On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel All Out Ridicule The Play-House of the Ridiculous, Inc., is a repertory club. Before the play gets under way, a technician invites members to cheer and clap with abandon...
...She, in turn, jumps off a roof...
...The reception clerk, who has a six-inch smile held in place by a battlemerit of upper teeth, offers a few imitations...
...Another analogy that comes to mind is a Marx Brothers movie with the harp-twanging and the Kenny Baker/Florence Rice/Allan Jones interludes blessedly excised...
...But someone complains, "Everybody in Europe's done Jane Fonda...
...The current script, Big Hotel, was written by Charles Ludlam, a useful actor cast here as Svengali, Cupid and Aristotle...
...All guests checking in at the reception desk are sent to room 214...
...It confesses to no principles, chops no logic, forswears every rationale...
...We learn that one of them, a movie star, "has just had a lip job...
...He wears a puffed-out brassiere and can sing across a fair range of castrato notes...
...The director, John Vaccaro, steps forward to apologize for a delay: The company was at Columbia University the night before...
...The film shows Ludlam and the other actors trotting about in the raw...
...A man and woman want to get a divorce...
...What about this protruberance of mine...
...As it manifests itself in Broadway gush, advertising and other forms of Pop, it is mostly soft-centered, sometimes to the point of gutless-ness, and concerned with merely establishing itself in a furtive way...
...He reads a passage from The Poetics off a paper tissue, and when he comes to the section having to do with the spectacular effects that depend more on the art of the stage machinist than of the poet, he blows his nose in the text...
...Big Hotel is more radical: It chooses to entertain maliciously but will not purvey a message...
...Yet it's actually something else...
...A show like America Hurrah belabors the idea that our lives are depersonalized...
...As a sort of last word on audience participation, a multiple laundry line with trails of grimy cotton dangling from it is drawn backward across the seats...
...Between these individual turns the whole troupe gets together for company numbers...
...Later they sit meekly behind tall masks while a film version of Lady Windermere's Fan is projected on to the back of the set...
...But they want him to do Bette Davis or Henry Fonda...
...It is inconsistent, picking out its targets by hazard—that is, by unconscious design—and frequently picking on itself or changing its mind...
...Big Hotel has many of the hallmarks of Surrealism...
...For this reason, wherever the company goes it meets with cries and laughs...
...Hence the name of the company, which I'm satisfied to have seen in action once...
...Shortly after being introduced, he is said to have been stabbed, hung, strangled, shot and otherwise murdered...
...light flashes on, and also to help out with painting and moving what little scenery there is...
...Blinding lights come up...
...Finally, it does...
...He wants to do Edward G. Robinson...
...Cenci replies, "Au diable ton Dieu...
...its wispy hangings envelop the auditorium...
...Such undirected ridicule is ridiculous...
...But a person, whether homosexual or not, who has a taste for Camp often wants to be known by that taste alone: I like, therefore I am...
...For that a Groucho, Harpo, and possibly a Chico, not to mention a Margaret Dumont, would be necessary...
...But in some ways it goes beyond anything that writers like S. J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman would—could—have dreamed up...
...It proves to be a harem dance in the manner of early Cecil B. De Mille, with veils, snaky limb movements, flashing lights and music that only a screen pasha could stomach...
...Big Hotel refuses to admit that taste and identity have any significance whatever...
...in fact, recurs throughout Big Hotel...
...The non-husband, a take-off of Charlie Chan, is named Magic Mandarin...
...Ludlam also plays Marshall McLuhan and Rosenkrantz (yes, Guildenstern's sidekick), but the program assigns these roles to "Porpo Glumpwaart," Ludlam's second incarnation...
...And it does verge on campiness in its techniques...
...Somebody asked an Indian ambassador to the performance, in the course of which Mrs...
...The password of the play is not God is dead, but Let's kill God, and every time He shams dead let's revive Him and try again...
...And the implication that there is no difference between the sexes...
...George Washington's lines consist mostly of asking when the Babylonian sequence is coming up...
...The implication, for instance, that in the theater life and death are interchangeable...
...But lands intact and resumes her career...
...I remembered Donald Wolfit's Lear...
...Gandhi was impersonated by a male actor...
...Other fictional characters in the play include Adolphe and Henriette (presumably out of Strindberg's Crimes and Crimes), Leontes (of The Winter's Tale fame), George Washington and Shirley Temple...
...Or that one of yours...
...Sorting out some male from female performers becomes increasingly difficult until the last item in the show, a "Babylonian sequence," for which they strip down to basic underwear...
