Stage
Weales, Gerald
STAGE VOICE & MOUTH & FACE CHAIKIN'S 'STRUCK DUMB' Joseph Chaikin visited Swarthmore College this fall to conduct a two-week workshop in acting and directing. At the end of his stay he gave a...
...The range of Chaikin's expressions, the modulations of his voice are as remarkable as they were in Tongues...
...The process of discovery in the piece is not simply what he sees and feels but the finding of the word that identifies the object and the response to it...
...he greets a dog, he finds a shell on the beach, and declares it a miracle...
...Two of the most celebrated works to come out of this creative context were The Serpent: A Ceremony, for which van Itallie provided the words and the structure, and Terminal, with a text by Susan Yankowitz, which was identified as a work in progress when I saw it in Philadelphia in 1970...
...At the end of his stay he gave a public performance of Struck Dumb and the Angel's monologue from The War in Heaven (works he co-created with respectively Jean-Claude van Itallie and Sam Shepard), and Samuel Beckett's What Is the Word, the English translation of which Beckett dedicated to Chaikin...
...That allowed the program to end on the question that ran through the other works and that defines his own continuing struggle, "What is the word...
...Both are Chaikin, of course, and the angel's reiterated cry ("Take me back...
...Miracle" is a word that does not come easily to Chaikin, but the compression on "acle" makes a caress of the word, as though he were using his disability as a tool...
...Set in Venice, California, where Chaikin lives, it shows the speaker moving out of his house, walking to the beach...
...I had some trouble with Terminal, a consideration of death and dying, partly because the rhythmic pounding of sticks too often got between me and the shifting images, the dissolving words of the work...
...The name of the piece is itself an example of finding the accurate words...
...Sadly, it was billed as "his farewell performance...
...The one belongs to the angel, who, for some unknown reason, has crashed to earth, been made prisoner, and seeks release...
...There are two lines of speech and thought running through the monologue, printed in separate columns in the text in Letters and Texts...
...But The Serpent, based largely on Genesis, was completely absorbing even when juxtapositions were not immediately clear...
...The result was the double bill, Tongues and Savage/Love, which he and Shepard devised and which he performed as solo pieces with music...
...STAGE VOICE & MOUTH & FACE CHAIKIN'S 'STRUCK DUMB' Joseph Chaikin visited Swarthmore College this fall to conduct a two-week workshop in acting and directing...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 17 January 1992: 19...
...The danger in this kind of review is that one may slip into the sympathetic condescension which too often plagues the disabled...
...Of course, his aphasia marks the performance because it is the subject and the theme of all three pieces...
...On May 7, 1984, he suffered a stroke while undergoing open-heart surgery, but by January of the next year, partly through his work with Shepard, he was performing again—a radio production of The War in Heaven...
...After the disbanding of The Open Theater in 1973, Chaikin became increasingly interested in investigating himself as instrument...
...Work on The War in Heaven predates Chaikin's stroke, but the Angel's monologue, as we now have it, is a transformation of the earlier material through Chaikin's struggles, with Shepard's help, to regain his speech...
...This program was one of the most impressive things I have seen in a long time...
...It is unattractive at any time, but it is particularly inappropriate here...
...His aphasia makes it impossible for him to remember lines, but with the script in front of him, he is still a formidable presence on stage...
...Turn me loose") and his final forlorn statement ("I am here/by mistake") are powerful evocations of the trap of aphasia...
...It was a sentimental reaction...
...anyone who has not seen it should hope that, like Sarah Bernhardt, he makes a practice of farewell performances...
...It was the first time I had seen Chaikin perform since his earlier collaboration with Shepard, Tongues, was presented at the Public Theater in 1979...
...voice and mouth and face" still give substance and resonance to the words...
...By contrast to the Shepard piece, Struck Dumb is more personal, more domestic...
...My first reaction was to think that Struck Dumb should have ended rather than opened the performance, that the audience would then have wrapped itself in the remarkably moving piece...
...Chaikin has been a force in American theater since he founded The Open Theater in 1964 to explore with a group of performers and playwrights the interplay of words and movement, the way in which sharply realized images can melt into others, to produce, after extended periods of experiment and rehearsal, collective works in which the author of the text is simply one of a group of collaborators...
...This preoccupation of Chaikin's from the late 1970s is a forerunner of what was to come, the intellectual/vocal investigations of Tongues becoming a necessity for the performer trying to find his way back to words after his stroke...
...Not only does Struck Dumb identify Chaikin's condition before his slow return to words, but it describes his state in the piece itself, for as he walks from door to beach he is struck dumb in the popular sense of the phrase, is in constant wonder at the miracles he meets and names...
...On second thought, it seems just right that, after sitting to perform the longer works, Chaikin ended by standing up to read the very brief Beckett piece...
...the other is presumably Chaikin's, an associational meditation that moves in and out of the angel's words...
...18: 17 January 1992 Commonweal The exchange of letters between the collaborators, printed in Joseph Chaikin & Sam Shepard, Letters and Texts, 19721984 (New American Library), show Chaikin wanting "to try voices from different sources" and to perform "words of yours with my voice and mouth and face," which he certainly did in the impressive Public Theater production...
...On the way he discovers flowers and the sun and the artifacts of everyday existence...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 1
