Back Stage; 3/2/1990
by Michael Sommers

Phantasmagorical images - beautiful, fleeting, fragmentary - flicker about the decaying auditorium of the Victory Theatre on 42nd Street in "Crowbar," yet another visually exciting work by En Garde Arts. Seated either on the stage or extreme house left - the better to observe the haunting moments happening in the balconies, orchestra, boxes, and fly gallery - the audience is treated to an unusual and even memorable theatre event.

But mainstream customers, expecting to see an "At This Theatre" -type pageant about the Victory's 90-year history (built by Oscar Hammerstein I, run by David Belasco, home of "Abie's Irish Rose," later home of Minsky's Burlesque, etc.), will be disappointed and probably miffed with Mac Wellman's non-linear, impressionistic play. Others, more comfortable with Wellman's idea of drama, will appreciate "Crowbar" for its considerable verbal and visual imagery.

Wellman has created a collage of a script from stories in the New York newspapers at the time the theatre opened in 1900; and not just theatre stories, although Belasco and Hammerstein do appear in the intertwined tales. Wellman also takes obscure suicides and other one-paragraph fatalities and embroiders them, suggesting that the sundry ghosts live in the eternal twilight of the Victory.

And indeed they do in director Richard Caliban's striking use of the theatre, which is immeasurably supported by David Van Tieghem's impressive score, Eric Liljestrand's eerie and technically proficient sound design, and the artful shadows and gleamings of Brian Aldous's lighting. A ghostly chorus in gauzy white meanders about the house, while other spirits enact their individual horrors. A jazzy saxophonist (Reg E. Cathey) keeps popping up as a helpful, if anachronistic, interlocutor. Belasco (Yusef Bulos) addresses us upon the opening of his beautiful theatre. A madwoman (Elzbieta Czyzewska) ruminates upon heaven, hell, and Poland, and confides that the dead are stupid. One long-dead soul (Omar Shapli) escapes up the aisle to 42nd Street and rushes back, crying, "That's not the America I know!"

Atmosphere is everything here, and the substantial, strange charms of the production hold together the weaker links in Wellman's text. James Sanders' slide presentation about the Victory's history is nicely integrated into the show.

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