STAGE: 'IN CELEBRATION' BY DAVID STOREY OPENS By FRANK RICH
Published: November 9, 1984, Friday
'' WHAT do you do with this feeling of disfigurement?'' asks a son in David Storey's play, ''In Celebration.'' The disfigurement to which the young man refers is that which parents can inflict, however innocently, upon their children. The question may be an eternal one - as eternal as Ibsenesque family dramas like ''In Celebration'' - but it is not asked or answered rhetorically by Mr. Storey. Though it takes a while to get there, his play leaves us with bruising images of adult children gasping to escape the crippling psychological stranglehold of Mom and Dad.
Mr. Storey wrote ''In Celebration'' early in his career - after the novel and film ''This Sporting Life'' but before his plays ''The Changing Room'' and ''Home.'' The Manhattan Theater Club's production - at the company's new second home downstairs at City Center - has been staged by Lindsay Anderson, who directed both the 1969 London premiere of ''In Celebration'' at the Royal Court and the 1975 screen version starring Alan Bates. At the M.T.C., Mr. Anderson has assembled an assured cast, led with bristling authority by his frequent film collaborator, Malcolm McDowell. The actors can't quite camouflage Mr. Storey's prosaic and humorless exposition, which accounts for the sleepy first act, but they strike hard once the characters reach the tense, alcohol-fueled climax of their long day's journey into night.
''In Celebration'' recounts a 24- hour reunion that occurs when three sons return to their Yorkshire row house to celebrate their parents' 40th wedding anniversary. The pixieish father (Robert Symonds), a coal miner nearing retirement, and the striving mother (Pauline Flanagan) had raised their boys to achieve ''higher things.'' But, as we soon learn, the sons have escaped the proletariat for the professional class only to drift into terminal alienation.
Though the father takes pride in his menial work, his children regard their own loftier careers as ''at the best a pastime, at the worst a sort of souless stirring of the pot.'' The angriest son, Andrew (Mr. McDowell), has thrown away his university legal training to become a cynical dilettante in abstract painting. Steven (Frank Grimes) is a once-promising writer who has just abandoned seven years of blocked effort on a single book. Colin (John C. Vennema), an automobile-factory labor negotiator and nominally the family's success story, is really just an empty suit, passionlessly enacting the rituals of the good life.
To explain how the sons ended up as they did - and how the parents unwittingly sealed their doom in childhood - Mr. Storey inevitably has to expose the family's darkest secrets, some of them contrived. Like angry English dramatists of the previous generation, the author also inveighs heavily against the empty values enshrined by bourgeois respectability. In his later plays, Mr. Storey has achieved a more documentary form of realism, devoid of the kitchen-sink commonplaces that pockmark ''In Celebration.'' Even here, however, his writing, if not his dramaturgy, is pungently authentic.
The play becomes unsettling once the sons must decide what to do with their pent-up bitterness. If Andrew wants to get revenge on his parents, Steven would rather destroy himself than reopen old wounds. Colin, the peacemaker, chooses to repress the past entirely. Yet Mr. Storey seems to be saying that none of these approaches is satisfactory. ''In Celebration'' ends with a Chekhovian vision of a family forever locked into the changeless cycle of its sad history.
In his staging, Mr. Anderson emphasizes the isolation of the characters. As the sons and parents circle each other in supposed celebration, they seem trapped in solitary cells of existence; there's little rapport or physical contact. Fittingly, the living room they inhabit is also a cell: As designed by John Lee Beatty and lighted by Dennis Parichy, it is a bleached-out, anonymous place suggesting the nothingness of the Northern England landscape outside.
The cast usually finds sharp details that enliven the writing's bleak palette. Mr. Grimes' blocked writer has the consumptive pallor and burning anguish of O'Neill's Edmond Tyrone, and Mr. Symonds's wheezing, well- meaning father seems both heroic and pathetic as he somewhat fondly reminisces about his half-century of drudgery in a 13-inch-high crevice beneath the earth. As the catalytic Andrew, Mr. McDowell anxiously jiggles the coins in his pocket, delivers his lines with sarcastic venom and constantly seems about to gore the parents he blames for everything that's gone wrong.
Even so, when the moment of truth finally comes, Andrew can't quite bring himself to settle the old scores: He freezes instead of exploding. While many family plays end with cathartic confrontations, ''In Celebration'' achieves its distinct chill by dramatizing feelings that are well beyond a playwright's power to resolve.
Yorkshire Reunion IN CELEBRATION, by David Storey; directed by Lindsay Anderson; set design, John Lee Beatty; costume design, Linda Fisher; lighting design, Dennis Parichy; sound design, Stan Metelits; production stage manager, Peggy Peterson. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director; Barry Grove, managing director. At City Center Theater, 131 West 55th Street. Steven ShawFrank Grimes Mr. ShawRobert Symonds Mrs. BurnettMargaret Hilton Mrs. ShawPauline Flanagan Andrew ShawMalcolm McDowell Colin ShawJohn C. Vennema
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