The Visit
Claire’s terms are simple: if you want my money, commit ritual murder. And though the Brachenites express horror at her offer, they start buying that pricey booze and those colorful clodhoppers at Anton’s shop–on credit, of course. As their debt soars, Anton’s fate becomes inevitable. The real target of Claire’s vengeance, however, isn’t Anton but Brachen itself: he will die, but the town will have to live with its atrocity.
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The late Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt came up with that brilliantly macabre premise, which makes The Visit a perfect offering for the Halloween season, in his 1956 “tragic comedy” Der Besuch der alten Dame (“The Visit of the Old Lady”). Generally seen in America in Maurice Valency’s translation (introduced on Broadway in 1958 by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne under the direction of up-and-coming Brit Peter Brook and first seen in Chicago in 1960, when the Lunts brought it to the Blackstone), The Visit is pretty cynical stuff for a musical. Its heroine is a vengeful monster, its hero a weakling, its supporting characters easily corrupted fools. Oklahoma! this ain’t.
Such lightening of the material makes The Visit a more comfortable theatrical experience than Durrenmatt ever wanted this disturbing black comedy to be. Worse, it’s unconvincing: having Anton declare his love for Claire as he faces death is strained to say the least. It lessens the horror of Anton’s fate, contradicting Durrenmatt’s view of humanity as “existentially menaced by the worst possible turn of events”–a chillingly fascinating perspective as we contemplate the threat of terrorists armed with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Rivera’s by no means the only star who could sell this show; it would make a wonderful showcase for Angela Lansbury (for whom it was originally intended), Eartha Kitt, or Bea Arthur, and it could probably have a life on the regional-theater circuit as a vehicle for local leading ladies of a certain age. But Rivera is one of a kind. When she sits alone onstage in her last solo, “Love and Love Alone,” singing the melancholy, Weill-like melody in her husky Marlene Dietrich-Lotte Lenya baritone, it’s almost a musical-theater apotheosis–a genuine moment of magic in this interesting but imperfect show.
