The Art of Craft
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Art of Craft Near where the Bowery begins, on Bleecker Street, a resident acting company is shaping for itself a personal style in stagecraft. The event is...
...He puts three musicians on the scrap heap: Emanu, a trumpetplayer who stands in for Christ (the Hebrew name Emanuel means "God with us"), Topé, a clarinetist who betrays Emanu with a Judas kiss, and Fodere, a mute saxophonist...
...Her former boy friend comes to the inn and woos her...
...There is no raised stage...
...During the evening dishevelled English comes fitfully through on the City Center's transistor radios...
...They meet an actor who holds a flashlight with a red, revolving beam, a Charon who does not so much steer them to their places as silently defy them to sit down...
...and at some point an actress may brush past his knees...
...and to operate on the solitary spectator, rather than on the audience as an undifferentiated whole...
...All the characters are guilty of deception, and the title thus carries the uncannily modern implication that they are equally to blame...
...The City Center recently accommodated the Bavarian State Theater of Munich...
...The APA-Phoenix displayed an aptitude for broad comedy in Scapin, The School for Scandal and You Can't Take It With You...
...The set dominates the floor...
...Goethe wrote Die Mitschuldigen with daunting precocity when he was 18...
...Büchners Woyzeck makes a severe contrast, although the production by the same director, Hans Lietzau, is, if anything, even more satisfying, owing to Heinrich Schweiger's interpretation of the title role...
...The girl blames the theft on her father...
...Peter Brook and the various Happenings-about-town have tried in their own ways for comparable results...
...to start that performance as a ritual and stealthily inject into it a disquieting, realistic quality...
...the scene is self-contained...
...The event is heartening...
...he is no more than six inches from the action...
...There are 23 scene changes, each managed in a blackout which is, in practice, needed for reconsidering the previous scene, so curt and densely packed is Büchner's writing...
...Dilla must be Mary Magdalene...
...some have brought along their own partners, and the grunts, panting, sighs and groans of fornication emerge from the set like an aural nightmare of lust...
...The story has an innkeeper's daughter married to a wastrel with heavy gambling debts...
...Even more of an innovation is the fighting, which is actually a part of the set...
...the wall is at his back...
...The set by Jurgen Rose is the interior of a bleak, gray-white, bricked-in cube, its walls cut away toward the bottom and draped in black...
...The set, put together by Jon Burnett to Dunn's design, stands as an original metalwork sculpture, certainly as much of one as the steel and iron boxes made to Donald Judd's specifications and shown earlier this year at the Castelli Gallery...
...The actors, when they come on, are caught in similar, jerky, magic-lantern movement...
...In its current showpiece, Fernando Arrabal's The Automobile Graveyard, the director-designer Joseph H. Dunn seems to have several related aims: to bring the auditorium onto the stage so that the two are knit into a unit enveloped by the performance...
...A policeman and policewoman repeatedly circle the playing area either on a motor cycle or-disguised as athletes-at a knees-up trot...
...Dilla is able to lift a man to fever-pitch in about five seconds...
...He is supported by a capital cast, and outstandingly by Max Mairich as the Captain and Elisabeth Orth as Marie...
...The occupants of the cells within "ring" for service by pumping a car horn...
...Not all the occupants need her...
...The production on Bleecker Street is not for noveltyseekers...
...Very simple...
...Well, it's a crucifixion, and crucifixions are meant to be watched...
...Despite these ingrown handicaps, Dunn's production effects-noises, music, the fingers of light, the smell of the motorbike exhaust-coalesce with the acting of William Barry as the policeman, Charles Parks as Emanu, Michael J. Luisi as Topé, Irja Jensen as Dilla, and Joseph K. Moriarty as the bellhop to enlist the spectator's excitement...
...It is French, almost Moliéresque, in its polished tone, its mockery of the characters, and its effortless Alexandrine scansion...
...The director admits the spectators one at a time through a curtain...
...They point inward...
...for the famous barber shop sequence with the Captain...
...Flickering green, red, amber and white lights pick out the broken, curved landscape of the set, feature by feature...
...This is light composition in the tradition of Meierhold, Rabinovich and Vilar...
...Arrabal's attempt in The Automobile Graveyard to construct a parable about goodness manifesting itself in the midst of squalor has the shoots of some interesting notions, but they fail to sprout...
...When, unfortunately, will we see it again...
...Once seated, the spectator-participant cannot take refuge behind someone else...
