[In the following essay, Brustein chronicles the themes of guilt and redemption in The Devil and Billy Markham and criticizes the play for lacking variation in both tone and verse.]

Lincoln Center Theater is currently engaged, upstairs and downstairs, with plays deriving from Jewish metaphysics, which is to say with devils, demons, and dybbuks. This represents more unity than we've yet seen from this normally eclectic (I hesitate to say expedient) institution. Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man at the Vivian Beaumont is 30 years old, while the two one-act pieces by David Mamet and Shel Silverstein, produced at the smaller Mitzi E. Newhouse under the collective title Oh, Hell, are brand new.

It's nice to find Lincoln Center Theater back at the ranch house after sorties around various Broadway corrals, and even nicer to be able to detect some consistent artistic direction following several early years of vagueness and improvisation. The emerging policy would seem to be American revivals in the larger theater and new American plays downstairs, which pretty much reflects the aesthetic preferences of artistic director Gregory Mosher. The schedule will no doubt vary to accommodate the odd South African offering, possibly some classics, an occasional new play from abroad—but no one minds a few departures once you make some effort at self-definition.

This policy will not satisfy New York's need for a repertory acting company, but it may help to distinguish the goals of Lincoln Center Theater from the aims of current Broadway producers. Its production of The Tenth Man, on the other hand, evokes the ghost of Broadway past in the spectral shape of Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky is an enigma. His tough-minded screenwriting—particularly movies like The Hospital and Network (and possibly even Altered States)—is far superior to his earlier writing for the theater, which was invariably squishy, portentous, domesticated midcult. Having grown to admire Chayefsky from his movies, I was hoping to like this revival of The Tenth Man a lot better than Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production, which gave me heartburn. Ulu Grosbard's is a stronger version on the whole, but it hasn't improved my dyspeptic condition. The Tenth Man remains an indigestible dose of mystical kitsch and boiled-cabbage kabbalism.

The play was originally written to amuse a suburban audience with ambiguous feelings toward its immigrant forebears—the kind of assimilated Jews that Philip Roth satirized in his early stories. The action takes place in a ramshackle synagogue in Mineola whose Orthodox worshipers are full of disdain for Reform Jews who “sit around like Episcopalians, listening to organ music.” Yet, perhaps in deference to these same Jews (who after all constituted his audience), the playwright has the congregation pray not in Hebrew but in English, put on “phylacteries” rather than t'fillin, and seek out “quorums” instead of minyans. Chayefsky's version of Yiddish humor is also dispensed in assimilationist translation, most of it based on the bewildering impact of bustling New York on cloistered innocents from the Old Country. There are jokes about cemetery plots, the decline of Orthodoxy, and ungrateful daughters-in-law, the most successful being an extended vaudeville shtick concerning two Jews who never before strayed from Mineola trying to find the right subway to Williamsburg and always ending up in New Jersey.

Instead of being practical and realistic, in other words, Chayefsky's Jews are simple, loveable, and filled with mystical awe—suitable qualities for their role as affectionate Dwarfs to the play's hapless Snow White. Here Snow White is called Evelyn, a disturbed girl spirited from an asylum by her grandfather, while the Wicked Stepmother is Current Scientific Error in the shape of rational Freudianism. To accommodate the playwright's preference for supernatural explanations of psychological afflictions, the main plot is a variant of Ansky's The Dybbuk without tears, with Evelyn's paranoid hallucinations interpreted as demonic possession (the dybbuk being a vengeful Kiev whore named Hannah).

When a young man enters, defeated, cynical, suicidal—an unbelieving analysand disillusioned with life and love—Evelyn offers to marry him. In his presence, the girl's distemper takes a somewhat different form. She thinks she's a de Mille movie star. Not surprisingly, he thinks she's psychotic. When he finds the marriage impractical, she concludes that he too is possessed of a dybbuk that will not allow him to feel. In the ceremony that follows, it is his demon that is exorcised, and capable now of love, he prepares to cure the girl with the strength of his passion.

“He still doesn't believe in God,” observes the exorcist, “he just wants to love. And when you think of it, gentlemen, is there any difference?” This is the way that problems of madness, suicide, and anomie were resolved in the theater of the late 1950s, no doubt along with coronaries, carcinomas, and the cold war. Presumably, the rite of exorcism was also a simpler matter 30 years ago, when demons were more benign. The possessed heroine of The Tenth Man is hardly obliged to vomit green slime or rotate her head 360 degrees. In Chayefsky's symphonic metaphysics, diabolism is largely an occasion for romantic scherzos with the orchestra playing variations on “All You Need Is Love.”

