of rehearsals in Knoxville to perform "The Branchy Tree" tonight at 8 o'clock in Carnegie Music Hall. "The Branchy Tree" is dramatic readings from the great Irish writers who wrote plays for the Abbey Theater in Dublin.

"I'm going to perform, not read. I have just finished a film about Lady Gregory, who deserves credit for helping the Irish writers see the wisdom of performing in Ireland. Yeats wanted to start an Irish theater in London. She said, no, if you want an Irish theater you must do it in Ireland." Miss McKenna said the branchy tree of her title refers to the one at Coole Park, where Lady Gregory lived. "Yeats, A.E., O'Casey and others carved their names into it," she said.

1 -fp Vietnam and Clairton: two locations for the Oscar-nominated new film "The Deer Hunter." On left, Robert DeNiro and John Savage peer out from a Vietcong cage. Above, DeNiro strolls with Meryl Streep through steel-town streets while home on leave from the Army. The film opens today at the Warner. mi ymmwi'ntwiMtmwm9 a Steel-Town 'Deer Hunter' Intense, Harrowing Movie lives are drastically altered. But the film is not an antiwar statement like "Coming Home." It takes no position about the validity of that terrible conflict.

In fact, it is one of the most unswervingly objective films I have ever seen. Director Michael Cimino uses an almost documentary detachment throughout his film, a lack of point-of-view shared by his characters. Michael, Steven and Nick, three blue-collar workers from Clairton, go to fight in Vietnam with no discussion of the war's morality. When they experience the painful horror of conflict and the lingering wounds it leaves, they still react out of a sense of individual bond, rather than cosmic order. The film vividly portrays the origins of these motivations in the community life of Clairton.

(Clairton, by the way, is a composite community that represents the archetypal steel town. No scenes were shot in Clairton itself, although the director used locations from Duquesne, to Cleveland, Ohio.) We see the three principal characters at their last day at work in a steel mill, follow them to the neighborhood bar where they drink Rolling Rock in boisterous good spirits, join them at a Russian Orthodox wedding where the baby-faced Steven marries his hometown sweetheart. The noisy wedding reception and farewell party are capped off by a weekend hunting trip to the mountains, where Michael, the natural leader of his group of male friends, explains his belief that there is mystic value in killing a deer with one clean shot. This Hemingwayesque notion is given dramatic emphasis by liturgical music on the soundtrack. War intrudes abruptly, the sound of a helicopter over- (Continued on Page IS) By GEORGE ANDERSON Post-Gazette Dram Critic A magnificent buck, antlers reaching proudly to-ward the mountain sky, stands in the sights of a rifle.

A frantically frightened young soldier points a revolver containing one round at his temple while his captors stare with menacing expectation at his sobbing figure. A faceless soldier lifts a trap door in the ground, glances emotionlessly at a tangle of women and chil- Post-Gazette Review dren crowded desperately into the bole, and calmly tosses in a hand grenade. Two men wearing red bandannas sit across a small table, their fa' 'rained of feeling, as they play Russian roulette a room full of sweating, screaming men place beb uii which man will die with a bullet in his brain. Scenes of violence, awful to watch, varied in meaning but connected by their existential nature. This is the raw stuff of which "The Deer Hunter" is made and the source of its visceral power.

The movie, which opens today at the Warner Theater, Downtown, is one of the most harrowing and memorable movies of the year. For sheer brutal impact, there have been few films to equal it. The intensity of its war scenes, while occupying only a third of the film, is so extreme that many moviegoers may find them unbearable. Those who remain with the film through its consistently compelling three-hours may find themselves stunned by the end, filing out of the theater in sober silence. "The Deer Hunter" has been nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture, so it is bound to turn into a major film event of 1979.

