New York Times
March 29, 1982
Stage: Granger's 'Eminent Domain'
By FRANK RICH
Percy Granger's ''Eminent Domain,'' at the Circle in the Square, proves at least one thing - that its exemplary star, Philip Bosco, is ready and able to play a terrific George in ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' In a sense, he already is. Mr. Granger's protagonist, like Edward Albee's, is a middle-aged college professor with a stalled career, a fractured marriage and a mysteriously absent son. Mr. Bosco's performance - cresting steadily from tweedy wooliness to lacerating wit to bourbon-fueled rage -is an expert tour through a consciousness that's only one tiny, last-ditch step ahead of final defeat.
Good as the actor is, however, he's left at sea by Mr. Granger, who fails to give his hero a dramatic context. If we believe in Holmes Bradford, as Mr. Bosco's professor is named, we don't believe in the other characters and ghosts who batter him from every side at the Middle Western ''cow college'' where ''Eminent Domain'' is set. Mr. Granger can write with intelligence and feeling, as he proved in his one-act ''Vivien'' at Lincoln Center last season, but, Holmes aside, his work here lacks texture, depth and shape, if not wit.
The author's ambitions are high. Though the play's moribund academic milieu recalls both ''Virginia Woolf'' and ''Butley,'' Mr. Granger has attempted to weave an O'Neill family drama. Holmes's wife, Katie (Betty Miller), is nothing if not a Mary Tyrone; once a promising artist, she lost her career after a doctor hooked her on amphetamines. And, though Katie's bout with drugs and booze is over when the play opens, her marriage to Holmes is nonetheless a dead issue. It ended eight years earlier, when the Bradfords' son, Wendell, ran away from home at age 16, never to return.
Wendell, it turns out, is now a famous poet and Thomas Pynchonlike recluse on the verge of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Granger's plot is about what happens when an ambitious young Harvard scholar, Victor Salt (John Vickery), invades the Bradfords' home to interview Holmes and Katie about their son's formative years. Victor has written a dissertation about Wendell, and he needs to add biographical ''spice'' to sell his thesis to a commercial publisher. Inevitably, his attempts to appropriate the Bradfords' private past for public consumption - by eminent domain, as it were - force Holmes and Katie to face the long-buried truths about their relationships with each other and their runaway son.
Unfortunately, it takes Mr. Granger 90 minutes of repetitive exposition in Act I to reach his half-hour of thunder in Act II. Once we live through the long day's journey to get to the drunken night of revelations, the wait doesn't seem worth it. Wendell, we finally learn, was ''brilliant like a diamond'' but devoid of ''human feeling''; Holmes speeded his son's departure by neglecting him to write a tome on American poetry. Yet we don't get a specific sense of the unseen Wendell's personality, and we never believe that the son and his parents ever shared the same household. Nor do either Mr. Granger or Miss Miller successfully penetrate Katie's alternately catatonic and self-pitying facade to reveal the true pain of her wounds.
The visiting scholar, meanwhile, presents severe credibility problems. It doesn't wash that Victor would cheapen a scholarly work with People-magazine gossip to make a buck, or that Holmes would allow this total stranger to camp out in his study over his wife's protests. And while Victor also seems a figurative stand-in for the Bradfords' son, he's no more fully characterized than Wendell is. A humorless, caricatured opportunist, he remains but a playwright's device and defies Mr. Vickery's concerted attempts to humanize him.
There are other contrivances, too. Much is made of a junior faculty member (Paul Collins) who crosses Holmes - but he remains only a symbolic reincarnation of what the hero must have been like in his early, more rebellious teaching days. When the young Turk leads his students in demonstrations, we're asked to believe that Holmes would respond by suddenly abandoning his fuddy-duddy ways to play tennis nude in the snow. This cathartic act of liberation in turn leads to an equally farfetched reconciliation between Holmes and Katie -a jarringly unearned happy ending.
Paul Austin's graceful staging licks the Circle in the Square's problematic geography, as does Michael Miller's household set. The most dramatic scene is an extraneous one, in which Holmes confronts a callow freshman (well done by Scott Burkholder). The best moments mainly belong to Mr. Bosco. While the star is the perfect incarnation of an embittered, wintry academic, he also shows us the springier, idealistic Holmes in a lovely speech of reminiscence about teaching battle-bound students during World War II. ''It's the minor triumphs that keep us going,'' he says at one point, and although Mr. Bosco's minor triumphs don't exactly keep Mr. Granger's static play going, they're to be applauded all the same.
Winter in Academe
EMINENT DOMAIN, by Percy Granger; directed by Paul Austin; scenery by Michael Miller; costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser; lighting by Lowell Achziger.
Presented by the Circle in the Square, Theodore Mann, artistic director, and Paul Libin, managing director. At 50th Street, west of Broadway.
| Holmes Bradford | Philip Bosco |
| Katie Bradford | Betty Miller |
| Victor Salt | John Vickery |
| Stoddard Oates | Scott Burkholder |
| James Ramsey | Paul Collins |