Timothy Leary's Turn
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Timothy Leary's Turn Outside the Village Theater any night but Tuesday you lined up for an Italian or YiddishAmerican movie. On Tuesdays, however, you saw Dr. Timothy...
...Projections that resemble a brown rose-window illuminate the screen and are punctuated by action-cut stills of a fellow named Harry (after Hesse's Harry Haller) who has glasses on...
...But I did hear a lady on the street afterward murmuring to a group of friends, "No, let's get together at rar shrine.' If Dr...
...He pays unexpected homage to Hermann Hesse, "NobelPrize winning author of the psychedelic manual Steppenwolf...
...There is little to say about The Alchemist (Vivian Beaumont) that has not already been said in other reviews and about other Lincoln Center productions...
...Him-up-there," over whom we must keep vigil...
...And "like an intellectual always does, he kills beauty with his mind...
...Aline MacMahon plays Tribulation Wholesome, a role written for a man...
...Michael O'Sullivan wrecks Subtle's speeches by alternately mugging and melodramatizing...
...He must be allowed to turn the boiler room into a garden where he can cultivate mushrooms with nine-inch heads...
...The sets and costumes are the most functional work Rouben Ter-Arutunian has done in New York...
...Now his athleticism-dead falls, standing at an angle to the ground, freezing in mid-run, tossing the contents of a teacup into the air and accurately putting his mouth underneath-and his sheer comic intelligence make this a performance to compare not unfavorably with that of Ekkehard Schall in the Berliner Ensemble's Arturo Vi...
...A library card may do as well or, since this is a religious service, some sacerdotal token...
...But Brose has hidden reserves of power...
...Poor Harry, a guinea pig if there ever was one, comes in for a lot of reproaches...
...Robert Symonds is a featureless Face...
...Brose has yet another weapon, his most effective one...
...But since they are supposed, like Harry, to have checked in their minds, he doesn't say what they are to meditate with...
...check your newspaper...
...But the evening is Dustin Hoffman's...
...He quotes Life Magazine to the effect that 4 million people in the U.S...
...are now taking LSD, yet in the Village Theater there is a whiff of pot in the air...
...asks Dr...
...In an earlier play entitled Stop It, Whoever You Are, Livings introduced a character who tended a men's lavatory in a factory...
...The director, "Roger Short" (Alan Arkin), has crammed in pleasant bits of business whenever the play's talk slows to a drone...
...Leary advises, and make a room in your apartment into a shrine, and he produces a slogan-incentive: "Turn on, tune in, drop out...
...Harry, didn't I tell you to check in your mind when you came in here...
...By the time the projections stop, it is not clear whether Harry has lost his mind or his senses, whether he is out of the "huge tube" or still somewhere up it...
...His vision, though, is unsteady and in places he will chew over a single idea for 10 or 15 minutes where a single, hard bite would have been both statement and explanation...
...Leary's earnest, tutelary pieties leave one in doubt whether to laugh at the altar or weep for the pews, no such uncertainty arises during the final, lightly scatological scenes of Eh...
...An object that looks like a roast beef spins lazily among magnified fragments of cells that go in and out of focus...
...In Eh...
...Some represent the Garden of Eden, possibly, because they are outdoorsish and God is alluded to, but not as being either dead or particularly alive...
...it is incapable of arousing interest until the last act when Philip Bosco steps in as Lovewit, normally an unrewarding characterization, and shows how swaggeringly entertaining Jonson can be when he is not stooged-up...
...You ask for the press section and, when you have elbowed your way there and are told to show your press accreditation, you fumble in the mystical darkness and produce your Blue Cross membership...
...Circle in the Square) by Henry Livings, the English playwright A clergyman, a foreman and a machineminder munch on mushrooms dipped in milk and have visions of one another (and of a prudish lady) without clothes on, stripped to essentials and delighting in their helplessness...
...Every four hours he or she examines three pressure gauges and puts a finger on an odd button, but Brose insists on the need for a break during his shift...
...Miscasting and misinterpretation by the director, Jules Irving, result in childish illustrations of Jonson's lines...
...He is a first-class eccentric...
...Man versus machine: an apparently unequal match...
...Like all of us, Livings must at some time have heard metal screeching against metal and been reminded of a creature in distress...
...Storefronts and sidewalk disappeared behind well-dressed citizens clamoring to get inside and have their consciousnesses expanded at a fee of $3 per consciousness...
