STAGE REVIEW : VIENNESE CHARM AT MARK TAPER FORUM

“Who are you being unfaithful to, at the moment?” asks a character in an Arthur Schnitzler play--not the one that began the Mark Taper Forum’s spring repertory season Friday night, “Undiscovered Country.” But the insouciance gives you the tone of Schnitzler’s turn-of-the-century Viennese: wise to the ways of the world and the weakness of the flesh, and resolved to salvage at least a smile from the situation.

Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s “Das weite Land” (1911) makes the characters even wittier than they are in the original play, which is no fault and no surprise. It was a Stoppard character, after all (in his “Night and Day”), who claimed to be totally faithful to her husband, except, of course, in hotel rooms. The badinage here has something of that elan and the Taper audience enjoys it almost as if this were an Oscar Wilde comedy 15 years later.

But “Undiscovered Country” is not about cucumber sandwiches. What it is about is hard to locate exactly--which is one reason it’s a play worth the Taper’s attention. The word undiscovered puts it well. What is the trouble here? Not only are Schnitzler’s people prosperous, they seem to enjoy a highly practical code of morality, similar to Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s ethic of doing whatever you please as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses. Being so “wise,” why are they so unhappy?

Here is Schnitzler’s major theme: the ache of the comfortable for. . . something else. His heroine, Genia (Christina Pickles), wants to have her young son back from England. But basically she wants to have herself back, an identity lost somewhere between an unconsummated love affair with a young suitor and a consummated one with another. She has had to pay in self-respect for both decisions. Pickles shows the cost with an indrawn breath, a turned back. In Vienna nice women don’t make scenes.

Her husband, Friedrich (Granville Van Dusen), is a truly occluded man, enormously adept socially, yet a stranger to himself. What attracts people to Friedrich--especially women--is his air of being both off-handed and vital, a man who makes life seem a terrifically amusing game.

But Friedrich’s friends have a way of ending up either dead or damaged. There are hours when he feels dead himself, although the boyish charm continues. What he seems to want--Schnitzler declines to spell it out--is some kind of showdown with Fate. Perhaps that’s why he’s trying so hard to bring down his marriage. But, again, marriage involves a second party.

Totaling up all the damage at the end of the play, one is reminded more of Greek tragedy than Wildean farce. As in the old fables, something is hounding Friedrich that he can’t name. There will be no rest until he faces himself in the dark mirror--with, again, someone else paying the cost.

“Undiscovered Country” is far more successful than, say, O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” in seeing the Furies in what the Freudians were to call the unconscious. One reason is that Schnitzler refuses to inflate his language. The actor playing Friedrich has to keep his tone debonair, while showing a soul in deep distress. Van Dusen is only at the beginning of putting these opposites together. (It’s a part for an Olivier, or a John Wood, who played the role with the National Theatre of Great Britain in 1979.)

But the proportions are right and Van Dusen projects an American innocence that does suggest the famous charm of the Viennese, who are present in this play in abundance--Mammas with girls to marry off, poets who laugh at everything, headwaiters, hotel clerks, lovers with their own problems.

It’s good to see a big cast at the Taper for a change, and Ken Ruta’s players, if they don’t quite suggest Vienna’s Burgtheater, do suggest a company--a body of actors acclimated to the world of the play and to each other.

Certain characterizations are in exceptionally sharp focus. Michael Keenan, for instance, as one of the many husbands cuckolded by Friedrich, starts off as a merely nasty little man, beneath the bonhomie. By the end of the play it’s clear that he can be a dangerous man as well. A link, perhaps, to the underside of Vienna that surfaces in “Measure for Measure.”

Jeanette Landis plays a fussy comedy mother, who is still susceptible to the flirting tone that marks all male-female conversations in Schnitzler’s world--not an innocent tone, although the words are kept innocent, to add spice to the encounter. (The same principle of pretended modesty that keeps the ladies in long skirts and high collars.) Landis virtually shivers when William Biff McGuire directs his attention to the brooch on her bosom, and it is more than the usual joke about the fat lady who thinks she’s still available.

Robert Yacko as the wife’s second young suitor--the first is in his grave by the time the play begins--falls into the same faintly leering tone. Though inexperienced (with nice women) he has done it all in his imagination, as has everyone in this play. D. H. Lawrence could have found no more fecund example of sex-in-the-head than Schnitzler’s Vienna, which we’re reminded in the Taper’s program notes was also Freud’s Vienna.

The production is beautifully dressed by Sam Kirkpatrick and stunningly designed by Ralph Funicello.