"Status Quo Vadis"
by Richard Coe

Novel in style, satiric in content, "Status Quo Vadis" is an amusingly different essay in theater.

Arena Stage's final production of the season blows in from Chicago, where a six week run turned into six months. Both the play and direction are by Donald Driver. Rarely does one find a work and its staging so much of a piece, the writer knowing so precisely what the director might accomplish, the director so aware of his writer's intentions. With the single exception of the central role, the players are from Chicago's Ivanhoe Theater company and last night's opening revealed them a wondrously assured ensemble.

The central figure is Horace, a factory worker inspired to move upward in society through his writing. A teacher sees to it that his poems are published and during the adventure Horace will learn some of the world's ways.

Driver's intention is to muse on how immobile our mobile society actually is. Using stock characterizations—hardhats, clergymen, a professor, veterans, organization types, a couple of secretaries, a bartender, executive climbers, a couple of parents—Driver finds episodes that question just how mobile our mobile society is. Though he observes exceptions, his conclusion is Not Very.

To a degree, his social welfare teacher is a modern American Major Barbara, dedicated to lifting up those on lower rungs than herself and speaking her mind on women's freedom when it comes to sexual conventions. This Irene is a nice embodiment of the New Woman, just as the lonely mother of our ambitious poet is a trim salute to the earthy intelligence of those who seem to have no intellect.

In short, Driver is tackling almost any subject that comes to mind when one thinks of an ordinary American city ruled by union regulations, the Old School Tie and the Establishment. He isn't really spitting on them, just taking fleeting note.

Such is made possible by author Driver's production design for director Driver. There are 17 characters. Steel-framed cubes, oblongs and rectangles serve as settings, moved into place by the players. Taking full note of uniforms, from coveralls to dark suits and clerical collars, costumes indicate status.

I lost count of the number of episodes and some take place, in different parts of the stage, simultaneously, a neat concept which, so well drilled is the company, works most amusingly. This kind of style stems directly from our filmic sophistication and the brevity of scenes is related to television drama. The appearance is fresh, though the gags, situations and comments could be called old friends.

While it seems strange not to see familiar faces on Arena's rectangle, the new ones are welcome indeed. Moving into the Horace part, Bruce Boxleitner has just the mixture of innocence, vulgarity, sensitivity and anger to quicken our interest in his ambitions.

Though it seems downright unjust to single out some of the 17 players, it would also be unjust to ignore some. Geraldine Kay, as the mother whose first impressions always are right until she sinks into her loneliness, is craftily funny indeed. Gail Strickland is every inch the spirited, liberal lady who takes up with the lower orders and both Rebecca Taylor and Lee Zara are grand as the office workers our for a spree. Jud Reilly makes a nice dry figure of the bartender working his way through school and, as a tiny stock figure a priest's housekeeper, Kathy Korla is a worthy successor to Una O'Conner.

Driver's entire cast is first-rate and we owe Chicago a thank you for discovering this funny, sometimes provocative mix of writing and staging.

The New York Times
April 14, 1972

"Theater: 'Status Quo Vadis' in Capital"
by Mel Gussow

America as a rigidly structured and stratified society is the subject of Donald Driver's comedy, "Status Quo Vadis," which opened last night at the Arena Stage after an extended seven-month engagement at Chicago's Ivanhoe Theater. As Driver sees it, this is a futile society where with pluck and luck you will succeed only in sinking to your own level.

Driver, who is the director as well as the author of this gentle spoof, specifically labels five class levels. The lowest, number five, is "the tenement set," as represented by a wino, his tough-talking wife and their son, Horace, the play's reverse Horatio Alger hero.

One rung up the socio-economic ladder are Horace's hard-hat factory mates, members of "the coverall set." Then come secretaries, followed by middle-rank executives, and finally in No. 1 post position, the bosses and their families, which include the heroine, Irene, a rich do-good schoolteacher.

The characters wear their numbers as badges on their costumes so that we are never in doubt about rank and station, even as they jockey for position. Horace shyly conceals his demeaning No. 5 from a "3" secretary, but proudly sports it as a defiant flag of machismo when he woos the "No. 1" teacher.

One of the points of the play — it makes so many points that one could use a scorecard instead of a program — is that just as Horace cannot be upwardly mobile, Irene cannot be downwardly mobile. Each is "imprisoned in his own skin" is Driver's basic but questionable thesis.

The author is interested in competitiveness (mostly sexual), pecking orders, and role-playing. The only way actually to subvert the system, he indicates, is through art. Horace, an apprentice holemaker, writes poetry, which, immediately gives him intellectual baggage.

In one of Driver's drier touches, Horace's mother accepts the poetry, even its salaciousness, once it has been published. "How can it be dirty if it's in a printed book?" she asks ingeniously, and fights those who would censor her son.

Driver is most observant when he is viewing status upside down, when dealing with the immorality of the educated classes and the snobbery of the lower classes. But there is a strong traditional line to the play. The work takes place in "Any Familiar City in the United States," and it is the familiarity of the landscape and of much of the humor that is self-defeating. Like its unlikely hero, the comedy sinks to its own level. The class finally is situation comedy, not satire.

As a writer Driver is more marked by cleverness than wit, but as a director he has a brisk sense of how to make the most of his comic resources.

The Arena's open stage is almost bare — like a gymnasium floor. It is planted with multipurpose modular units, which the actors casually convert from machines to staircases to furniture. The scenery is economical and so is the acting.