...Girls flash subliminally into view, sometimes their faces, sometimes a close-up of that region from the knees to the navel (the senses...
...is a clutter of unused themes and motifs, firecrackers detonated too late to add up to a worthwhile collective explosion...
...the tube gets smaller, the [unspecified] lights get brighter...
...In a dream of evil and chaos," the clergyman tells Brose, we still hear the noises and perceive the image of the tyrannosaurus, extinct for 17 million years...
...No, don't make it stop...
...For all I know, there may also be a whiff of LSD...
...The beef gets red, then white-hot, then overdone...
...Voices tell him to float to the center, float beyond the body into his cellular memory, while in the background an oriental instrument twangs and drums beat in a copulative rhythm...
...George Voskovec and Michael Granger are temperamentally and physically at odds with their parts, Sir Epicure Mammon and Pertinax Surly...
...Timothy Leary's name big on the marquee, and below it, the street swarming...
...Harry is therefore instructed to go out of his mind and come to his senses, to free the wolf in himself...
...Leary-Hesse...
...Leary then takes over solo again, for his sermon...
...He is the only applicant for the job, a labor monopolist, and can thus lay down his own working conditions...
...He squats in his famous white suit and breathes words into a mike, much as Senator Dirksen and diskjockeys do...
...Didn't I teach you the secret of the chessboard of life...
...In other places he seems to bring on effects (the mushrooms, a burst of psychologese) before he knows what to do with them...
...How can you take a break," cries the foreman, "from doing nothing...
...His antagonist and ward, the machinery, is a complex of hydraulic piping and valves painted a brilliant white and leading away and up to an overhead mess of armor-plating which takes on a threatening red glow when neglected and lets out screams of animal pain...
...We are in for a painful experience, he warns, "like a voyage through a huge tube...
...Go home, Dr...
...Nobody is to browbeat him...
...After Journey of the Fifth Horse he could be nominated as one of our best actors...
...And, "Harry, what did you do to my theater of life...
...there's no way back...
...The production is not merely unfunny...
...The end of Eh...
...his hero is a "gormless nit" named Valentine Brose who becomes the guardian of a boiler room in a dyeing plant...
...He appears to be trying, to judge from the agonized montage shots of him and from the twitchings of a silhouette, which also represents Harry, behind a scrim...
...but it also lives for itself, in the moment of its presentation...
...We still need the dragon-fiend as an adversary...
...He must also turn it into his home by getting his bride to sleep in and share his duties...
...Buttocks are mentioned (or, rather, "no buttocks") so Face slaps Subtle across the behind with a sword...
...This creature is today's dragon...
...But the implication is obvious...
...The Tuesday night scene is now shifting...
...Images continue to whirl and flicker on the screen...
...By this time many people in the press section have dropped off...
...But Livings does cheerfully leave us with the consolation that man, even saddled with his home-bred dragons, does not find the weight of them intolerable...
...For those determined to enter, I suggest a ploy that worked on one occasion...
...Please make it stop...
...Then the show-the service-begins...
...The tube has sharp hooks pointing forward...
...Who am I?" he wonders aloud and puts on a false nose...
...Dapper is said to be the nephew of the Queen of the Fairies, so he prances and simpers...
...Join in the fun with the growing, sensual ranks of "the next religion, which is chemical...
...we make him anew, an armored monster who spews black smoke across the sky, "Mr...
...And he commands a bathetic eloquence: "I'll always love you, Betty, even after I've gone off you a bit...
...Leary explains that "we no longer need messiahs, nor priests, nor martyrs" [applause], so let us simply call him the vicar of LSD, overlooking the British meaning of those initials: pounds, shillings, and pence...
...Leary informs us...
...An intellectual, Dr...
...Livings writes inventively...
...Elizabeth Wilson makes the lady prude out of strict observation and excruciating bravado...
...As played by Dustin Hoffman, he wears elevator shoes, shirt cuffs that come down to his thumbs, a jacket that reaches barely below his waist, a red cap rooted to the crown of his head, and a face full of smirking dumb insolence...
...Comedy can accumulate...
...I witnessed no mass psychedelic conversion, nothing that resembles the aftermath of a Billy Graham act...
...He also counsels his congregation not to rush out blindly on to Second Avenue, to stay in the theater and meditate, all night if they wish...
...Stop," Harry shouts, unsure whether he is on a trip or in a transport, "I'm drowning in blood...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 22
