BOOKS

...While Simon continued to carp away at American ineptness, Brustein gave up full-time criticism to become Dean of the Yale School of Drama, where he serves as administrator, impressario and stage director, guiding "the first professional theatre company in the United States...

...To help us "see our darkness," Dr...

...Needle-man writes in his introduction, "Western civilization has operated on the assumption that man understands the universe without understanding himself...

...Needleman describes some of his own experiences: of his grandmother's death, of assisting in a hospital autopsy room as a pre-med student (he can still smell the dust of, skulls) and of staring, as a child, at the formula E=MC2 as though "looking into the very face of the Creator...

...This one "repels," that one has "sex repeal," others range from the merely "plain" to the "reptilian" to the "demonic...

...His search for flawless theatre, he tells us innocently and defensively in Singularities, is prompted by his learning and a taste refined to exquisite perfection...

...The severe libel laws in Britain, how they curtail freedom of expression in the press and the theatre, and the corresponding absence of these restraints here, are the subject of a taut essay, "Reflections on Privacy," which makes clear that caustic critics like John Simon would not be tolerated abroad...

...He can bear little more than supremely rare performances of the loftiest classics...

...Student Subscriptions CLASSROOM ORDERS, 10 or more copies for any number of issues (biweekly) to one address, 30c a copy...

...old and stale understanding of what a living process really is" and make us ponder anew "the very ancient idea of universal relativity" that all things exist only 'in relationship to a mind which perceives them or a purposive consciousness which creates them...

...On his seventy-fifth birthday, Arnold Tdynbee wrote optimistically that "I feel confident that the tradition of the past is also the wave of the future...

...Becoming personal, Dr...

...Apply with curriculum vitae, photo and copies of certificates to: Richard Morand, Director, Our Lady of Mercy School, Rue Visconde de Caravelas...

...Despite his lip service to the shaky future of the arts in America, his tone betrays a self-serving craftsman of bravura arias that display his erudition and the coarseness that it veneers...

...He is hideously fascinated with the heads, breasts and weight of actresses, most of whom are too beastly to cross the stage when Simon is in the house...

...Does anyone still use, publicly, the term "penis envy" to degrade women...

...This means, to begin with, exposure...

...This is indeed a serious question, as are many posed in this short, stimulating, book, which may remind us of T.S...

...The corrective, Dr...

...Needleman is not so sanguine...

...But the first thing is, obviously, to see: "fac ut videam" as" the blind man, asked what he wanted, said to Christ...

...If, as Murray suggests, "The first instinct for expression is visual," it is hard to imagine the limits of the role videotape will .play in personal communications...

...Simon cares little for contemporary issues or whatever else may mar the perfect plot, the polished phrase...

...Simon, consistent as a metronome, is misguided by a rigid, reactionary mentality...

...and, because the quality of its picture is inferior, videotape has a certain gritty realism that film lacks...

...Needleman nowhere mentions Jacques Monod, the Nobel prize winner whose Chance and Necessity discusses the "element of chance in the universe" in depth...

...Certification is required, as well as two years minimum experience, minimum B.A...

...to relate the factual findings of modern science with the archaic (and often arcane) teachings of the great traditions...

...Brustein looks skeptically, Simon hatefully, at the fads and cults of experiment, non-verbal, "therapeutic," environmental theatre, and Brustein finds in them the symptoms of a disturbed, fragmented society...

...Eliot's lines: "We know all the answers...

...it is the questions that we do not know...

...Needleman is not the acquisition, say, of a plastic heart, but rather that he might not even notice the loss of his human heart...

...The pre-scientific view of the universe was "a hierarchy of purposeful energies" which exceeds man not only "in size and intricacy, but also in depth of purpose and in intelligence...

...Videotape, by virtue of its accessibility, can transform television from a sales medium into a means of personal communication, "(It) uses television to beat television," writes Michael Murray...

...Brustein writes of the difficulty of maintaining high standards in the American theatre, Simon of the impossibility of that ideal...

...he thinks that "our unaided ability to be what we know" is a naive assumption, and he fears the "swift" and subtle passage from seeing the darkness to dreaming of light...

...More important, though, is the discussion of the potential of videotape...

...Needleman sees us with one hand full of new scientific facts, and the other of powerful, ancient ideas...

...IN BRIEF The Videotape Book: A Basic Guide to Portable TV Production, by Michael Murray...

...He could make a worthwhile contribution by writing books on Buchner, Brecht or some other genius, preferably male, straight and European...

...This break Dr...

