STAGE REVIEW : A Soviet Bureaucrat Makes ‘Connections’

At intermission, “A Man With Connections” seems dead in the water at the Matrix Theatre. Yes, Alexander Gelman’s play displays the new freedom of the Soviet theater to point to problems in the system. But its central situation feels canned. A Moscow bureaucrat’s wife berates him for being responsible for the industrial accident that crippled their son. Where can this play go but down?

Surprise: It’s got resources. If Gelman at first seems to be playing back Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” at a very slow speed, it eventually becomes clear that he has something more like Moliere in mind.

Moliere loves oversized zanies who surrender themselves so totally to some ruling appetite (for gold, say, or for strictly fresh virgins) that they become a function of it. Galen’s bureaucrat (Charles Hallahan) is one of these incorrigibles.

His thing is manipulation. By kissing up to his superiors and frowning down on his staff, he has leveraged himself into a good job, a nice apartment and a satisfactory wife--when she’s not drinking--played by Carolyn Seymour.

Now comes the biggest challenge of his career. His son’s accident has caused his wife to decide that he’s a terrible person. How can he get her back on the team?

It is not a virtue of Gelman’s script that the first half plays like soap opera--all recrimination and heavy silences. But once we see that Gelman’s real game is wittier than that, we start listening. Was ever woman in this humor re-won?

Almost. Our hero is a clever fellow. Charles Hallahan makes him a chunky, red-faced guy who would fit in on any building site. A real man, his workers would say of Hallahan’s bureaucrat--a man of instinct. And they would be right. The instinct to save his own neck.

Like Richard III, there’s nothing to which Hallahan’s character won’t stoop in order to conquer. As a Russian, he is particularly skilled at self-abasement. You’re right, he tearily tells his wife. I’m a fraud, a zero, an empty mask! But I’ll do anything to change! I’ll even quit my job!

By the way, he adds--I got promoted today.

Oh? This information brings an interesting new look into his wife’s eyes (actress Seymour shows us the look) and the conversation takes on a practical tone that wasn’t there before. These two have been married for a long time, and old arrangements die hard.

The next half hour or so of the play is about that, and it’s delicious. At the end, though, the play goes back to being “All My Sons.” And one has to admit that the curtain scene packs a punch, with our man of connections taking a shaming call from a character whom we had almost forgotten about.

Like his hero, Gelman can create an effective moment--all the more effective, here, for being so quiet. Whether the moment is organic is another question. Written just at the end of the Brezhnev era, “A Man With Connections” seems to have been written for all markets, both for playgoers who like their stories to have a moral and for playgoer who holds that morality is what we talk about after we pay the rent.

The script admits both readings, depending on where you catch it, and Kristoffer Siegel-Tabori’s staging respects its ambivalence--or, if you will, its shiftiness. The acting, however, is specific. Hallahan doesn’t give us some imaginary Russian, but this particular bloke, full of himself and also sick of himself. Meanwhile Seymour, in the far less grateful role of the wife, negotiates that character’s sodden silences and her squalls of violent emotion like an expert sailor.

Designers Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio put the play on the same plain-pipe-rack set used for the other show in Actors for Themselves’ current repertory series at the Matrix, Larry Shue’s “Wenceslas Square.” The pairing is not accidental. Shue gives the outsiders’ view of a society where the bureaucrats tell the people what to do, while Gelman gives an inside guess as to the human cost of being a bureaucrat. Too bad he takes so long to get to the point.

Plays Saturdays-Mondays at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. Closes Sept. 17. Tickets $12.50. 7657 Melrose Ave. (213) 852-1445.

‘A MAN WITH CONNECTIONS’

Alexander Gelman’s play, presented by Actors for Themselves at the Matrix Theatre. Translation Stephen Mulrine. Director Kristoffer Siegel-Tabori. Producer Joseph Stern. Sets and lighting Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. Costumes Dana Silver. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Casting Rosemary Welden. Managing director Darsie Marie. Associate artistic director Peggy Shannon. With Charles Hallahan, Carolyn Seymour, Joshua Stern.