Media

...So, as Goodson, Todman, Griffin, et al...

...In it, Bill and Ted, two heavy-metaled-out California high school students, pass their history final not by learning anything, but by using a time machine to bring Socrates, Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Freud, Napoleon, and Abraham Lincoln back to their school auditorium to put on a show...

...She was the fourteenth child of a mountain woman who had been sterilized after her thirteenth pregnancy...

...This paragraph is intended not as a sermon but as a lament from a playgoer who has gone to the Public as often as possible since that first season (1967-1968), when Hair and Hamlet and Havel indicated the range and the ambition of the new venture...

...In one South Indian district, according to the news magazine India Today in its cover story "Born to Die" (June 1986), an estimated 6,000 baby girls had been poisoned to death in the preceding ten years...

...Somehow, this determined baby broke through fate and technology and was conceived...

...In most families, the men and the boys eat first...

...The old, and maybe romantic, formula is that preliterate societies value wisdom, literate ones value knowledge, and electromagnetic cultures value data...

...Couples will go on producing girl after girl in a desperate attempt to get a son...

...Trivial Pursuit, though, you win by retrieving information so that you can move around the board...

...Therese, Casanova's neglected wife, comes back from the dead to act as a kind of presenter--pulling curtains, making announcements--who will lead the audience through Casanova's life, an infecting female point of view undercutting the male voice that sounds in the famous History of My Life...

...where a direct or implied criticism of masculine power (some reviewers saw the play as a doctrinaire feminist statement) runs up against scenes of female complicity in male dominance...

...And that is the history of our values, if you look closely...

...Her mother then decided on an abortion, but was persuaded by her obstetrician to carry on to term and give the baby up for adoption...

...The Public is presumably having money problems (A Chorus Line could not keep it afloat forever), but that does not soften the feeling that Papp was simply waiting to find out whether or not Casanova was going to get the Frank Rich seal of approval (of course, it didn't) before he pulled the rug out from under Congdon's play...

...Jeopardy" is--sorry, Vanna--much more fun because it's a game of almost pure information, which is to say almost meaningless information...

...Because, when you break it all down, that's the mythic core of the game show: the final exam, the spelling bee, the piano recital, whatever performance you remember that they made you do to get your diploma and prove you were one of them...

...Think about the wave of indignation that swept the country in the late fifties when it came out that contestants on the really big money shows--"Twenty-One," "The $64,000 Question," etc.--had been coached on the answers by the producers (yeah--I'm old enough to remember that...

...I like to imagine her growing up, no longer Moy Moy, but Didi--the Hindi for elder sister--helping in some way to save the little girls whose small bodies--aborted, poisoned, starved, neglected, or worked to death--stand as evidence of how far we have to travel...

...Bovary, one of us, face up to the one Ultimate Challenge that still reappears in the anxiety-dreams of almost all adult Americans: the Final Exam...

...the young man is horrified as he watches his older self in scenes which illustrate the cruelty, the violence, the manipulation that sex can be--the penis as instrument to power, to money, to a mechanical keeping of score...

...As the play progresses, however, it is obvious that she is there as lover as well as accuser...

...Whatever the merits of her argument, it was clear that the motives of the poor woman were at least purer than those of her well-off sister, who could, after all, afford the dowry a daughter would require...

...Damn, man...

...Like rock, like the movies--indeed, like almost all distinctively twentieth-century art--TV is art only to the extent that it is also mass commodity: a producer's more than a performer's art...

...If that is accepted, why can't I do this...

...Then the press is invited and the production settles in for its--sometimes brief--run...

...Although female infanticide was outlawed by the British in 1870, the practice continues...

...So, from the inception of network TV in the late forties and through the fifties, canny men like Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, Jack Barry, Merv GrilTm, and our boy Dick Clark developed and perfected the game show...

...9 August 1991:483 And you can't not watch the damn show: it connects that intimately with what we really think "winning" is all about, these days...

...It's not a disembodied, authoritative voice from nowhere, it's the ghostly but instantaneous presence of "real people" (remember the ABC show of that name) in your den...

...At the level of what we usually call "culture," it's how you get what the pseudo-hip critics now term"postmodemism": the jumble of styles and traditions whose main statement is the equivalence of all values as merefin de siOcle bric-a-brac...

...Boy babies are taken to the doctor early on in any illness...

...Rightly so: it was finding out that the croupier had loaded the dice, or that the headmaster had jacked the exam...

...The hospital her parents left her in did not even have an incubator, but Moy Moy survived, flourished, and blossoms today, eighteen months later...

...We have only one Moy Moy and I thank God that this little sister was saved from her early death...

...The other two main characters are Sophie, Casanova's daughter, and the transvestite Bobo (impressively played by Jeff Weiss at the Public), who--as M. Elizabeth Osbom, dramaturge on the production, said in TheaterWeek (June 3-9, 1991)--"is at once mother, father, and companion to Sophie...

...Mui-Mui: little girl dying...

...I did get in for one of the last performances of Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day, but I kept expecting someone to start dismantling the set before the play was over...