...Gnawing concern, and troubled shifts from hope to doubt appear on Brus-stein's pages, while a sneering hauteur typifies Simon's prose...

...He offers whatever he can scrape from the private lives of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Terrence McNally as proof that their plays are artistic failures...

...Such a universe, while being a manifestation of great consciousness, "places man and therefore calls to him...

...Only connect" wrote E.M...

...Perhaps we may even be reminded to be grateful for the reminder...

...Taptinger, $9.95...

...With more review space given over to film, and the gradual squeezing out of drama criticism in our newspapers and magazines, three recent books on theatre have much to teach us about the uses and abuses of critics...

...degree, age 25-35, single, two-year contract...

...Dr...

...a review of a performance of the play in Uneasy Stages is a pathetic display of an intellect dwarfed by an unchecked mania to belittle and degrade...

...Observing the society of London, he gains insight into his own...

...Everything is superior in Europe, but they choose to live and work in this brutish society, whose traditions are no more than a smudge here, a smudge there...

...It is also explained by a jungle of personal problems, and by an unmasked contempt for American theatre, "the short and simple annals of the poor American stage," for the artists who nourished it and the culture that surrounds it...

...It can be used in role plays and community controversies, in psychotherapy and surveillance...

...Shaw galvanized the English stage by turning from critic to playwright, and Kenneth Tynan now serves as literary adviser to the National Theatre of Great Britain...

...The Greeks and the Elizabethans did rather well without them (professional reviewing did not mature until the eighteenth century...

...it converts the passive television watcher into the active television maker...

...Books: JOHN FLUDAS Anyone who even glances at the performing arts would have to agree that the theatre has lost its way in a maze of experiments and financial crises, and that film is in much better artistic health...

...He literally blames gay audiences for the bad taste of the Moscow Art Theatre on tour in New York, for the popularity of nostalgia revivals, and for the "shoddy histrionic trickery" of Zoe Caldwell in Colette...

...The critic who has trained his taste harder, by reading and seeing plays, by studying drama both through the words of great teachers and through the work of great directors and actors, by keeping abreast of scholarly and critical thought at home and abroad, stands a fair chance of being more discriminating than the reviewer who stumbled onto or was shoved into his particular slot because of some quirk of newspaper or magazine publishing...

...As above, so below, wrote Hermes Trismegistus, and man is a microcosm...

...Easier to use than film, it is less formal...

...Murray gives many examples of video workshops in underprivileged urban communities, where local celebrity status is conferred on the young people who produce news shows or plays to be shown on television sets within the neighborhood...

...Brustein sounds at times like a doting parent, but just as often as a visioned person who made the risky switch from outsider to professional...

...Though Robert Brustein is not always at his lucid best, he has cast the circle of his vision far and wide, viewing theatre as a prism of society-and pondering art and politics as sometimes strange, sometimes cozy bedfellows...

...separated from him, she was tricked into judging the apple by its appearance, then Adam, active "hearkened to" the passive...

...Einstein's demand that we think in new categories about the universe should require that we question our Qualified Religion Teacher Our Lady of Mercy School, Rio de Janeiro, is seeking an experienced teacher of the Catholic Religion to coordinate an entire elementary and high school religion program and teach high school religion classes...

...True, there are inconsistencies in Brustein (he alternately damns and defends experimental theatre), but these are signs of change, doubt, growth, challenge and experience...

...48, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, S.A...

...Comparable State-side salary, housing allowance, round-trip air fare...

...His analysis of Peer Gynt as dramatic poetry, Ibsen on the pristine pages of a book, in the safety of the study, is a calm and perceptive appreciation...

...DENNIS VELLUCCI...

...Needleman insists, we are afraid of becoming aware of our own ignorance, that we quickly fur and clot any such new ideas with new explanations...

...but if we delay, or empty one hand to grab what is in the other, then "What will become of us as the universal purposes of nature move to balance out the injuries we have done to her...

...Needle-man insists "free to relate...

...Many of the best themes in The Culture Watch eventually sound like over-used leitmotifs, such as the blasts against the mass media for applauding every silly bubble of the counter culture...

...The technical sections are written clearly and concisely, and give the layman a good understanding of all that is involved in shooting, editing, lighting, and moving the camera...

...The futility that sometimes clouds his thoughts is the frustration that many sincere reviewers must feel about their inability to change the theatre directly...

...Curiously, Dr...

...He asks whether the failure of attention is not, perhaps, the original sin...

...Needle-man reminds us, "I am not that man...

...He is afraid, that if we bring our hands together prematurely, we will produce uncon-trollable explosions...

