Repertory: The Playhouse Is the Thing

All the playhouse needs is a moat, and it could pass for a medieval fortress. Yet it is not forbidding. The new home of Houston's 21-year-old Alley Theater is a child's idea of a castle—a genuine playhouse. The sandblasted concrete with its nine turreted towers glows like imprisoned sunlight; glass has succumbed to stone. And behind the facade, inner grace balances outer strength. The stairways are cascades of red-orange carpeting; the low ceilings are dimpled with lights embedded in them like flat moons, and the throwaway nooks and crannies have no function except to delight the eye.

The atmosphere is invariably one of warmth, and the architectural scale is everywhere measured by human dimensions. Architect Ulrich Franzen is a master of the broken line and the ingratiating curve. Nothing is rigid and antiseptic. Masculinity and femininity thrust, parry, yield and wed in a superlative marriage of craft and art. The main theater itself, a semicircular urn of intimacy seating 798, is a kind of womb with seats. Decked out in soft brown and nuzzling together like cattle, the rows of theater seats are concentrated reminders that the playgoer is in an edifice indigenous to the Southwest, a vivid memory link with the adobe hut and the Alamo. Aided by the Ford Foundation ($2,400,000) and bolstering that grant with $900,000 from the pocketed dimes of children as well as the black gold of oil, the people of Houston have much more to show for the money than a structure of civic pride. They have that unique treasure, a native home of the spirit.

Symbolical Journey. Perhaps the playhouse is so fine because it is a gift of love. It was built for a person as well as a purpose. It is Houston's outpouring of affection for Nina Vance, 53, a perky, scrappy woman who founded the Alley and fought for regional theater before the words were invented.

Her choice of a first play, Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, to launch the new theater was symbolically correct. Houston is the nation's space center, and on opening night 30 of the U.S.'s 52 astronauts were present. They journey among the stars that Galileo peered at through his heretical telescope.

Unfortunately, Miss Vance's direction of the play does not soar into orbit. Perhaps the shift in sheer playing space from the postage-stamp stage of the old Alley Theater was intimidating. A risky lark tends to become a sobersided responsibility when culture receives the imprimatur of opulence. In this production, everything that was raging and revolutionary in Brecht has been quietly domesticated. The central confrontation of the play, the direct clash between the authority of divine revelation and the authority of scientific observation, is muted.