On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Author as Authority One of the penalties of living in a society that permits something like freedom of expression is seeing well-known figures constantly strike...
...Our Joshua feels tempted to get a bigger trumpet ("That's not a trumpet," protests the Durante in all of us), and to try to play it inside the walls...
...and a studio impresario, Herman Teppis, who stands in simultaneously for the late Louis B. Mayer and the late God, and sits on a throne-cum-toilet seat gazing down with distaste and utterly false compassion on the lives of his menials...
...What else is new...
...Norman, you're at it again...
...The fringe hero, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, mentions late in the performance that we have spent "an evening watching the damned chase after love...
...There will be misapplied remarks: When the hero whispers something affectionate to his girl friend it will be overheard by a parody of a homosexual who will shiver with delight...
...Of politicians and quasi-politicians (William F. Buckley Jr...
...a movie producer...
...Shaffer uses a conceit borrowed from what he calls in a program note "one of the most celebrated scenes in the repertoire of the Chinese Classical Theater...
...say) we expect these pos-turings and are used to discounting them...
...Britain offers him "too much freedom...
...And it becomes only too easy to understand him quickly...
...It gets harder to tell as Mailer increasingly insists on being his own appraiser, outshout-ing the chorus of mixed criticism, and stepping forward as the man of Literature As Current Affairs...
...But how do we respond to the fiction author who attitudinizes, particularly when he makes his work conform to his attitudes, instead of touching them obliquely, from another plane...
...His homely, lying sentiments about what the public wants, flung off in delectable Yiddish-American slang, with almost-musical hand accompaniments, are slivers of crystal beside the epigrammatic grit that passes for conversation in Desert D'Or between the sub-Voltairean Eitel and his throng...
...If Lee's is the only acting, of note, that may not be the fault of the rest of the cast nor of director Leo Garen, who, I would guess, has contributed mightily to the physical conception of the setting...
...Yet the absence of dramatic high jinks has its own quiet advantages, and Lehman does hand out more than a fair ration of droll and wise lines...
...Unfortunately, she survives and continues to drench Eitel and the auditorium in her verbal waste...
...Shaffer is merely against liars and cowards...
...Eitel's second, and worse, hangup is named Elena...
...Teppis is played by Will Lee with frightening sincerity...
...Which wish leads me to wonder how soon it will be possible to reclaim the splendid author that Norman Mailer??not was, but can be still when he forsakes the attitude of public sage...
...As the play proceeds and enmeshes her in further bouts of hysteria, she becomes less Eitel's burden than the spectator's...
...in her soul she is all virgin...
...A trap door will be left open in the floor...
...The play centers not on O'Shaugnessy but on Charles Eitel, a movie director who would have been more at home, it is said, in the 18th century...
...The first is a script he wants to film on his own terms, for which he cannot raise the production money...
...In the play (Theater de Lys) he strays through the 88 scenes and casually meets good-looking, low-cut babes...
...Close to the end of the original novel, Eitel muses, "With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance...
...it is also, incidentally, popular in the Indian theater, and consists of having a scene that is supposed to take place in darkness performed with the lights on...
...Mailer points this out perhaps to fend off the observation that in The Deer Park he has himself trodden over the same ground as West did in The Day of the Locust, though with his own kind of footwork...
...Most of the roles are priggish, and prigs (in this case, self-commentators) are the most trying characters to interpret??and to take??in the theater...
...And I feel like I can...
...The play, too, wanders...
...Does he give first allegiance to the glorious realm of letters or to the mudflats of prime time...
...But what if the walls remain standing, as they usually do...
...The pimp tells her, "Die in the Niagara of your sentimental shit," and one waits anxiously for the torrent to bury her for good and all...
...it doesn't matter...
...it would be nice to be able to believe him...
...Feydeau is malevolent and funny...
...the acting by George Vosko-vec and Michael Granger is undistinguished...
...For whenever that furiously spinning big wheel Herman Teppis is spotlit the gist of The Deer Park turns brilliant, just as it did in the novel...
...Is he putting himself on...
...He splinters it into two acts, each with 44 scenes (some hardly more than squiggles), which are counted down on a totalizator to zero, or the center of 88 circles of evil, because the Desert D'Or setting of the novel now doubles as the Inferno...
...Why, then, does Mailer create them...
...You got a chip against society," says Teppis to the queer one...
