How Absurb Can You Get?
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider How Absurd Can You Get? The theatrical metaphors of tie "Theater of the Absurd" have become increasingly respectable with age. This year, from Broadway's The...
...it has to be solid gold...
...Its heart has been wrapped in fashionable tinsel and swallowed up in the neon flytraps of Broadway...
...To make sure we get his point, Kopit includes some dangerously carnivorous Venus fly-traps and even a ferocious (cat-eating) fish with his two quite different but equally destructive human females...
...The latest in the convention of the unconventional is Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet And I'm Feelin' So Sad (Phoenix East 74th Street Theater) by Arthur Kopit, only recently out of Harvard...
...Each of the already elaborate scenes is preceded by elaborate and unrelated comic-surrealistic still movies—to make sure we'll know we're supposed to laugh...
...In the Phoenix marriage, I'm afraid, we have gained a title but lost a play...
...Labeled "A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition,' Dad is a combination of The Visit and Suddenly Last Summer, an extravaganza on the now-familiar theme of the female emasculating the male...
...When furniture is supposed to break once, it breaks twice...
...The two men in the play are timid, helpless, tongue-tied, literally held by invisible bonds...
...Yet the young playwright clearly possesses a gift for literate language, a keen wit and a real sense of the sardonically theatrical...
...Instead, we have Jerome Robbins —the first production of a straight play by the brilliant dancer-choreographer—and Jo Van Fleet...
...Almost everyone has forgotten that Strindberg wrote The Ghost Sonata a halfcentury ago, and that it was Chekhov's plays, rather than those of either Beckett or Ionesco, to which the term "tragic farce" was first applied...
...Kopit's Mamma surpasses even Edward Albee's "Mommy" as a tumescent monster, though all of Jo Van Fleet's posturings and furbelows cannot quite convince us she could really stuff her late husband and put him in that closet...
...Dad, or ODPDMHYITCAIFSS, or what have you, had been awaited for two years, during which it passed under various auspices and various directors, ranging from José Ferrer to José Quintero...
...The result this time is lavish, slick, chi-chi imaginative, colorful, and all wrong...
...Frank Corsaro finally directed it in London last summer, with Stella Adler as "Mamma" (Madame Rosepettle...
...Intentionally or otherwise, Dad is too much and too often played like a musical comedy without the music...
...Beyond its free-wheeling and apt title, Kopit's play has little originality...
...His work requires a real marriage between content and style...
...And his Rosalie is a pink-cheeked Gorgon, deliciously whined and grimaced by Barbara Harris, an enticing new comedienne from the Second City...
...Not only is there a hammer in Mamma's handbag...
...More hopefully, we have lost a play and gained an author...
...We do, but at the filmstrips more than the lines...
...We are, in addition, bedazzled with blinking lights, follow spots, gauzes, and a leaping piranha...
...This year, from Broadway's The Caretaker to the recent repertory season at the Cherry Lane, they have been accepted by their audiences, continued to confound the critics, and survived pigeonholing by Time magazine...
...Perhaps aware of being ill-served in the London production by too strong a devotion to naturalism, Kopit has allowed the play to go too far in the other direction, and wound up being distorted by an overdose of stage pyrotechnics...
...What is wrong with all this, however, is that Robbins has consistently gilded a hothouse lily: the script...
...The result was evidently a disaster, and neither reappears in the current production at the Phoenix...
...The scene in which she gets her man (Mamma's boy, Jonathan) to bed, complete with stamp collection, coin collection and corpse, is hilariously macabre...
...And at one point, during a long apologia pro vita sua by Madame Rosepettle to her captive Commander Roseabove, the light dims completely on the Commander, leaving Madame to do her number "in one...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
