An influential critic—he shall not be nameless—who has spent years urging repertory theater as an antidote to Broadway recently concluded that “false seriousness” and “wheyfaced solemnity’ are indeed worse than box office flapdoodle, and that repertory, as it is practiced in America today, has in general less to do with theatrical entertainment than with terribly stuffy notions of cultural enrichment. Nothing is so sad as negative inevitability unaware of its course; it was only a matter of time, and the Vivian Beaumont Repertory Theater in Lincoln Center, before Mr. Robert Brustein came to abandon what had emerged for many of his followers as the path to salvation— abandoning it in natural consequence of the fact that his followers, like Jude the Obscure’s progeny, were too many. Too many, in the arts, means the automatic coarsening of taste, and this is a tragedy even for cultural democrats like Mr. Brustein. As the great mass of art-tasters surges forward, the connoisseurs must retreat to higher and higher ground. It is now the fashion to patronize minoritarian culture—styles, attitudes, forms of expression the middlebrow public has a hard time getting hold of—even to the acceptance of views that contradict previous doctrine, such as that theater to be good need not be costly. This heresy is, finally, the supreme insult of Brustein’s revolt against repertory, for he has lately embraced the theater of poverty—‘that underground expression now being developed in cabarets, workshops and studios . . . where reality and joy can once more be combined and drama is once again superb, gay and wild.” To the backers of such expensive Off-Broadway repertory proving grounds as the Beaumont Theater (now foundering in a second crisis of identification), it may not appear precisely superb, gay and wild that two kitchen chairs and twelve dancers in masks now constitute drama, whereas only five years ago drama was a kind of revolving permanent library of the classics too dear for anybody but ofcourse-the-government to pay for. Having paid, government, private patrons and audience are alike dispossessed. What Brustein calls the “third theater” is situated off Off-Broadway at remote, improvised, hole-in-corner places like the Martinique, the Pocket Theater, the Cafe La Mama, the Judson Memorial Church; or—official clearing house for thirdtheater aspirants—the Yale Drama School, which under Mr. Brustein’s direction imports New York underground expression and ships it back, surface freight, to claim a review from Cue Magazine. MacBird, Viet Rock and America Hurrah have scored the biggest hits with Yale, which confuses matters somewhat because only the latter two are typical of Off Off-Broadway basement theater. Rigid academic definition forces one to consider MacBird theater; it is really a pamphlet got out by the Berkeley maquis, and its appeal—if that’s the word for the unmistakable vendibility of a piece which does indeed suggest, nay, which insists, through parallels with Macbeth, that Lyndon Johnson murdered Kennedy—is entirely contained by the printed page. Of course, Brustein’s attachment, and presumably that also of Dwight Macdonald and Robert Lowell, is to the irrational Geist rather than to the letter of Barbara Garson’s text, where her New Left -hysteria joins with and expands his own, like afflatus at a religious meeting. So that a collegiate lampoon intended for local circulation is itself inflated and identified with the larger phenomenon of protest theater. You don’t have to see MacBird, you have only to read it or have it read to you, preferably in alternating Texas and Boston accents, to see what it is about. Viet Rock, on the other hand, is nothing on paper and parts of America Hurrah, the best parts, are less than that. Whereas Mrs. Garson wrote the original version of MacBird (a later version opened in New York February 22) without much thought to its staging, both Viet Rock and America Hurrah are from script to stage the products of a coherent, unified theatrical expression developed by a Greenwich Village studio, the Open Theater, at the Cafe La Mama. The technique, which suggests immediate origins in Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook, older ones in Brecht and Erwin Piscator and the mime theater of Etienne Decroux, is ingenious and exciting when the protest is intelligent, bullying and callow when it is not. Viet Rock, which jovially takes Our Boys from induction centers to Saigon whorehouses, is like Jules Feiffer aspiring to be Herblock: all glitter flaked off to bring up the dull glow of righteousness. Only, in Viet Rock the process was tediously indeterminate, so that some corrosive episodes—a Vietcong Axis Sally getting backtalk from GIs lying in the jungle, South Vietnamese regulars learning to drill American-style— seemed more inconclusive than effective in the context of pulpy, New Left set-’em-up, knock-’em-down op- -portunism. Viet Rock is a mirror of New Left anarchism, of its vagrancy, its silliness, and its unexpected pieties; a pteta is in fact arranged for a Gold Star mother, but such placid invention seems double-edged when compared to the outright wild sympathy with which the company mimes self- -immolating Buddhists. Seven boys and six girls constituted the company that played Viet Rock at the Martinique. The boys looked mostly loutish; for that matter, so did the girls.
