Theater

THE END OF TERM. A pantomime, written in palpitating secrecy by the two sixth-form anarchist-intellectuals and that new swinging young English master, is mounted in the gym. The headmaster, comfy in a front-row armchair (his lady beside him) watches himself as Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber, slaughtering half his common room while—as a sub-plot—the senior classics master touches up matron, the first fifteen sing Hawaiian lullabies in grass skirts and the art master camps across the stage as Buttons, making sly references to nonexistent scandals among the prefects. The sixth form watch with conscious urbanity; the fifth guffaw; the fourth form are in a state of hysterical terrified glee. How daring! How marvelous! All those insulting Gilbert and Sullivan choruses with The Beak’s name inserted! Why doesn’t he jump up and stop the show! But he takes it, of course, with a tolerant if, just once or twice, thin-lipped smile. At the end he stands up to congratulate one and all on a splendid show. So talented, so clever, so irreverent. It’s nice to see ourselves as others see us (laughter), and it all proves (so he likes to feel) that as with all happy communities, we can laugh at ourselves. Everyone leaves for home in a glow of loyalty and self-congratulation. IT IS SAID that Senator Robert Kennedy, that most progressive of putative headmasters, enjoyed being attacked in MacBird!, the end-of-term pantomime for his brother’s Presidency. Clearly it was only because Lyndon B. Johnson hasn’t the wit to appreciate sixth-form humor that he was not in the front row at the New York production of MacBird!, pointedly in stitches, thus—like any clever headmaster or commanding officer— instantly depriving it of its frantic underground reputation as a searing, sensational indictment of wickedness at the top. Even with his furious disapproval MacBird! is only a lump of non-satire, an occasional piece of the dreariest, most conventional sort, offered up by a poetaster-laureate to the chic Protest Establishment of the American West Coast. The play is written by a young California housewife (and stalwart of Students for a Democratic Society), Mrs. Barbara Garson, with, in its British version, emendations by Joan Littlewood. MacBird! is a dogged parody of Macbeth, with slabs of half-a-dozen additional Shakespear- – ean plays inserted where convenient. The joke (the one joke) is that disturbing contemporary references like “New Frontier” or “Pax Americana” are injected into familiar quotations, and famous political figures are given thane-ish titles like Ken O’Dunc, the Wayne of Morse, or The Egg of Head (Adlai Stevenson). Mrs. Garson says that the germ of her parody came to her as a slip of the tongue. She found herself saying Macbird in place of Macbeth at some Berkeley cocktail party. Instantly the idea burgeoned: how appropriate tohave three drop-out witches (one Beatnik, one Black Muslim, one old-fashioned left-winger) at a Democratic Party convention (“Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the stale and smoke-filled air”) promising MacBird the Senate leadership, the Vice Presidency and then: PAU hail MacBird. dhat shall be President!” How jolly to have the Kennedys as a Ken O’Dunc clan. And Lady Bird Johnson as that vulgar harpy Lady MacBeth. MacBird: I dare do all that may become a man Who dares do more is none. Lady MacBird: Vm not a man I am a lady and a Southern hostess. With simple signs of hospitality I mean to give our guests the warmest welcome. What a merry jape to write verse couplets in boisterous Texan: My secretary’s waiting in the hall With autographed photos for y’all. How neat to recreate the gibbering and sheeted ghosts as the New York power failure! And then how amusing to insert the thousand best-loved Shakespearean tags into the text, each one subtly altered: MacBird: Unity, unity, wherefore art thou unity? The Egg of Head: To see, or not to see, that is the question . . MacBird: This here is the winter of our discontent Made odious by that son of … Crony: Yeah. (This kind of thing is amazingly easy. Why did Mrs. Garson forget “A whore, a whore, my kingdom for a whore’”—or “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is the Warren Commission action”—or “Something’s rotten in the State of Texas!’—no, sorry, she remembered that one— or “Oh what a rogue and peasant President am I’ and so on right through The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations?) THE PROBLEM, as Barbara Garson and every after-dinner humorist has found, is that such parodies appear monuments of ingenuity when you still have the original beside you; on their own they sometimes seem lame. What’s more, after the initial glorious inspiring joke, you have to keep it up; consistency involves a number of. extremely weak jokes. It also involves sticking roughly to the original plot. Having started off a Johnson-Macbeth joke, Mrs. Garson clearly found herself obliged to make Johnson kill Kennedy. It is this stroke, with all its heavy implications of conspiratorial special knowledge, and outspoken social criticism, that is responsible for the overblown satirical reputation of MacBird! But it’s pretty clear the murder only happened that way because the plot demands it. Mrs. Garson doesn’t seriously believe it happened that way. And even here she has a failure of nerve: the murder is archly indicated, as if to flatter some teach-in assumption that there must have been a great big, rotten conspiracy. The effect is merely of modish knowingness. MacBird! decorates its basic joke with some quite funny humor. Mrs. Garson is better about her friends than her distant enemies. The witches quarrel amusingly over their clashing forms of protest. Her Egg of Head, an overarticulate sap who refuses to oppose MacBird until it’s too late, is convincingly done. But where the schoolgirl irony is dropped and the attempt made to be direct and serious, MacBird! is a terrible flop: Taylor’s tongue and Goldberg’s slime, MacNamara’s bloody crime. Sizzling skin of napalmed child, Roasted eyeballs, sweet and mild. _Now we add a fiery chunk From a burning Buddhist monk. Flaming field and blazing hut, Infant fingers cooked and cut, Young man’s heart and old man’s gut. Groin and gall and gore of gook In our cauldron churn and cook. Why Goldberg’s slime? Clearly, because it rhymes with crime. Who is seriously concerned with self-immolating Buddhists? Not someone who writes of chunks of monks. MacBird! is a good text to categorize types of immature humor: the infantile, the schoolboy and the undergraduate. Infantile humor has at least some properly anarchic custardpie type clowning. Undergraduate humor is doggedly destructive and cynical, and packed with deliberately arcane references. As usual it is the middling category that is dull and conformist: schoolboy humor plays the game, and needs only a token refusal to be shocked to be totally disarmed. MacBird! is pure schoolboy. Reprinted from the New Statesman