Grosbard's Chagall-like production manages to capture some of the schmaltz-herring flavor of the play with the help of seasoned acting by Joseph Wiseman, Jack Weston, Sidney Armus, Ron Rifkin, Alan Manson, and Bob Dishy. Dishy—doing a variant of his sour waiter in Cafe Crown—is particularly endearing as a socialist-atheist who hangs out at the schul because he has nothing better to do. His hooded eyes, bent back, and grim-set lips add a note of reality to an otherwise fanciful evening. Peter Friedman also sours the pot a little in the part of the young man (the first of Chayefsky's suicidal heroes), but there's no particular electricity flowing between him and Phoebe Cates, who stumbles over the uncontracted dialogue of Evelyn and the Slavic flourishes of her Kiev dybbuk. I liked Santo Loquasto's set, though, with its grimy windows and linoleum floor flecked with traces of old paint, and the new thrust configuration of the Beaumont is a fine solution to a once forbidding space.

Downstairs at the Mitzi E. Newhouse there's more about guilt and redemption in the form of Mamet's and Silverstein's short plays. Actually, it's more accurate to call Silverstein's The Devil and Billy Markham a musical-narrative monologue on the order of The Face on the Barroom Floor or Dangerous Dan McGrew; I suspect it reads a lot better than it plays. This is not the fault of the performer, Dennis Locorriere of the Doctor Hook group, who sings and speaks the piece with unflagging energy (he has the grating voice and matted hair of Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills). It's simply that the ear soon tires of dactylic quatrains and the unvaried adventures of the raunchy hero in hell.

Mamet's Bobby Gould in Hell is also concerned with a damaged stud doomed to the infernal regions. It is receiving a more elaborate production and has more substance as a play—but not much. Mamet's dramatic genius is beyond dispute, and his place in our theater is assured, but now that he's entering the mainstream, he should beware of losing his edge. Bobby Gould in Hell, like his movie Things Change, is a pièce rose, rather than a pièce noir like American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross; and I'm not so great a fan of his whimsy as I am of his scalpel-like incisions into the body politic. The eponymous hero of Bobby Gould in Hell bears the same name as the sleazy producer of Speed-the-Plow, but he's hardly the same character. Joe Montegna's Bobby Gould was a ruthless, fast-talking manipulator prepared to sacrifice friendship to expediency, and vulnerable only to sexual confidence games. Treat Williams's version of the character is oddly diffident and defensive, shy and puzzled in his bathrobe and pajamas, hardly a candidate for such remorseless diabolical attention.

This attention is provided by the Devil himself—assertively played by W. H. Macy as a humorless, impatient “Interrogator” in a red beard and long rubber boots. He'd been headed for a fishing trip but something “bad” called him down to Bobby's well-appointed apartment. Although the Devil wants him to confess to evil behavior (including a threat to put a toaster up his girlfriend's tush), Bobby will only admit to being “a straight-B sort of man.” Still, every time he tries to escape through the door of his own apartment, he is confronted with a blast of smoke and flames from the pyrotechnic department.

But what is Bobby guilty of? Perhaps he didn't call his uncle when he came down with the flu. When the girlfriend of toaster fame materializes, wearing a pink wrapper, sucking a lollipop, and wielding a TV remote control, we learn that Bobby “screwed me and he told me he was going to call up, and he never called up.” Not much of consequence there either. The Devil is ready to give up and sign his release. “Why do we sin?” he asks, and Bobby answers, “I think we're lonely—I think we want God to notice us.” Finally, Bobby learns the true reason for his damnation. He always acted as if whatever he did was good. The Devil concludes, “You are a bad man. You were cruel without being interesting.” Having confessed his sin and said he was sorry, Bobby is allowed to go home, while the Devil says, “And the rest of you folks—catch you later.”

The confrontation between Bobby and the Devil is similar to that between Peer Gynt and the Button Moulder. Both men are remorseful mediocrities, guilty of half-and-halfness, of failing to be either a great saint or a great sinner. But Bobby is a much less interesting figure than Peer, and Mamet is a much more forceful writer when dealing with extremes of human behavior (as he demonstrates most powerfully in Some Freaks, a series of essays filled with complicated probes into himself and his contemporaries). Bobby Gould in Hell has some value as a jeu d'esprit. But in this play, our most gifted playwright seems to be doing practice jumps on the board before his next plunge into the dark turbulent waters of American life.