...Most important, perhaps, the director is aware that sets, lights, costumes and other appurtenances are theatrical only insofar as they contribute to the focal element in theater, a sustained relationship between the actor and each member of the audience...
...the bellboy, played by the actor who greets the audience, scrambles out from under a hood to deliver drinks, food, and a whore named Dilla...
...The staging also begets its own evanescent symbols for decay, mechanization, and coercion- evanescent because they must be created afresh for each performance-which transcend Arrabal's unhelpful language and stale characterizations...
...As they flash on and off, the hues and answering shadows seem to shift the hump of metal spasmodically back and forth...
...they are never wholly out of the darkness or in the light...
...Yet they take the long speeches, some of them poems in their own right, without crowding the words...
...The play is an out-and-out treat...
...He took the story from a newspaper account of a poor soldier's murder of his mistress (much as Dostoevsky borrowed from criminal proceedings), and turned it into the finest dramatic protest ever against the psychological debilitation caused by poverty: man against man-made fate, and losing...
...The gambler steals the boy friend's gold...
...In the end they capture Emanu, flog him till he is wet with blood, and hang him up to dry, dead in a whitewall tire...
...They are used in the crucifixion-flogging to project a shadow-play on a blank wall at the rear: A magnified, imprecise silhouette raises a knout and brings it down, discovering terrible joy in the exertion...
...It is translated in the program as The Accomplices, which is literally correct and also meaningless...
...Judy Holliday once made a remark that describes this so-called translation: It would have been funny if it wasn't so amusing...
...The two-tier set has a waferish look, but the performers scamper up and down stairs and hang dangerously over a fragile balustrade as though they were on granite and insured against every mishap...
...for the hovel of Marie, Woyzeck's common-law wife...
...But the heedless Christ-come-lately business does little to dignify a play in which the dialogue is hardly ever nourished by ideas or poetry or braced by a whiff of anti-poetry...
...A rectangular box slides forward to serve as a barrack room for Woyzeck and his comrade, Andres...
...Since the closing of The Brig, when Judith Malina and Julian Beck took their Living Theater to Central Europe, New York has had no stageconscious troupe, only drama-conscious ones...
...The Two Bleecker Street Theatre Workshop is an altogether smaller, fiercer enterprise...
...It is a high tribute to the group to say that one feels no sense of letdown in coming to their Woyzeck and Die Mitschuldigen after one has seen the Hamburg Theater doing Faust under the late Gustaf Gründgens and the Berliner Ensemble in Brecht's Coriolan and Arturo Vi...
...he puts the blame on her...
...But APA has generally confined itself, as has Lincoln Center, to homely presentations of wellestablished plays...
...Strangely enough, the impressive acting and directing have to contend with a drastically insufficient play...
...If he finds a substantial play for his next production, a work that caters to the spectator's mind while the staging engages his emotions, Dunn may come close to realizing that phenomenon-frequently talked about, rarely achieved-known as total theater...
...The trio supplies music for the occupants of the graveyard to dance to (i.e., brings them The Word...
...All the principal lights are adapted from automobile accessories, white headlights, yellow directionals, red tail fights...
...but Brook has worked in fairly conventional playhouses, and the Happenings have been mostly odd concoctions, flung together by painters who enjoy making like actors for the benefit of people who dare to join the Evergreen Review underground...
...Schweiger's chalky make-up, his defeated stance and restless hands, the helpless manner in which he shambles out of sight, giving us Woyzeck's indifference to his brain and his body, mark him as an actor with astonishing sympathy for the role...
...Gradually one finds that the scrap heap is a sort of lodging house-cumbrothel...
...But for him it will prove a singular experience, an occasion to be lived through alone...
...It consists of a hemisphere of automobile scrapfenders, wheels, headlights, bumpers, grills, hoods, doors-welded together, embellished with tires, lashed for security to two Corinthian columns, and giving the aspect of a monstrous fungoid growth...
...His seat is one of a single line of chairs that stretches along three walls...
...The performance is already under way...
...The play's brevity and disillusionment exactly match the temper of our time (it was written 130 years ago), but I have never felt this so sharply before when seeing earlier productions or the murky German movie made about 1950 or Alban Berg's opera version, for which the composer wrote his own libretto...
...a good woman is she, says Emanu, because she gives herself freely to men...
...I would hesitate to recommend it to anybody but a conscientious theatergoer...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 9