Everything is made to seem improvisational. Properties are kept to a minimum. The cast, guests of the Arena from Chicago, perform with a freshness and naturalness that keeps the evening pleasantly uninsistent. Especially ingratiating are the two leading players, Bruce Boxleitner as the poet Horace and the lovely Gail Strickland as the schoolteacher concerned about welfare.
 
 

The New York Times
February 19, 1973

"The Theater: Donald Driver's 'Status Quo Vadis' "
by Clive Barnes

Donald Driver, the author and director of "Status Quo Vadis," which opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theater last night, is much obsessed with class in American society. In this way he may be making a valid sociological point, but it does not necessarily leave him with a valid play.

His author's note reads: "Equality has become our inalienable right to be equal with the people below." The play itself, which originated in a small theater in Chicago, is on the same level of well-meaning, easy, flip cynicism.

For Mr. Driver, America is divided into five classes, and everyone wears his class badge on his clothing — even on his underwear. Also, Mr. Driver seems to think that class has very special sexual overtones, which to him seem to be more important than other ethnic or racial considerations. It is perhaps a tenable theory, but not one really maintained by his play.

It is an allegory of a Candide-like hero's making it in the big world. His name is Horace Elgin and he begins — in Class Five — as a high school dropout. He starts life with the hard-hats as an apprentice hole-maker, being told that "with enough experience you can become a top hole-maker here."

A bar encounter leads him to a liaison with a secretary (Class Three) and, through a rich, oddly aristocratic bartender, the opportunity to go back to the school. There he has an affair with his teacher (very definitely Class One — it's all over her bra) who enables him to publish his erotic and explicit poetry.

Even though the second act is stronger than the first, the story is of comparatively little interest. Mr. Driver is depending much more on his premise of a class bound society and the humor he can derive from that. To an extent — although the premise there was different — it bears some resemblance in its emblematic simplicity to Elaine May's "Adaptation" of a few seasons back. But Miss May's touch was light; Mr. Driver's is very heavy.

Staged by Edward Burbridge in a yellow wooden and cavernous permanent setting, full of doors, the effect is something of a modern morality play. It makes its points in squibs and anecdotes, some quite funny, some quite pointless. The relationship between Horace and Irene, his teacher, is very nicely done and beautifully written, but the scenes concerning a Roman Catholic priest and an Episcopalian priest are too obvious and too easy.

Mr. Driver has, in the past, perhaps been better known as a director than as a writer, and here a great deal of the humor comes from the direction, which is very good indeed, rather than the writing. The writing is a little flat. A complaint, for example: "What is the matter with men nowadays, when the girls have to do all the flirting," or a specious suggestion to the effect that "the cathedrals are rapidly being replaced by the Hilton chain."

Such remarks, and they seem typical, are less than ebullient. Yet it is amazing how much humor Mr. Driver can extract from his own script. He is much helped by an agreeably talented cast.

First and foremost there is Gail Strickland as the schoolteacher who knows all the answers and does not even question apples. She is a beautiful girl, in a tawny, languid way, and has stage presence. But Bruce Boxleitner as the All-American boy hopefully upwardly mobile was also attractive and talented, Ted Danson made a convincingly successful bartender and Geraldine Kay charmed as a mother who could not believe her son's poetry was dirty because it had actually been printed.

"Status Quo Vadis" — the emblematic title is typical of an overly emblematic play — does have its laughs and does have its points. Yet there is a certain indecision in its style, a certain obviousness in its narrative writing, that eventually tell against an evening of cute, mild, and simple humors.
 
 
 

Variety
February 21, 1973

"Status Quo Vadis"
by Hobe

After long preliminary runs at the Ivanhoe Theatre, Chicago, and the Arena Stage, Washington, "Status Quo Vadis" has arrived on Broadway as a moderately amusing comedy of social comment. It opened Sunday night (18) at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

Donald Driver, who adapted the book of "Your Own Thing" from "Twelfth Night" and staged the off-Broadway musical hit of five seasons ago, is the author-director of this new play about the rigid stratification of the social-business world. Individuals may cross the caste barriers temporarily, the show asserts, but have little chance of permanently improving their status.

As the playwright says in a program note, "Equality has become our inalienable right to be equal with the people above so we need not be equal with the people below." The story is located in an American city of today and involves a young, virile factory worker whose poetic aspirations don't prevent him from having simultaneous affairs with a secretary and an heiress doing voluntary night school teaching.

To emphasize the class system theme, most of the characters wear numbers. Thus, the attractive heiress who has an emotionally uninvolved affair with the young hero has a large figure 1 on a necklace, while his pullover shirt has a figure 5 on it. Others are similarly labeled, including an Episcopal minister and a Catholic priest. As for the plot, it boils down to juggling of several love affairs and a sardonic double marriage situation.

The opening scenes, in which the sociology thesis is presented, are a little slow, but the play picks up pace and interest in the second act. There are especially good scenes involving the two secretarial figures and a confrontation between the hero's mother and a vigilante delegation trying to suppress his book of poems. The author's direction seems effective.

There are plausible performances by Bruce Boxleitner as the forthright young hero, Geraldine Kay as his embattled mother, Gail Strickland as the free-thinking heiress, Rebecca Taylor as the secretary, Lee Zara as her telephone operator-friend, Don Marston as a snobbish personnel manager and William Francis and Robert E. Thompson as the friendly rival ministers.

Edward Burbridge's scenery consists of a modernistic combination of backwall with several doors and platforms, plus a number of movable set pieces, and David Toser has provided uneven-quality costumes. Basically, "Status Quo Vadis" is a fairly routine ironic comedy. But although it hasn't much depth, it's reasonably diverting.
 

Thank you, Claudia!