Universal, its distributor, has carefully calculated its release to assure that this happens. It is being shown only twice daily on weekdays, three times on weekends, a slow play-off guaranteed to make it a talked-about film. This is a wise policy because the "The Deer Hunter" is something quite exceptional for today's escapist audiences. Shot partly on location in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio in the summer of 1977, the film concerns three steelworkers who go off to Vietnam, where their SIOBHAN MCKENNA Beckett: Perpetual Pain With Occasional Laughter Urban Fans Reviving Folk Music, Dancing By BARRY PARIS Pott-Gazette Staff Writer In the ongoing era of disco, "Love Boat" and non-dairy coffee whitener, i people aren't very anxious to delve into I the subjects of human anguish, loneliness, life's meaninglessness, or the eternal despair of defining one's own identity. There's just no market for that sort of thing these days.

And why should there be? Our cup runneth over with yuk-yuk diversions and disposable income. Theater, and society in general, for that matter, has settled its collective posterior into an artistic armchair which for the most part reflects the affluence under which it thrives. Hence the dominant standard of pleasant mediocrity, occasionally relieved by cleverness here and there. Even so, there's no shortage of serious drama perse some of it perfectly sincere and decent. Some of it even psychological.

But at its best, the content is most often bounded by the restrictions of Realism and by a fairly cliched notion of "relevance" social or political. The greatest challenge to all this has come from a group of enlants tcrhbles whose joint output was dubbed by the magic capital-letter wand as Theater of the Absurd. Unofficial progenitor of the movement, though not much of an enfant, was Samuel Beckett. The Pittsburgh Public Theater is currently offering a workshop production consisting of three Beckett one-act plays "Krapp's Last Tape," "Act Without Words II" and "Come and Go" with two performances remaining, tomorrow at 2 p.m. (reserved for Senior Citizens of Allegheny County) and Monday at 7 p.m.

in the Public's Northside Allegheny Community Theater. Man's existence, endurance and self-definition, and his helplessness within the confining ravages of Time these are the issues that concern Beckett. One wicked measure of that Time is the fact that more than 20 years have somehow (Continued on Page 16) By MIKE KALINA Post-Gaietta Staff Writer The originators of folk music and dancing were rural Americans of yesterday. But those attempting to revive the art forms are the urban Americans of today. The resurgence in Interest in folk music and dancing is a surprising development in an era when discos are proliferating and rock music is gaining fans.

The revival is being sparked in the Pittsburgh area by two nonprofit organizations Calliope House and the Pittsburgh Folk Arts Cooperative. They frequently co-sponsor dances and concerts and Pitts-burghers have been receptive to their efforts, according to spokesmen for the groups. Tomorrow, the organizations will hold an old-fashioned, get-down square dance at the Pitt Student Union Ballroom. It starts at 8 p.m. and there will be not only authentic square dance music by a local group known as Swing on a Gate, but also Inside Stuff two special dance presentations.

An exhibition of Morris Team Dancing will be presented by members of the English Country Song and Dance Society and a clogging presentation will be given by the Mystery Country Cloggers. Ron Buchanan will be square-dance caller. On Sunday, Calliope House and the Cooperative will sponsor a concert at the Duquesne University Student Union Ballroom starting at 7:30 p.tn. Performers will be the Louisiana Aces, who specialize in Cajun and French-Canadian fiddle music; the Cork Lickers, six musicians who will perform old-time mountain music; and Margaret MacArthur, playing the dulcimer. Larry Edelman, a spokesman for the Cooperative, feels the interest in folk music and folk dancing is healthy.

And he isn't surprised at how interest in it has boomed in (Continued on Page 17) '-if w' '1 yt 14 14 Page Page Joe Browne's Our Towne Bernhard on 'Fishers' Ann Landers reads her mail Best Bets in entertainment Page 14 Page 14 'Planet Earth' in jeopardy on screen Page 16 Win Fanning meets Eddie Alexander Page 19 Bee Gees' new album reviewed Page 19 MORRIS BERMANPMt-Gazettt Dancers square off for tomorrow's square dance at Pitt..