On Stage

...The Living Theater is best known for its controversial production of The Connection, Jack Gelber's play about a group of dope addicts waiting for a "fix...

...In our own time, with the commercial theater mainly concerned with formula musicals and comedies, we desperately need permanent workshops where new ideas can properly germinate...

...In addition, a con-man flings paint on a square of glass and, with a rolling pin, presses the blobs into a fine takeoff of an abstract painting which the actor auctions off to the audience...

...The Apple, which the author himself calls "a comedy about death and madness," takes place in a restaurant...

...The large boulevard theaters have generally adopted these ideas, been nourished by them and sometimes" even developed them...

...The actor stuffed an important secret paper into a firstrow spectator's hand and told him, "Hold it until I get back...

...This time, however, these words are indiscriminately spotted throughout the evening and do not seem useful in characterization as they were in The Connection...

...ON STAGE A Satire on Satires By Robert Lewis Over the years, in Russia as well as throughout Europe, it has always been the small studio theaters that have initiated new forms in stage technique...

...Now don't come back without wanting something...

...It all ends up as bizarrerie, not "poetry of the theater," Jean Cocteau's phrase that is quoted in the program...

...Today, this scenic style is used on stages the world over...

...In the new production, Gelber and the Living Theater continue to "involve" the audience forcibly in the play by using violent images not often heard or seen in our bourgeois theater, and by spilling the stage action into the very laps of the audience...

...Here is where off-Broadway should come in...

...Experiments in acting styles could only have taken place in studios: Vfevolod Meierhold with his bio-mechanics (a non-realistic style of acting based on work movements), Eugene Vachtangov directing The Dybbuk (stylization derived from Hasidic dances), and so on...

...In playwrighting, the whole school of so-called anti-plays (Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett et al) now enjoying popularity in the commercial playhouses was born in the little art theaters...

...The only existing establishment of this kind in New York is the 10-year-old Living Theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, a permanent theater group devoted to producing non-commercial plays in distinctive styles...

...Actually, such devices seem more old - fashioned than avant - garde...

...With Bertolt Brecht, whose influence Gelber has acknowledged, we are not only kept awake and thinking by theatrical devices, but in some way educated as well...

...After all, "taking the audience in" is as old as Thespis, and, when justified, has always been accepted...

...A first night souvenir-hunter won it for $90...

...What is important, however, is the audience's response after it has been shaken up...

...Although Gelber admits knowledge of Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' gags, he obviously has aimed his shots higher...

...Gelber serves us, among other strong dishes, a spastic, a hustler, a homosexual nihilist, a paranoiac bigot who was formerly a silent screen actor, a female mannequin who is stabbed in the genitals, and a liberal spicing of four-letter words...

...Years ago, an in-the-round production in the Soviet Union by Meierhold's pupil, Nikolai Okhlopkov, included a scene in which a Red Army soldier was suddenly recalled to the front...

...At the end of The Apple he says directly to the audience: "You got to want...

...Recently, it introduced the same author's latest work, The Apple...

...Anna, the OrientalAmerican girl in The Apple, puts it nicely in the third act when she says, "I'm tired of satires on satires...

...In the second decade of this century, for example, when Jacques Copeau, with his tiny but celebrated Théâtre du VieuxColombier, needed to perform two one-acters on one night, he devised a "unit set" which grew out of the architecture of his own tiny Parisian theater...

...When we are not, the same embarrassed and nervous giggles are heard that attend Olsen and Johnson's carryings-on...

...Robert Lewis directed Brigadoon, Regina and, most recently, Kwamina...

...The action in the audience includes the bigot's entrance, accomplished by having him seated in the house from where he later rises in protest and walks up on stage...

...On opening night he was seated next to a well-known critic and his sudden explosive interjection sent that worthy gentleman reeling into the aisle, visibly shaken...