THE STAGE
Kress, Robert
LIBERATION? NONE-SEXISM? MOSTLY THE STAGE It is customary to expect from Broadway theater the sophisticated and from Off-Broadway the avant garde. With these expectations I thought it might be...
...In the long run, in fact, its sexual liberation and emancipation are no more convincing than the non-tumescent celibate sexuality of romantic Irish clerics like Andrew Greeley, Eugene Kennedy and Vince Dwyer...
...Their Sartrean negative understanding of freedom as the absence of the other has already condemned them to a relationless and monadic solipsism, which is mistaken for freedom...
...And it has an equal responsibility to promote the liberation of sex, for the sake of "the return to paradise," God's original Eden, a garden of pleasure...
...Perhaps one should not really have expected much from Chicago except, in Graham Greene's terms, entertainment...
...But like the people of the play, the sex was dreary and the liberation not at all...
...But it is more than sufficiently depressing as it is, since every sexual encounter's denouement is both deception and violence...
...It may have been-ten years ago...
...The most heartfelt songs of the evening were about homosexual relationships, whether male or female...
...The old stifling and heavy-handed bondage is still there, only under new and different auspices...
...And good entertainment it is, chiefly because of Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera dancing Bob Fosse's choreography...
...I'm Gay" declares that "I'm really happy and not ashamed at all of what (notice, not who, but what) I am . . . this .is how God meant me to be...
...Indeed the emphases of the lyrics clearly reflect the male bachelorhood of both Earl Wilson, Jr., composer and lyricist, and Billy Cunningham, arranger and conductor...
...Its "look but don't touch" policy (almost as stringent on stage as between cast and audience) can hardly be considered an advance over the normal house rules of any burlesque house or show bar...
...A sort of Cabaret transposed to Capone's Chicago, it lacks the former's bone-chilling despair...
...the one about fellatio simply oozes with feminine fulfillment- it is, indeed, a song about "the part of you I idolize...
...This is clearly evident in the program which features totally nude females throughout, with a few males, but has only the former on the outside cover...
...The other male homosexual song and the single female one are both suffused with a melancholy loneliness, a leit-motif of not a little of the lyrics...
...It is highly interesting that at precisely this juncture the deity should be invoked...
...But the words betray an almost completely unemancipated understanding of sex and an equally unliberated attitude toward the female sex...
...Plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose...
...With these expectations I thought it might be interesting to see how sex and its liberation were faring this summer season, an unusually active one for New York theater...
...Of course it is hardly your typical ladies sodality or garden club party fare...
...One is compelled to conclude sadly, poor sex, poor liberation, poor sexual liberation...
...Indeed, oral sex is very big in this musical, but the balance is entirely in favor of the male as recipient, the female as agent (a neat reversal of the traditional and typical male-female sex roles...
...A play like Let My...
...ROBERT KRESS (Father Robert Kress, author of Whither Womankind: The Humanity of Women [Abbey], is an associate professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Evansville...
...But in the age of Al Goldstein and his journal, Let My People Come is about as emancipated as the old men's smokers and stag shows...
...On the basis of various reviews I chose, on Broadway Chicago, and Off-Broadway, Let My People Come, which explicitly claims to be "A Sexual Musical...
...In any case the attitudes of the lyrics are quite different...
...The one about cunnilingus is quite clearly a spoof...
...It could hardly be insignificant that, according to Wilson as quoted in the program, the very first song to be composed was "Come In My Mouth," a paean in praise of fellatio...
...People Come can help, for it indicates that Christians need not look to so-called modern secular man for sexual liberation and emancipation...
...Some of the music is bright and bouncy, some of the lyrics clever and catchy...
...Its combination of sex, violence and exploitation might more readily be expected in Broadway's X-rated porn, shops than its sophisticated theaters, even when they are attempting satire...
...The program does contain one song about cunnilingus, but it escaped my notice in the performance I saw...
...Although the cast generally and frequently appears nude, there is unmistakably a predominance of female nudity...
...But its sense of sexual liberation hardly surpasses their "uptight feelings . . . fear . . . inhibitions" so berated in the play's finale and title song...
...pipedream of almost perpetual sexual motion...
...Whether the play succeeds in avoiding that gnostic depreciative distinction between the body and the "I" strangely so characteristic of so-called modern materialistic man is not at all certain...
...The Christian tradition certainly has to bear great responsibility for the bondage in which sex has so long been fettered, at least in the Christian West...
...Male sexism is elsewhere also in evidence...
...In general one does not get the impression that Let My People Come is really a vibrant and vital Dionysian celebration of sex-it is not a play which fulfills its own desire and "lets your body sing...
...But how can they avoid being condemned to such solitude...
...The play's attitude toward the female genital zone is about what one would expect of TV ads for feminine hygiene deodorants...
...Even more disappointing and equally unliberated was Let My People Corner probably because this "sexual musical" both claims to be and has been described as a "theatrical emancipation" and a "milestone for freedom of expression...
...Far from being a sort of neo-mesopotamian pan-sexual orgiastic exultation, which Let My People Come at times seems to want to be, it turns out to be much more the plaint of modern urban anonymities, "each afraid to be left alone...
...The same old fashioned sexist attitude is also illustrated by the play's fascination with the size of the male organ as well as with the male's (and not the female's also...
...Like its forebears and kin, the stag show and smoker, Let My People Come is mostly all talk and no action, its focus is not the heart, but the groin...
...They have indeed become "two clinging shadows, etched on a wall...
...One title, "I Believe My Body When It Talks To Me," at least hints an anthropology which, far from finding "sex a magical show...
...a beautiful thing," has typically rejected sex and the body...
Vol. 102 • November 1975 • No. 17