The cast of America Hurrah, better-looking, was better served by the evenness and audacity of its production and by the situations provided for it by the playwright, Jean-Claude van Itallie; although in calling van Itallie a playwright I mean more to suggest a scenarist, or composer who prepares a piano score for later orchestration. For the Open Theater is wholly a theater of mise en scéne. Unlike an unlucky predecessor, the Living Theater (now dead, by income tax evasion), Open Theater productions don’t usually try to duplicate actual environments—a Marine Corps brig or a junkie’s pad. The environment is the stage but the spoken word is not the medium—action is all. In the course of one play, actors may each take several different parts, turn themselves into props, march, dance, sing, speak in unison or all together out of unison, make sound effects, and so on. In another play, they do straight “character” acting, impersonate leading newsreel figures, and do TV take-offs. In a third they dress up as dolls. The virtuosity this style calls for has already hit Broadway in dilute form, in Marat/Sade, and has been intermittently activated in the techniques used for such superbly engineered, high-speed commercial musicals as West Side Story, Gypsy and Cabaret. (In America Hurrah a light shines from the stage directly into the eyes of the audience; I can recall this effect, of “Artaudian cruelty,” used with great success in Gypsy, in 1959.) If this sounds as if Off Off-Broadway has more in common with Broadway than with Off Broadway, that is probably the case. Either luxurycommercial theater or poverty-poetic theater seems better suited to American talents than repertory drama on the European plan, where money does too much and yet not enough. Only at either extreme can one move fast with safety. In the new Theater of Action the script is the least part of the show. There is no time for plot or developed characterization — everything goes too fast. There is instead instant characterization within a total imagined surround. In Interview and TV, two of the playlets that. make up America Hurrah, place, time and personae are matters to be inferred more from what you see happening than from verbal cues. In both plays, the City of New York is brilliantly present as mental atmosphere, its presence enclosing and defining what would otherwise escape into the philosophical abstraction of Beckett or Ionesco. Within this container, action that is either conventional narrative or discontinuous hyperbolic fantasy can take place—the atmospheric pressure is constantly permissive, so to speak; and what is produced therefrom, an all but untranslatable satiric mélange of urban types and attitudes, is more interesting as pure demonstration than as a lesson in the city’s indifference and inhumanity —which is, unfortunately, the literal “meaning” of the script. As on Broadway, the technique is too sophisticated for what the script allows. The third and best of the playlets in America Hurrah is Motel, a pantomime for three giant-size dolls. Two of the dolls are dressed as a fright- -eningly vulgar tourist couple. The action consists in the casual, step-by-step destruction and despoliation, by them, of the premises and person of the third doll, a folksy Midwestern motel proprietress who intones prerecorded inanities about the comfort and modernity of her establishment, the excellence of the services, etc. The two monstrous dolls say nothing. Having stripped and ravished the furnishings (the monologue runs on throughout), they whip out lipsticks and scrawl eye-popping obscenities all over the set. Next they strip and dismember the hostess. At last they are off, parading up the aisle of the theater. — This is authentic and accurate grotesquerie which need not be explained to anyone who has crossed America by car. But my difficulties with it, or rather with its sponsorship, were profound. On the one hand, the Open Theater had produced a master piece, one in which a brilliant theatrical idea and the means by which it is carried out are inseparable. But as in a happening, everything can be related to everything else, until an infinity of meanings produces the final vast blur of non-meaning. Just as my thoughts in the other two lesser plays were coerced by “New York” understood, I found it hard to get rid, while watching Motel, of “New Left” understood, even though only the most general and non-sectarian political meanings can be discerned in the play. But there is a politics of non-politics, quite close to the blithe anarchism of Viet Rock, that is currently magnetizing hurt minds on the Left, an emotional nullity, a mood of static vengeance against All That Is (mirrored in Brustein’s remark that van Itallie depicts “our sufferings in Johnsonland’’). It is the provisional nature of art that makes it inhospitable to political sponsorship; the artist’s guesswork cannot be checked out though it may be palmed off as invincible proof. It’s too bad that the New Left thinks it sees in a work like Motel a vindication of its existence, and that this view, extended to Off Off-Broadway as a whole, has come to be accepted by “uptown” critics and audiences. In fact, there is a good deal of theater to be seen Off Off-Broadway that is not agit-prop or even symbiotically “engaged.” The Judson Church on Washington Square produces, virtually unnoticed, the best musical entertainment in town. Guided by the beneficent spirits of Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, E. E. Cummings, Mae West, and W. C. Fields, and by such quondam phenomena as Hellzapoppin and Tin Pan Alley, the Reverend Al Carmines and his collaborators have mounted excellent homemade farces, romances, operettas, revues, dance concerts and “poets’ vaudevilles,” most of them set to charming musical scores by Carmines himself. I remember most fondly a music-and-dance production of Gertrude Stein’s What Happened that seemed to launch the text on a floating island surrounded by ozone and pure water. Currently Judson is offering a delirious farrago of folk mythology, poetic mysticism and social satire called San Francisco’s Burning: a cast of 25 sinners comes to grief in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the same year the architect of Judson Church, Stanford White, met his own death at the hands of Harry K. Thaw. The gifted Carmines has composed in the lush manner of the period; the performing is ebullient, in some cases outstanding; admission is free; and nobody says a word about Vietnam all night.
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