Three Characters in Search of a Fountain
PHILIPSON, MORRIS
On STAGE By Morris Philipson Three Characters in Search of a Fountain Red Eye of Love. By Arnold Weinstein. Staged by John Wulp; presented by Sam Cohn and John Wulp. At the...
...It has the form of the episodic story about a man who drops everything to find an answer to the question, "What is life...
...The "snappy" dramatic form sometimes has the awkwardness of home movies, and the simple sets are no more obtrusive than the minimum necessary props of a vaudeville stage...
...The man becomes irate and shouts, "You mean to say I've gone to all this trouble only to have you tell me that 'Life is a fountain...
...If human life requires such ambitious dreams as discovering "the key to the Universe," there is no escaping necessity for a Martinas...
...He goes from philosopher to philosopher, until he ends up in the presence of an ancient Jewish wise man, who tells him, "Life is a fountain...
...Weinstein's farcical love-triangle follows three characters through a period of years, from the 1920s, the depression and recent wars, to the present...
...There is Mr...
...Red Eye is a pleasantly acted, clownish amusement, written with intelligence as well as the desire to entertain...
...The author of Red Eye of Love had the discretion not to spell out the punch-line of the play as a whole...
...Weinstein is a scoffer...
...This kind of Jewish humor finds extensive expression in the repartee of Mike Nichols and Elaine May and the cartoon characters of Jules Feiffer...
...Funny not by virtue of humorous situations but because of its wit, the play's special vigor derives from the author's irreverent refusal to treat serious subject matter (the search for meaning, and the accommodation to necessity) in a solemn manner...
...But the clear-cut structure of incidents has one purpose: to satirize the conventional ways that human beings have for whistling past the graveyard...
...Most of all, Red Eye of Love spoofs the sober-somber stories of conscientious young men seeking eternal salvation...
...After all of Wilmer Flange's attempts to find "the key to the Universe," the audience is left feeling: "Who said it was locked...
...when all three decide to start a new life together, Martinas proposes to give up the meat business and go in for fish...
...The spoofing of all those D. H. Lawrence-type novels that end with escaping worldly ills by going to live "far away among the Navajos" is unrelenting, but also poignant in the way a zany Marx Brothers routine is often touching...
...If "all the world's a stage," Weinstein seems to say, it is not tragedy that's being performed on it, but a chain of pyrotechnical jokes that illuminate the darkness...
...Selma's passions are divided among Flange's attractiveness, Martinas' supply of food and escape into the movies...
...Social critics and other imaginative writers have tried to derive from various works of art a contemporary "image of man...
...In his first produced play, a comedy called Red Eye of Love, Arnold Weinstein, a poet, offers his contribution to their raw material...
...Flange begins with the idea that his profession—bookkeeping—is "the key to the Universe...
...But it is inherent in the form of the comedy...
...But there is more than ordinary wit expressed in the costumes (e.g., a butcher's jacket metamorphosed into a frock coat), and in the music and visual puns...
...The parody of trying to find "the key to the Universe" through creativity — expressed by Flange's attempt to create dolls that will grow sick and die—is coldblooded ridicule, but not bitter or vicious...
...Many of the scenes are extended anecdotes having the structure of jokes, and so does the play as a whole...
...it is "spectacle" in the sense that it delights the eyes and ears as well as the mind...
...He has a passion for bombastic poetry and a girl named Selma Chargesse...
...At the Living Theater...
...O. O. Martinas, an unlettered businessman, bent on making a fortune in his department store exclusively devoted to varieties of meat...
...Selma lives first with one man and then the other...
...There is a young accountant named Wilmer Flange, who has a similar passion for Miss Chargesse, outweighed only slightly by his passion to discover "the key to the Universe...
...All this is presented with good spirits and slapstick hilarity...
...And the wise man answers, "So it isn't a fountain...
...he lampoons a hundred objects of criticism...
...Here the image for a human life appears to be a sequence of nightclub routines, a program of comic "revue" sketches...
...Most of the subsequent action is concerned with his various investments of hope in discovering "the key" by creating and selling dolls, playing Santa Claus, writing military history, studying musicology, becoming a partner with Martinas in the meat business and, lastly, in escaping to live "far away among the Navajos...
...There may be no better solution available, but at least there can be fun in the way one registers a complaint...
...It is that peculiar self-conscious lack of confidence in one's cliché ideals that enables one to make fun of them gently because of the resignation in the attitude that asks: What good would it do to make fun of them brutally...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 28
