New York Times
April 4, 1982
Stage View:
A Knot of Mysteries, Tellingly Unsnarled
By WALTER KERR
I suppose everyone, in his fantasy life at least, enjoys playing detective, and the deep pleasures of playing detective are what make Percy Granger's ''Eminent Domain'' such a fascinating experience in the theater. Let me say quickly that the new piece at Circle in the Square is a somewhat flawed - it might be better to say somewhat incomplete - play, and then let me add that I have seen technically flawless plays that weren't half so interesting.
In one sense, it's about a detective. A literary detective who's barely out of graduate school. This brilliant young comer, played with all the right shades of ambiguity by John Vickery, has graduated summa from Harvard, attracted further attention as a Rhodes Scholar, and actually acquired both an agent and a publisher for the dissertation he's doing on a skyrocketing new poet named Willard Bradford, age 24.
Because virtually nothing is known about his subject's home life, Mr. Vickery has come to a small university town in the Midwest looking for information. There the poet's father, a jaunty and candid and going-to-seed Philip Bosco, is a respected academic who hopes to flee the ''basset hounds'' he's been teaching for some 25 years and spend his twilight years pontificating at Brandeis. The poet's mother, Betty Miller in her very finest form, at first sight seems merely Mr. Bosco's maid-of-all-typing, silent and efficient and asking nothing for herself. As the evening's box of secrets is gradually pried open, Miss Miller occasionally breaks her silence, dangerously. When she speaks she speaks deferentially, but with the easy directness of a knife-blade unobtrusively slipped between ribs.
Though the eager young sleuth is greeted with a formalized hospitality - wouldn't he like a drink from the secret supply Mr. Bosco keeps hidden behind the Transcendentalists on his bookshelf?, wouldn't he like to stay overnight on a cot in the messy study? - he is baffled by the contrariness of his hosts. He would like to discuss their son, ''the freshest new voice in 20 years.'' Mr. Bosco seems not to have read a word his only child has written; certainly he doesn't recognize an image from one of the poems that may apply to himself, an image about life ''slipping out from under him like a pair of old stilts.'' The biographer has come hoping to learn - among other things - the present whereabouts of the poet, whom he has never succeeded in meeting. Before he can get the question out, the father is asking ''Do you know where he is?''
Sudden shafts of blunt talk, of unexpected honesty, cut through the genial ramblings of the graying teacher in the musty bathrobe and the shuffling bedroom slippers. At one moment Mr. Bosco is muttering about the incontrovertible fact that the paperwork on his desk is as multi-leveled as the ruins of ancient Troy (exasperated with himself, he exclaims ''I'm too incompetent to be old!''). At the next moment he's volunteering what seems a straightforward appraisal of his absent son: ''He was a brat genius who kept the genius hidden until he left.'' On the night he left, at the age of 16, he seems to have appropriated $500 of his mother's savings, then paused long enough to rearrange - misarrange every book in his father's library.
Between the casual jokes and the furtive tippling and the philosophical perceptions (''We're only footnotes,'' the professor observes without rancor), it becomes clear that the boy felt nothing but contempt for father and mother both. Or that the two of them thought he did. A couple of tantalizing, red-letter questions have now got to be answered before anything subtler can be tackled. Are the parents lying defensively, are they frauds? Or was the artist as a young man a monster?
As the visiting scholar carefully overhears Mr. Bosco's rage at having ''led a half-life with a half-wife,'' as he dares invade Miss Miller's solitary confinement, he does begin to unearth portions of the past. Miss Miller was a gifted painter, though she will only acknowledge the fact if she can mock her own answer: ''I painted because it didn't involve lifting anything heavy - or dealing with people.'' She gave it up after the child was born, having become addicted to amphetamines, and then to alcohol, so seriously that her hands now shake uncontrollably. Or so she says.
But as this sort of probing is going on, those of us trying to unsnarl a knot of mysteries from out front are -thanks to dramatist Granger - working yet another vein. Our curiosity, our habit of snatching at clues, has temporarily focused on the detective himself. What of this very young, very ambitious scholar? We've caught him in little lies: he tells Mr. Bosco that Miss Miller said things she never said. We know. We were there. But more than that is brewing. This aspiring critic has virtually completed the dissertation that will become a book. He must hurry it along. If Willard Bradford should win a Pulitzer this year, the poet's work will be required reading in every school across the land come September. Mr. Vickery's own book should be ready to go on sale right beside it. A strain of greed infects the sunny, dedicated idealism of our summa cum laude. More troubling still, the information he is picking up tends to run counter to the thesis he's been developing in his manuscript. If he learns yet more, might it wipe out his work altogether - turning it wrong-headed, unpublishable?
Playwright Granger does not make us privy to the scholar's struggle with his conscience, if he has one. He simply shows us what he does. What he does is grab his manuscript, stash it safely away in his briefcase, and get out of there. Not, however, without running into the wary and observant Miss Miller, who understands well enough what he is doing and is prepared to challenge him. In self-defense the boy blurts out the cant phrase ''I'm going to tell the truth as I know it,'' and bolts.
The phrase is such an ordinary one that we are startled to hear how much implication can be packed into it. What Mr. Vickery has really said, in his hurry, is that he is running from the possibility of knowing more, that he wants to hear nothing that will contradict him, that he has decided to use what he knows not to be the truth. He hasn't necessarily faced up to any of these things; they simply run in his bloodstream, and playwright Granger has opened a vein to let us see.
Mr. Granger can also be very telling in rather quiet ways. A bit earlier Mr. Vickery has made Miss Miller a promise, ''You can rely on my discretion.'' And Miss Miller, looking him straight in the eye and smiling an enigmatic smile, has replied, ''I'm sure I can - but I'd rather not.'' Often, as we listen to the dramatist's impeccably characterized people, we do feel as though we were stripping away as many layers as ruined Troy ever boasted.
At this point we have by no means come to the end of our hunt for right answers, though I'm not going to detail any more of the narrative. If the vanished biographer has given up the chase for urgent reasons of his own, we remain intent on cracking open the ultimate, most disturbing posers. What was it, precisely, that destroyed the relationship between Mr. Bosco and Miss Miller, and what can possibly keep them from washing their worn hands of each other now?
We never do learn precisely. And Mr. Granger has paved his way for what may be a wishful-thinking kind of ending with a bit of comic extravagance that seems out of key with the tart, knowing scenes preceding it. There are times, too, when we feel with alarm that the playwright has suppressed his truths for too long, stretched his tensions too far. We worry that those invisible cables that hold a play in the air like a suspension bridge are going to fray and unravel before we've made it to the other side, the side where the characters secretly live.
But there is talent aplenty here to keep that from happening, and if we don't always get absolute answers we do get boldly provocative hints. The language is angry and honest and funny, the insight into people is sometimes close to scary, and the performances that Paul Austin has directed are uniformly perfect. Even the smaller roles - Scott Burkholder as a devious freshman with a guilty grin, Paul Collins as a teacher who's lost both his tenure and his temper - are meticulously managed, and Mr. Bosco and Miss Miller are top-flight.
In an insert that comes with Circle in the Square's Playbill, Mr. Granger is quoted as wondering how long he'll be considered a ''young writer.'' I'd say that he can stay young for about three weeks and after that just call himself a writer.