...But in its counterpart, Uneasy Stages, an overstuffed, unselective album of reviews, mostly from New York magazine, he proves that he may sometimes be a keen critic of plays, but a perverse and hostile witness of performances...

...Today, in the face of what molecular biology can already achieve and in the face of Heisenberg's indeterminancy principle, what scares Dr...

...He is terrified of real or imagined homosexuality on both sides of the proscenium...

...The American actor is a species that knows nothing whatsoever about poetry," or any of the other things that Simon knows...

...Needle-man views as largely the fault of the Church, which had "become unable to do what it is an essential task of all religions to do: to communicate the purposes of existence in such a way that a man can hope to experience them both in himself and in the cosmos...

...But, Dr...

...In Singularities, a book of leisurely essays, he can fashion a discerning and engaging piece now and then, when he is not defending his compulsive dedication to high art...

...to develop organically out of a training program at a Well, if we assume that taste, like the act of savoring a new food, only more so, is a slow, experimental process, then the tasteful critic is likely to be the one who spends the most time developing his taste...

...six months (13 issues), $4...

...It is still a child, and it has behaved precociously and naively...

...He suggests that the universe is not less organic than the great teachings of "say, the Buddha and Jesus" since only a conscious universe can be "relevant to the whole of human life...

...Needleman discusses the universe, the situation of medicine, our fear of death, biology, physics, psychotherapy and the sacred, and also magic...

...John Simon, by contrast, has a keyhole interest in drama as aesthetics...

...Its communication is direct and personal...

...Simon's scapegoats are so numerous, they could be alphabetized and indexed...

...These tinsel aristocrats pride themselves on the faded glory of old regimes...

...It can supplement the role of the teacher in a classroom and give people a chance to observe themselves...

...INDIVIDUAL STUDENT subscriptions: one year, $8...

...Simon at least flirts with one of Brus-tein's fears, that "the minority culture of art and experiment is in serious danger of being overpowered by the majority culture of profit and entertainment," as more of our best talents are enticed by the easier cash and steadier work of television and film...

...Forster in Howards End...

...Fresher, more personal, and more durable are his accounts of his Yale experience and the cultural cross talk between England and the United States in those essays written when he was guest critic for the London Observer daring the 1972-73 season...

...In order for man once more to relate freely to the universe, "there must be something in him" Dr...

...There is a trickle of contempt for small, poor countries (Simon is from Yugoslavia) and a torrent of abuse against women...

...Needleman declares, is to connect...

...Vesalius' view of the human body as exhibiting a "marvelous correspondence with the universe" has been lost somewhere in the vast distances measured by astronomy (such as that light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, takes 800,000 years to reach us from Andromeda, a local galaxy...

...Failure" is his favorite word and concept, though "fiasco" runs a pretty close second...

...He has a special loathing for old women, female flesh, Jews, blacks in "white" roles, most living critics, including the "Polack" Jan Kott...

...Singularities school...

...Where is logic...

...Free of the body, else man's body cannot become an instrument of his search...

...Videotape has been successful at distributing information to a community...

...CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT, Commonweal, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...

...A Sense of the Cosmos: Tike Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truth JACOB NEEDLEMAN Doubleday, $6.95 ANNE FREMANTLE For several centuries, Dr...

...The propa-gandistic plays staged in the political ferment of the Irish question serve as mirrors for American plays about blacks, Vietnam, social disorder, and he reflects on playwrights in both societies torn by their dual commitment to their causes and to their art...

...Of course he has never seen anything approaching his quixotic ideal in the United States...

...Adam, the active element, was bidden to "cleave to" the passive ele, his wife Eve...

...Where is the line between delusion and reality...

...Murray explores the social implications of videotape as well as the mechanics in this book, which anyone who is exposed to television or film, whether in the creative end or as part of an audience, should find useful...

...European by birth and sensibility, he belongs to a fringe minority of foreign malcontents...

...10016...

...But of course there seem to be people with inveterate bad taste (whatever that means) whom no amount of exposure manages to refine...

...Instead, Dr...

...What went wrong at the beginning of the scientific era was that the connection between the general laws of nature and the law of man's own nature was broken...

...Free copy added for instructor or distributor on request...

...It is troublesome to prove that reviews ever influenced the theatre except in marginal ways...

...All three titles are collections of reviews and essays written in the past several years, and are cautions that very few occasional pieces deserve a second incarnation in book form...

...The Culture Watch has received the 23 April 1976: 280 least publicity, but it clearly makes the sanest contribution...