...That is not an unusual phenomenon on Broadway, where fight budgets quickly disintegrate in the face of bad notices, but the Public has traditionally been a place in which unusual and difficult plays have been put on stage and left there long enough for their audiences to find them...

...but as Marshall 482: Commonweal McLuhan told us long ago, where radio is aristocratic, the Tube is, let's say, populist...

...Which brings me to TV game shows...

...You win at Monopoly by moving around the board to make a lot of money: funny money, sure, but as we Masterchargers all know, that's the only kind there is...

...Because in the era of data, history is showbiz, and if you're fast enough on the synapses, the world is your postindustrial playground...

...That's Dick Clark of"American Bandstand...

...He wanted the best, he said, and cost was no object...

...That good man, Jack Barry, was the goat who took the fall for everybody else...

...And that may be, not the market value of information as an end in itself, but its real cost...

...Suppose she had lived...

...But you've got more: a perfect little parable of the Tube's morganatic marriage to the idea of "democracy...

...where a joke--maybe crude, maybe corny--will be swallowed by a cry of pain...

...David Greenspan's Dead Mother and his production of The Way of the Worm came and went so quickly that, being a critic who has to juggle schedules in two cities, I never got to them at all...

...So it is with Casanova, where scenes chase one another off stage, the actors quick-changing for their multiple roles as though vaudeville were reborn...

...But you've got to be real fast: fast enough, say, to be able to forget what lies on the other side of the playground's fence...

...Although anmiocentesis is now banned for sex-selection, in most cities it is still possible (often easy) to find a "doctor" willing to provide the service...

...Although I suppose it isn't fair, it is tempting to think of this child as one who has been sent, someone with a mission and a preordained role...

...It was better to save her from a lifetime of suffering...

...When and if he finally appears, he is as precious as gold, while his sisters are less than sand...

...The starkness of her words shocked Ms...

...Now sociologists from the great Max Weber to Michel Foucault have told us that the games a culture privileges are a good indication of the kind of behavior and values the culture wants to inculcate...

...You know the classic intro: "Here's our first contestant, Mrs...

...And the high drama--I'm not kidding here, I'm an addict, too---is watching Mrs...

...Some early TV shows--preeminently, of course, "What's My Line...

...And though its ancestry goes back to the days of radio, perhaps no variety of TV is more quintessentially TV than this apparently simple, surprisingly complex little life-form...

...In radio days, a lot of game shows featured panels of"experts" answering questions submitted by listeners, e.g., "Information, Please...

...Pursuit is the brilliant, bang-on late capitalist transformation of Monopoly just because it knows that money is no longer our basic medium of exchange or "getting ahead," but that information is...

...The old man glories in the young man's sexual triumphs, urging him on...

...Bumiller, who wondered whether this woman could possibly believe there was no difference between abortion and infanticide...

...At the level of national survival, this is how you get the computerized number-worship that can ignore human suffering while calling itself, without irony, "economics...

...Casanova is played by two actors...

...According to Bumiller, the reason the business class went in for sex-selective abortion was simply to "avoid the social embarrassment of having daughters but no sons...

...how much more demanding it must be in production...

...When we lived in Delhi, a poor man of our acquaintance came one day to ask us the name of a good doctor for his ailing son...

...Sophie is preoccupied with Casanova, who has always ignored her, and at the point where she seems to have reached a stand-off with her obsession, she welcomes the return of a lover who, over her pleas, once again walks away from her bed--as her father would have...

...FRANK McCONNELL STAGE PUBLIC DISMISSAL CONGDON'S 'CASANOVA' oseph Papp's Public Theater has always kept its own counsel about such matters as official opening nights of its productions, playing previews to the Public regulars until a work is as ready as it is likely to get...

...It was the same nauseated discovery, in leisure time, that Watergate--and Iranscam and, let's face it, Desert Storm--were to be in political, "real" time...

...The casting of Seitz--his ability as an actor aside--underscored the fact that sexuality is more than profile deep and--particularly in the case of Casanova--that the appeal of reputation is as strong as visual impression...

...There is the matter of focus...

...The outrage--and it got all the way to the Senate floor--was directed not so much at the contestants who had "cheated," but at the producers...

...As in Trivial Pursuit, it's instant retrieval, not understanding, that makes you champ...

...The shifts and the overlapping in No Mercy, Congdon's play about the making of the atom bomb, demand complete attention on the page (the only place I have seen it) if one is to be aware of the relationships among images...

...But both are really played for success at information retrieval...

...And you have to rest at home...

...Without missing a beat or raising his eyes as he mixed a perfect perfect Rob Roy, Rocky said: "Dick Clark...

...But they've, literally and figuratively, retrieved the past, and that's good enough...

...the girls and the women get what is left...

...You win at "Wheel" by completing a phrase before Vanna White has turned all its letters: it's a kind of crossword puzzle spiced with avarice, and it's a trifle old-fashioned, since you can lose your turn at play by coming up "Bankrupt" on a spin of the giant roulette wheel that is the set's main feature...

...As another woman she interviewed put it, "Abortion at the fourth month is legally accepted in India...

...The game, in other words, tests your ability to recognize what "facts" are really important, importance being calibrated as exchange value of the data...