...Before the play gets under way, a technician invites members to cheer and clap with abandon whenever an applause...
...The Play-House of the Ridiculous could, in truth, use several virtuosi to do justice to its better episodes and to compensate for the sloppier ones...
...He is tired, but not too tired to face the plaudits, and certainly not dead tired...
...However, he returns from the dead—by magic—and joins his non-wife, a Russian ballerina...
...But she could have taken comfort, anyway, from the thought that practically everybody in the world comes under comic fire during a Ridiculous play...
...What lies beyond the Marx Brothers, most conspicuously, is the phenomenon that preceded them in Europe, Surrealism (of which Ar-taud was for a time an adherent...
...All through Big Hotel gods of various degrees of importance are consigned to other places and the God is continuously assailed...
...Gandhi is his specialty...
...There is a compromise: He will do Jane Fonda...
...The analogy is borne out—or perhaps a debt is acknowledged—when the ballerina suddenly dons a Groucho nose, mustache and spectacles, and circles the stage swiftly in the familiar rubbery crouch, taking those bent-kneed, low strides...
...At Columbia a small crisis arose...
...To which Ludlam might counter-retort: The differences are appearances, and appearances are mutable, especially in the theater...
...From Monday to Wednesday Vaccaro takes his players on occasional tour, rather like one of the old Spanish cambaleos, traveling with "a bundle of clothes that a spider could carry...
...now the lights have to be re-mounted...
...Affection for these interludes is a good example of Camp...
...I must be interesting...
...In an earlier review I suggested that Camp is a perverse reverence for the ugly and worthless...
...It pleads to be tolerated...
...Camp may be strange, even weird, though it always has a touch of obsequiousness about it...
...she got back from Europe with a new pair of lips...
...Five characters enter in succession, deliver serious parting monologues, put short knives into themselves, then scramble to their feet for the finale...
...Watch this . . . In Artaud's play The Cenci Lucretia exclaims, "Mon Dieu...
...The work proceeds by interrupting itself, and the characters keep changing character...
...One may retort that there are visible differences...
...The dis-guised-sex motif is its staple form of theatricality...
...Transvestitism...
...Vaccaro has managed to put on a genuinely negative piece of work, refreshing and disrupting to watch...
...it opens into a vinelike reticulation...
...the curtain falls and Wolfit grabs hold of it and gets up, to prove how strenuously he has given of himself...
...the spectator is left blinking in his place, drowned in sound, with strings of cotton looped over his ears...
...Four or five actors, the director and the gentleman responsible for sound and graphic design hold down a variety of other parts, some of them doubling, and one, Sterling Houston, actually quintupling, if that is the word...
...It opens in the lobby of Big Hotel where people gather in arbitrary groups and carry on simultaneous conversations...
...Iwouldn't claim for an instant that Big Hotel stands artistic comparison with any of the great Marx Brothers efforts...
...It is further borne out by the set itself: two gold-colored telephones, a tall old Spanish chair, red carpeting, a revolving door and an elevator with gold trim, the very picture of staid, innocent hostelry waiting to be raped and revealed by Marxian onslaughts...
...After the King dies, Kent and Edgar make their sad speeches...
...My preferences are bizarre...
...American homosexuality has yet to find its tough-minded Proust or Gide, its defiant Wilde or Cocteau...
...Nor is its female impersonation the usual kind of "homosexual art...
...Big Hotel doesn't...
...Most people who see this show will automatically call it "Camp...
...In another sketch they crowd together onto the stage like an audience...
...Gandhi probably did not hear about the incident...
...that particular night she was studying election returns— sorrowfully, if the pictures in next morning's papers were any indication...
...There is no discernible plot or story...
...The best-known actor in the company, Mario Montez, gives us Lupe Velez (but not Dolores del Rio) and Trilby to Ludlam's Svengali...
...Only one hint of evil is noticeable: an upholstered chair that has a curious look to it, until one becomes aware that the legs, arms and back are made of gigantic ram's horns...
...Its home base, a thin room at 13 West 17th Street, serves as a squeezed-together foyer, box-office, auditorium and stage for the club on weekends...
...The difficulty is that they're not married...
...One of these begins with the intoning of a genealogy from the Bible: "Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and . . ." Meanwhile, men and women come leaping into view and pile up on top of each other, with everybody begetting into the act, groaning and pumping...
...A man's identity—that something or other that perturbs so many writers today—is a product of his intelligence, skills, temperament, habits, sociability, and other capacities and qualities...
Vol. 50 • March 1967 • No. 6
