On Stage

...An essay by Peter Feldman, who has directed Keep Tightly Closed, explains that "the transformation is adapted from a Second City Workshop device but is not merely an acting stunt It is an improvisation in which the established realities or 'given circumstances' (the Method phrase) of the scene change several times during the course of the action What may change are character and/or situation and/or objectives Whatever realities are established at the beginning are destroyed after a few minutes and replaced by others Then these are in turn destroyed and replaced" Here a comparison with Picasso's aims suggests itself In his words, "I do a picture??then I destroy it In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but lather transforms it...

...views of given personalities, they are infinitely open possibilities, discovered by the actors and accepted or rejected at the playwright's discretion They involve, with each new scene, changing power relationships and transformations of the playing area, as well as of the characters In Comings and Goings different pairs of actors speak the same bursts of dialogue, or the same actors speak the dialogue as different characters, as master and slave, say, who swap identities The result is a fluid, diverse, uncertain performance adorned by none of the old conventionally dignified poses...

...Destroy to transform It is a characteristically modern artistic procedure In the theater every moment lives off the preceding moment, every stage picture is a function of the one before If it can erase, and liberate itself from, that preceding picture, it can concentrate all the drama up to that point m itself, it grows, to borrow Picasso's words again, "more substantial ". Feldman goes on "A member of our audience once said that these contumely metamorphoses left him feeling 'station less,' which is precisely the point " The spectator who does not mind being transported so long as he knows exactly where he is at any given moment will make heavy weather of a journey through a Megan Terry play One who is prepared to take each moment as it comes will find it rewarding, but more important, he will appreciate the cumulative effect of the playwright's juxtapositions...

...The play now appears m a collection with Miss Terry's Comings and Goings, Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place and The Gloaming, Oh My Darling (Simon & Schuster, 282 pp, paperbound, $2 45) In print the stage direction about the touching is a mushy cop-out, a specimen of the cosmic-love-conquers-all wistfulness that perverts so much American writing and turns on the Diggers Wallace Stevens called sentimentality "a failure of feeling," and this is not the only such failure m the four scripts But added up, Miss Terry's lapses amount to only a tiny portion of the book Her feeling for theater rarely ebbs...

...In production Miss Terry's plays have suffered from the actors' inadequacies Her art has drawn its energy from young, hardly trained people, some of whom improvise well, some not so well The matching gestures that have become a mannerism of the Open Theater can get tedious after the second or third exposure The casts break up into pairs of actors, and the weaker of each couple, taking his gestures from the stronger, debilitates the effects of both Drama thrives on opposition, on the collision of op-posits...

...To see what these discoveries portend for our theater one need only consider what happens in most run-of-the-mill plays The characters behave with spurious precision During "Act 2, Scene 1, the terrace of Mary and Sam's apartment, overlooking Gracie Mansion, 25 minutes later," they shift from behind "a blue upholstered chair left center" to "a potted plant upstage right", they tip "a generous jigger of Catty Shark" over "three large rocks " Directors are usually much more aware of space than playwrights, so a director who takes on one of these commodities arranges pretty assemblies of figures at different levels (Sam is given motivation for climbing on a table) or gets the actors to change places feverishly—an?¦e expedient to avoid having the show look static Whether static or whirling with these substatutes for dramatic motion, such a play does not actively occupy a stage, it merely puts up there for the night...

...Over time the actors will probably improve How many plays in the theater at large are well cast right down the line'' What matters is that the Open Theater has helped Miss Terry to find a style How well the style survives will depend on whether she is widely imitated, as I believe she will be, and whether the imitators will meet the standards she has set, which I doubt...

...The time sequence of a play has little in common, after all, with the length of a performance The audience sits for two or three hours while a politician or a pop singer rises from obscurity to discontented fame, or while a 10-mmute killing is described m court for several weeks The theater has rarely observed the unity of time with any strictness, but few modern playwrights have picked up where Stenberg and the expressionists left off in exploring the disunity of time Beckett's astounding ingenuity succeeds in taking his plays out of time altogether, they exist in a temporal no man's land, a Beckett-scope of the questionable present "To be conscious," says Eliot, "is to be out of time " To be theatrically conscious, as intently as Beckett seems to be, is to turn away from the logic of time...

...In Keep Tightly Closed the three actors begin as prisoners, abruptly become General Custer, a Bluecoat and an Indian Chief, switch to Captain John Smith and two followers, to parts of a mechanism, to drag queens, to a clergyman and congregation, without warm and at any time they return to their original roles The transformations are not flashbacks, exact transpositions in time, not merely multiple...

...Miss Terry is less of a dramatic radical than Beckett, but she takes advantage of the theater's ability to move instantly through time backward to what Hot called "before the beginning," forward to "after the end," even sideways to a concurrent scene—as painting, the novel and the film have already done with some persistence She also values the space at her disposal, the cubic capacity of the playing area, by profiting from its height as well as its depth and breadth The celebrated parachute jump in Viet Rock, for example, uses the air above the actors to simulate a descent In The People Vs Ranchman, an unpublished work of hers staged earlier this year by the Minneapolis Firehouse Company, a man accused of sexual crimes is suspended m a net His separation from the other players becomes an element in the performance and diffracts the stage space Only Ionesco and Beckett among the better postwar dramatists have employed stage space more conscientiously than Miss Terry does, Ionesco by filling it, Beckett by emptying it Possibly they made her discoveries feasible...

...Seventy years ago Adolph Apia tend to bring the Irving actor and his inanimate setting into harmony by bathing the stage in "plastic" light The actor moved about m a spotlight while the scenery was almost suppressed and kept vague in form so it would not compete with his presence Lighting since Apia has become a solvent, reducing actors and sets alike to a plastic batter It will color over bad places m a text much as a clever director can, but it will not make an underwritten play belong on a stage Most plays are not composed so that actors can create each setting for themselves and inhabit it Megan Terry's are They may, with any luck, show up the old "realism" for what it is—a poor imitation of imitations They may also lead to a new stage realism, in which the theater makes the most of its intrinsic means...

...As a writer she has prodigious gifts She threads together many varieties of language, from poetry By Albert Bremen Cutting Up in Time and Space and lyrical vernacular to senseless, palpitating vocal noises, she sets each one of her multiple scenes economically, without holding up the drama, her lines are rich with buoying rhythms and unforced song, she knows how to make a harsh satirical comment obliquely These verbal qualities will in due course come in for plenty of attention What I find most interesting about her plays is their exploitation of the theater as a medium, m particular their accommodation to those unreal and neglected dimensions stage time and space Miss Terry has allied herself with the actors at the Open Theater, founded by Joseph Chiasm, and "out of the material surfacing from this work" she has developed a technique that Chalking calls "transformations," by analogy perhaps with the efforts of cubist palters to choose many perspectives at once and so transform, rather than transfer, reality into art...

...ON STAGE The most exhilarating American play staged recently, Megan Terry s Viet Rock, was dismissed by TV commentators and other specialists as unpatriotic, one-sided The author was said to be uninformed about the conditions in Vietnam and the causes of the war (although nobody grumbles that Shakespeare didn't study the Battle of Philippi at first hand) Some people m the front row of the Martinique took offense when the cast came forward at the end and touched the audience's hands and faces...