...An "inscription of power," a playtime promulgation of what a society thinks is right thinking, has to be anonymous: otherwise people will stop playing...

...The champion of the quick close, however, was Constance Congdon's Casanova, which finished the week it opened...

...MEDIA THE GAMES WE PLAY DATA INTO DOLLARS y wife and I were having a quarrel about who was the most important figure in the early history of rock' n' roll: she said Chuck Berry, I said Elvis...

...Girl babies die more than boy babies, in spite of long-standing medical evidence that the female is the stronger sex...

...For the poor woman, things were more basic...

...Bill and Ted pass--happy ending--as preternaturally dumb as they were at the beginning...

...Instead of killing the child in the womb, I killed the child when it was born...

...In India, studies have consistently shown that to be a female is to be at risk...

...Consider the categories of questions that can appear on the big board in a typical game: "China," "Shakespeare," "British History," "Musicals," "Baseball," " ' C ' in Chemistry," with questions ranked by dollar value in order of increasing difficulty...

...But perhaps the realities of poverty enabled her a clearer vision than is generallly afforded to the privileged elite who are so fond of subtle nuances...

...And at the level of mass art, it's how you get"Jeopardy," more "postmodem" by half than any opera Philip Glass or any poem John Ashbery ever perpetrated...

...So I took the question to Rocky, our archetypically gruff/wise neighborhood bartender...

...Despite the almost unanimous dismissal of Congdon's play by the reviewers, Casanova was (and presumably will continue to be in other productions, other towns) a rich and complex work, now bitingly satiric, now lyric, now almost slapstick...

...What if the umpires are crooks...

...As in: Why did Elvis, amazingly, never perform outside the U.S...

...Charles Bovary, a welder and ballet dancer from Winesburg, Ohio, who has so far won...

...A disgruntled playgoer walked out of the Philadelphia Drama Guild production of Tales of the Lost Formicans, complaining that Congdon was making a joke of Alzheimer's disease--this in the face of a superb performance by Alan Mixon as the disoriented father...

...Several weeks later, she was born on the side of a road, twelve weeks premature, weighing in at two pounds...

...I have more daughters than I can count," he said, "but only one son...

...For the price of a simple, reusable set and some prizes donated--free advertising--by name brands, you've got yourself a half-hour of signal (Dead Air, as Dan Rather will tell you, being the Sin for Which There Is No Forgiveness...

...A joyful sex scene like the one in which young Casanova and the girl romp in the garden is colored not only retroactively by what the young man and we see later of his older self, but by the scene that immediately follows in which the young man becomes part of a sexual smorgasbord that destroys the girl's innocence...

...I hope you've seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, one of the most important films of the last decade...

...At the Public, the conventionally handsome Ethan Hawke was the young Casanova, the slightly pudgy John Seitz the mature and the old Casanova...

...Wealthy women have their own, more acceptable way of dealing with unwanted baby girls: amniocentesis and abortion...

...So what are the inscriptions that the game show incarnates...

...A lifetime of suffering...

...In the first place, it meets two optimal requirements for mass art: it's cheap and it fills a time slot...

...In Elisabeth Bumiller's book May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India, one poor woman who had poisoned her daughter drew the obvious parallel between her action and those of wealthier women: "Abortion is costly...

...And a lament, too, for those people who did not get to see Casanova...

...Play" is always both free and directed, that is: everybody gets to (or has to) play, but the rules and goal are determined by the game itself, a metaphor for the society that fosters the game---or, as Foucault would have said, a subtle "inscription of power...

...Seriously: even Thomas Pynchon couldn't have invented a better metaphor for our era, where the burden of the past has become the on/off storage and retrieval capability of the Lord, the Mainframe...

...Both Casanovas are often on stage at the same time, watching one another in action...

...Well, look: only two board games have taken America by storm in this century, Monopoly in the Hoover/Roosevelt years and, fifty years later, Trivial Pursuit in the Age of Reagan...

...It's democratic, at least, in that it tends to render the high and the mighty familiar, and make the familiar dramatic...

...one asked Bumiller...

...Wheel" is played for prizes, "Jeopardy" for cash...

...We watch "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" to see our demigods with their halos off, and we watch "Roseanne" or "thirtysomething" to see our own slob's life presented as---dangerous word--significant...

...Congdon has never made it easy for her audiences...

...Once the control-room curtain is drawn, Oz ceases to function as a wizard...

...Dig: FDR would have looked pompous on TV, just as George Bush would have sounded even wimpier on radio...

...This season, however, that "brief" has often become minuscule...

...girls are allowed to languish for as long as possible...

...I sat, stunned at the illumination...

...There is the matter of tone...

...discovered, the game show works best on TV when it features folks just like us or maybe, even, just a little dumber than us...

...So instead of spending money and losing income, we prefer to deliver the child and kill it...

...Because his manager, 'Col.' Tom Parker, was a Dutch citizen without passport, and was afraid they might not let him back in...

...followed the expert/celeb format...

...Bobo is Casanova in reverse--both absorbed with their 484: Commonweal...

...So with the two dominant game shows on the Tube now--both Merv Griffin products, by the way--"Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy...