Pop Up
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Pop Up For at least 20 years the theater and fiction have been hospitable to pop art in their use of dialogue. Now, with the production of America Hurrah (Pocket...
...he also felt that American theater has undervalued the expressiveness of body movement, and that actors could contribute a great deal more to a performance in inventiveness and cooperation than they were generally asked for...
...It represents a preoccupation with the ordinary...
...Remember when we used to...
...The steal comes full circle...
...The last episode, "Motel,' is played by actors inside papier-mach?© skins that enlarge them into monsters...
...TV," for instance, consists of a recorded evening of television, sliced up and served cold...
...Older generations have had their fill of them, while young people feel remote, if not closed off, from the textbook fervor and heroics...
...she comes gradually to believe she has herself been killed...
...The artist's memories of childhood, of comics, radio programs, old jokes, movies, the hit parade of 1937, foods and seasonings, baseball players, make him both yearn for and despise the triteness of the props in his background...
...A pop gag is not thought up, it is lifted and listed-a line from an ad, a political slogan-and it evokes, not admiration for the writer or performer but instant recognition...
...They are determined to shoot for difficult, collective results by treating the cast as a vigorous unit...
...The noncommittal character of pop art is restricting them...
...thus it is no better and no worse than television...
...They cut off the applicants' replies in mid-sentence...
...it amounts to a communal scrapbook, a family identification, a search for something culturally, innately, unmistakably American...
...an accumulation of chairs (The Chairs...
...Camp is a perverse affection for the grotesque and the ugly, a vomit reaction to the standards of correct taste set by, say, House Beautiful...
...A man asks an analyst about his troubles in getting television all mixed up with his life...
...The second episode, "TV," is a development of the fantasy-killing-reality bit with the analyst...
...These popular experiences serve as an equivalent for the literary reference...
...America Hurrah, like Megan Terry's Viet Rock, started as a project at Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater...
...a knife (The Lesson...
...A series of telecast items-news, soap opera, commercials, a singer who is Kate Smith plus Ethel Merman plus Sophie Tucker but not as bad as any one of them-runs in parallel with a story about three employes of the rating company so that the television and "real" situations overlap...
...she tries in vain to make contact with the zombies there to tell them her escort has just been killed in the street below...
...They walk jerkily and their questions sound as if taken verbatim from the personnel files of some vast, computerized corporation...
...It is not, in two words, specifically theatrical...
...Chaikin, an unusually good actor, explained in an interview in Tulane Drama Review some time back that he had grown impatient with American acting instruction, which seemed to put more emphasis on what the performers thought they were capable of than on what could be done with the roles...
...Writers dwell on their diets during pubescence (egg creams or Southern cereals, depending on whether they are in the pages of New York magazine or the New Yorker) or the Third Avenue El or a decayed schoolhouse in the Midwest, vanishing phenomena, all...
...But pop has also seeped into non-fiction...
...it has to be immersed in acid to produce sauerkraut...
...Pop arises from nostalgia and disgust...
...furniture that crowds somebody out of an apartment (The New Tenant...
...And since the American past is so brief and chewed-over, pop artists have turned their attention to the fleeting here and now...
...they draw on the hardboiled American writers of the '20s and '30s, Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett, for the making of their flat, spare, reportorial styles...
...They still have to weed out-or transcend-that nostalgia...
...It may be a consequence of all that poking into the recondite details of the Civil and Revolutionary Wars...
...When an actor hands the spectator a statement from a newscast about Vietnam, it is a statement...
...America Hurrah seems to be an angry show but it doesn't have the single-minded rage of Viet Rock, possibly because it is the product of an ensemble mind, the components of which were relying on one another to put the necessary point on the shafts...
...Yet the main theoretical sources of American pop seem to be French...
...it adds no substance to this not-very-new plea for the restoration of life in American lives...
...The Broadway play's pop references usually bring a faraway look to the upper half of the face and a mechanical grin to the lower half among the older and middle-aged spectators at whom they are aimed...
...she falls to the floor...
...At present they are reproducing them with movement thrown in...
...For the first, "Interview," directed by Chaikin, the stage is dressed in sheets of formica separated by chrome strips, to indicate the impersonality of "The City...
...Other tableaux follow...
...they keep upper and lower teeth bared in demonic smiles and their heads tilted as a frigid, condescending token of friendliness...
...By coincidence, this type of writing and camerawork calls itself "objective...
...Since the outbreak several years ago of new painting and sculpture by Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and others, the characteristics of this art have not been hard to pin down...
...It becomes a different entity only when measured against the event it refers to or the attitude of the man uttering it or the attitude of the man it is addressed to...
...The TV performers wear horizontal lines over their make-up to distinguish them from the employes, but in all other respects the pseudo-events are on a par with life...
...With practice they may clarify their stage technique until it improves the scripts they choose...
...But Chaikin and Levy can boast of some firm achievements: a freshness and freedom in the acting, especially of two of the girls, Ronnie Gilbert and Brenda Smiley...
...William Inge's last comedy, Where's Daddy?, was so jammed with these allusions that it might as well have been called Where's Pop...
...We are in the viewing room of a television rating company...
...The evening is based on three scripts by Jean-Claude van Itallie, each a comment on American life in the '60s, each a collage of pop remarks...
...Now, with the production of America Hurrah (Pocket Theater), pop reveals itself as a self-contained theatrical form...
...A prime recent example of pop fiction, only one of many, is Irvin Faust's The Steagle...
...Neither "TV" nor "Motel," both directed by Jacques Levy, uses the combination of mime, dance and incantation that promises much in Chaikin's first, masked section of "Interview," but is not sustained...
...Just the reverse...
...the analyst answers, "Hostile, blah-blah, penis, blah-blah, mother, blah-blah, money...
...He presents them with a mosaic of (generally unrelated) experiences he has in common with them...
...But thanks to the obfuscations in the glossy weeklies and Partisan Review, pop got stirred up with camp...
...One source is the theater of Ionesco, whose plays depict the tyranny of objects...
...One, a female motel-keeper, rattles off a monologue about the delights of the modern motel room, while the other two smash her room to bits and chalk messages on the walls that would make a white poster in the New York subway blush...
...Four interviewers throw cold, random questions at four bewildered job applicants...
...they stare, listen, smell, even lick, but never quite taste...
...Tennessee Williams' characters frequently hark back to the era when you could buy a nickel soda or a whatnot candy...
...Chaikin converts it into an eight-part chant and has the actors crisscrossing in a stiff-kneed 20th century minuet...
...Finally, they decapitate her and stamp away into the auditorium brandishing her torn-off arms like clubs...
...The other source, a double one, is the new novels of Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Duras, and the new movies of Resnais and (again) Duras and Robbe-Grillet, in which people themselves become objects, materially at one with their settings...
...The name "pop" is apt...
...The interviewers are masked above and around their mouths to look like store-window mannikins...
...But van Itallie's pop writing never grows selective enough, personal enough, to cope with depersonalization...
...They appear to be half in love with the easeful death they want to deplore...
...A girl has come to a party...
...Pop art is a reflection of America trying to make the most of a short history...
...Sliced cabbage is cabbage...
...It denotes that the artist is sharing with his audiences, not instructing them or introducing them to novelties...
...a corpse that keeps growing (Am?©d?©e...
...A woman wants to know how to get to 14th Street but nobody takes any notice of her...
...They do this, perhaps, out of a wish to fix in their chronologies some relics of the past, toeholds for remembrance, objects that help take the place of values during a time of swift, baffling transitions...
...Pop has nothing to do with bizarreries...
...There is a barn dance during which the participants open and close their mouths to let one word out at a time: "Excuse-Me-Can-You- Help-Me?-Sorry...
...so is the brutish, mindless frenzy in the motel room...
...just as the glistening great hamburgers and human figures of pop sculpture are definite, unarguable, a revulsion from the ambiguities of abstract expressionism, so pop jokes and theater are simple, direct...
...The spoken material is in itself of minimal interest...
...Such works are unFreudian...
...They are never as puzzling as wit and physical humor, which amuse us because they make us marvel...
...etc...
...The simultaneity of the scenes in and out of the video tube is an imaginative notion...
...Just as pop painting has the bony outlines of comic strips...
...Theatrical pop, the new realism, is distinctively American in its tone and nimbleness, even though pop movements in painting got under way elsewhere at about the same time as the one here...
...the novels, like dispassionate animals, shuffle around people and things...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 24
