All Four One and Four for All

ADAPTING ANY POEM for a dramatic presentation is a tall order, let alone wading through the murky images and innuendoes of one by T. S. Eliot. Call it dramatic suicide, but Director and Harkness Scholar Andrew Sullivan keeps Eliot's entire text of Four Quartets intact while lucidly portraying the poet's struggle with calendar and metaphysical time.

The Quartets themselves are marked by personal associations with four places which range from the burnt English estate in "Burnt Norton" to a beacon off the Northeastern coast of Cape Ann, Mass. in "Dry Salvages."

Eliot wields these images as objective correlatives, ideally, to recreate through the atmosphere they convey, the exact progression of emotions that his own contemplation on time elicits.

Necessarily the poems are highly autobiographical, seen clearly in the poet's use of the first person. Sullivan taps into this by systematizing what he sees as the poet's four different voices for his dramatic interpretation.

His approach departs from the usual divisions of these poems by literary critics. One common way of looking at them has been according to the natural rhythms, like earth, water etc., that their images evoke.

The dynamics center around the three voices with which the poet contends while trying to objectify the metaphysical influences of the passage of time, defining the distortions of memory and desire.

Sullivan's first voice is the older Eliot, the author of these poems, sensitively played by Daniel Zelman. A younger Eliot, less cautions than his author, leads the second voice. Nicholas Lawrence does a wonderful job in this role. He picks up small subtleties in the text, confidently magnifying their meaning for theatrical effect.

The few laughs which seep through the dense prose belong to Lawrence. His timely perversion of rhythms point to Eliot's potential for levity even amidst the most serious and cyclical treaties on time past, future and present.

Naama Potok plays the third voice. Her stage presence peaks in a powerful but serene moment of prayer for sailors on the sea in "Dry Salvages." In the program, Sullivan attributes this voice (presumably because of its rhythmic continuity) to the mature inner voice of the poet's mother.

As the fourth voice (a "recurrent scream of disorder," writes Sullivan), Katharine Andrews does very little to endow her part with the quirky originality in tone and movement with which the other performances spoil us.

Pains are taken in the staging to highlight the interdependency of these voices- to reiterate that they are not each a character, but part of one. They jump in on each other's lines, finishing thoughts and emphasizing the taunting echoes that crescendo in Eliot's memory. Overdone, though, are the long, pregnant glances directed at the voice of the poet, that must be taken by the three others before each exit.

Nowhere does the piece better convey Eliot's sinister vision of his own past than in "Burnt Norton." It initially describes Eliot's childhood memory of being caught in a forbidden garden. Sullivan here downplays an implied reference to the garden of Eden, favoring the psychological rather than the spiritual ramifications of the trespass.

Nearly as important as the poems themselves is the music by Oliver Messiaen. Written while a Nazi prisoner of war, Messiaen's "Quatuor pour lafin" is highly discordant and provocative. Sullivan alternates the poems' natural divisions with those in the music, imposing lengthy pauses, perhaps for speculation. The four musicians, Yoon-Sun Lee on piano, John Montgomery on clarinet, Alan Gilbert on violin and Ruth Maurice on cello are all first rate, contributing to a carefully crafted and entertaining production.