...she gets as far as being touched on one breast and tipsy...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Author as Authority One of the penalties of living in a society that permits something like freedom of expression is seeing well-known figures constantly strike attitudes in public, attitudes meant to denote integrity, commitment, or whatever the big current word is...
...He is seeking God at a time when, as his partner reminds him, "the whole world's gone secular...
...Robert Symonds' direction comprises parceling out the action equitably among the various stage levels and having the refugees slip in and out of jackets, overalls, coats and sweaters...
...When a tight-lipped, non-drinking spinster is introduced, she is clearly going to end up assaulted, brawling drunk or both...
...If only there were more trumpets and fewer megaphones among the characters in The Deer Park...
...Shaffer props up his dialogue with stuff like, "I don't know why I'm telling you all this," and "I've never told anyone this before...
...He is not a facile writer...
...He adapts his 1955 novel The Deer Park, with its epigraph from Gide ("Please do not understand me too quickly"), and makes a messier, more interesting job of it than a professional hack would do...
...A townful of them really would be hell to live with...
...After a not-so-great night with the pimp-Devil, she gulps down some poison and begins her rhetorical sniveling again...
...Fair enough...
...her son, a pimp, who stands in for the Devil...
...And then he turns playwright, producing a dramatis personae of Norman Mailers, nearly all of them intent on explaining themselves into existence, and occasionally succeeding...
...At the Vivian Beaumont the production of The East Wind by Leo Lehman sprawls over the fore-stage and several wooden promontories...
...He once testified before a Congressional investigating committee, spoke brave words, and qualified instantly for the blacklist...
...The honorable antecedents provide only a basic gimmick for Black Comedy, a lengthy one-act primed with foreseeable surprises...
...What if nobody hears the peep of that small trumpet...
...And his stance and the volume of sound he puts out begin to seem more important than the actual notes...
...Is he putting us all on...
...At such moments one longs to yell, "Attitudes, all attitudes...
...In his preceding one-act White Lies, he also comes out vigorously and courageously in favor of universal love, which he prefers to the hypocrisy of a world "full of images??images talking to images...
...She is a golden-hearted but unpaid whore who says, "I keep telling myself that you can't cheat life...
...At the beginning, noting John Dexter's directorial antics, I thought of Feydeau, then swiftly forgot about him...
...You and me, we can lick this thing together...
...Critics have not been sure, for example, how to separate Norman Mailer from his writing...
...Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy (Ethel Barrymore) is neither black nor comic...
...Why doesn't he kick the ontological guff under the table and stay with his strong suit, comedy...
...Its ideas are lifted from Miss Lonelyhearts...
...It is her best remark, and means that she wants to go on testing the sexual capacity of Desert D'Or's male contingent until she is somehow convinced that she is loved for herself...
...The characterizations are not well defined...
...As a result, he had a breakdown and came back to the States to find some den of oblivion, some pleasure-trove...
...Most of Elena's many outbursts relate how good it was with Eitel one night, although another night it was truly great...
...Eitel is a civilized gent whose name may or may not be an anagram of elite...
...He seems finally to be claiming that a refugee is an outcast only if he believes himself to be: "Country of origin??it's a myth...
...Because, goddammit, he thinks they're serious folk and he's a serious guy and biting comedy just isn't serious enough to cope with these national, nay, infernal, matters...
...Not that she is the only character who gushes it...
...Two refugees from Eastern Europe have set themselves up in a London delicatessen, where they are converting the locals to an appetite for such exotica as paprika and Russian salad...
...Eitel has two hangups...
...We all have our rights...
...Mailer, for all his displays of moral prowess, can write beautifully...
...O'Shaugnessy does not need updating...
...Is he now an essayist, a novelist, an old nag in the Esquire stable, a clown, a pest, a conscience...
...Eitel discovers that "sex is time, and time is part of the connection of all circuits...
...a gossip columnist...
...The two men keep diving into their past and coming up with yards of exposition which has little evident bearing on the unhappy situation in the present: One of them wants to commit suicide...
...the guest of honor will inevitably drop through it...
...The pimp states that "revenge is a dish which people of taste eat cold...
...in 1955 he was an ex-flier who had been dropping fire-bombs on "oriental villages" and burning up harmless people and their children...
...In one scene Teppis begs a homosexual matinee idol to marry a movie goddess and so recharge the ratings of both of them...
Vol. 50 • February 1967 • No. 5
