On Theater
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Our Theater of Cruelty This is my last theater column for The New Leader. Rather than sign off with a valedictory, a roundup of reviews, or a pronouncement on the State...
...Critics mourned, and with reason...
...wider seats, wider aisles...
...Their playhouse, financed and decorated with the aid of volunteers, was locked and barred to them...
...a heavier classical training for actors, improvisation by untamed amateurs...
...Rather than sign off with a valedictory, a roundup of reviews, or a pronouncement on the State of the Drama ("Whither the Absurd...
...a committed theater, a university theater, a neighborhood theater, street theater, filmed theater...
...I got to the theater and found it shuttered...
...it procures for the bitch-goddess Nine-Days' Wonder...
...They do what they do and take little account of the consequences...
...Poor mad Artaud and his hyperbole—or was it hyperbole...
...Artaud strove to make immediate contact with the senses and instincts...
...before crossing each one he had to get permission from a guard...
...Everybody in and out of the theater has run across scores of remedies...
...A medley of craftsmen, flung together for a few weeks and asked to form a unit, is disbanded in disarray...
...Obviously I am not defending the quality of the plays that die nor their productions...
...not only the phony awards...
...not only the critic who proclaims everything rosy...
...The results of Artaud's psychological laxative have so far been hard to gauge...
...In response to the violent din, masks, signs, incantation, ritualistic massing of actors and breakdown of the barrier between the doer and the watcher (the entire "poetry of space"), many are shocked, few purged...
...Some weeks ago, I looked forward to the second night of Jack Gelber's The Cuban Thing...
...Soon the Becks began to look like a theatrical conscience...
...There could be no second-night reviews...
...A prisoner in the marine brig could not walk five yards without meeting several white lines...
...not only the producer who bows to poor or middling reviews by closing a show as soon as it opens, or before...
...On this cheerful conclusion, and with a word of thanks to readers and to the editors of this journal for five years of hospitality, I drop into critical limbo...
...It is an unwitting cannibal, a Thyestes that devours its own offspring, even the "insiders" who pore over Variety and take as gospel that 46th Street gossip and rumor enlivened by bad typography, bad layout, bad grammar, and bad judgment...
...The realistic drama had addressed itself to the spectator's reason and indignation, the symbolic drama to his esthetic appreciation...
...The theater could pride itself on performing an act of healing...
...Artaud's essays make it plain (to me, at any rate) that he did not mean—any more than the Becks do —to hurt or punish audiences...
...But what theatrical revolution wholly succeeded...
...I mean the theater everywhere that breathes in an atmosphere of false expectation which I can best sum up in the question, "Who's big on stage today...
...not only the audiences who resist whatever they are not told to patronize...
...By "the theater" I mean not only the critic who attacks actors, playwrights, and directors as people when he dislikes their work and pretends to a feeling of personal affront...
...If the Becks, like Artaud, show us what else is possible and so take their revenge on the heartless, soulless, gutless monster we dignify with the name theater, they have found an apt title for their new play...
...I feel pretty sure that they will not be ingested by him...
...In the end, however, they were martyred...
...In their younger years, downtown at the Cherry Lane Theater and uptown in a loft that held a small assortment of nonpaying guests, the Becks worked for "a theater of symbol and poetry," dominantly surrealistic and plucking inspiration from plays by Auden, Eliot, Picasso, Strindberg, Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein...
...that, undoubtedly, was how they regarded themselves...
...The Living Theater, temporarily settled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music after a spell of expatriation in Europe, offers itself as a topical illustration...
...Perhaps the second-night reviews of The Cuban Thing would have been unfavorable...
...Artaud did burn scars into the body theatrical...
...Among the proposed skin treatments are higher ticket prices, lower ticket prices, free admission...
...In the first act of Frankenstein, a mythical treatment of the history of human suffering, the characters include a hanged man, a girl in a gas chamber, a racked man, a beheaded man, a crucified man, sniper victims, a garrote victim, a firing-squad victim, a guillotine victim and a "heart victim," in addition to a group of semi-fortunates called "the survivors...
...What does it matter...
...An anarchistic note sounded in their work, too...
...But there is something wildly misguided, twisted, and corrupt about our theater, something cruel and debilitating about its waste...
...it was counterpointed by pacifism and protest, and enhanced by some of the mystique of Antonin Artaud...
...Months, or more likely years, of labor vanish and leave as traces nothing more than some shaky memories and some studied insults in print...
...The anarchy glints through clearly in the work the Becks have developed while they traveled in Europe, but it is now overpowered by an Artaudian "cruelty...
...In letting the Living Theater go we lost the one American troupe with its own mind, heart, and style...
...de-unionization, decentralization...
...Shortly before Julian Beck and Judith Malina ran afoul of the Internal Revenue, served jail terms, and took themselves into exile, they had assembled their finest production to date, The Brig...
...If The Connection had been their Lower Depths, a sympathetic view of one parcel of social outcasts (addicts who were waiting for Cowboy), The Brig was their 1984 or R.U.R...
...But the consequences are appalling...
...Seen this way, the theories amount to a sort of revenge on the world...
...Iam not blaming these various parties (how, anyway, can one blame an atmosphere...
...In a note to the latter he called the Comedie "a legalized whorehouse," Moliere, its staple playwright, "a stupid bastard," and in a closing sentence remarked, "You crap on a Solemn Ceremony as an Arab does at the foot of a Pyramid...
...it is a counter-assault on the citadel of oppression...
...But most striking is their tone of increased bitterness, manifested by the cruel acts they stage...
...Frankenstein, though, was killed by the monster he created, while the Becks are needling, and perhaps trying to unmake, a monster they did not create...
...The spectator would then enjoy a new cleanliness of spirit...
...He washed, went to bed and dressed by numbers...
...The theater is especially cruel to artists, and the current wave of theatrical cruelty?as much of it as is sincere and not simply fashionable—has come about by way of artistic retaliation...
...What other medium that calls itself an art takes such a toll of human resources, leaves behind so much wreckage and so little of substance...
...I had read the script, a highly interesting one, and was astounded by the ferocity with which its competence was assailed in the dailies and on television—another example of dissatisfaction with a production expressed by flaying the play...
...Short of a token of extraordinary faith (a revival), the play is dead, the effort and love that went into realizing it are suddenly and brutally dissipated...
...I would like to get rid of some opinions about what our theater is and what it does to people involved in it...
...While hardly a distinguished script, it nevertheless gave the Becks their opportunity to define the enemy, the totally controlled society, and to do so with disciplined rage...
...better script readers, no script readers...
...more funds for "worthwhile" Broadway entries, more funds for the Cafe LaMama...
...In their deployment of scaffolding, screens, light, darkness, and moving figures the Becks prove once and for all that they have no rivals in the scenic and plastic modeling of stage space, and in their ingenuity at making one prop play many roles...
...Outwardly his purpose was to shock the spectator, to help him release his suppressed disgust for the world, and so purge himself of that disgust...
...The anarchism grew in volume...
...A new Broadway hit...
...Every season two dozen or more shows fold swiftly, in three or four weeks, say...
...Artaud's theories are generally assumed to arise from a pathological reaction to the world's cruelties, to the diseases, wars, and other catastrophes it puts us through...
...The theater is a pimp...
...Artaud clung to a prime moral principle in art: If you can't join them, change them...
...I am more inclined to see them as his revenge on the theater...
...Consider the penalties inflicted by a failure...
...some additional Joseph Papps, one fewer David Merrick...
...Yet it was the second-night reviews that saved Gelber's first play, The Connection, and did a great deal to preserve The Living Theater for a time...
...To me the theater appears hardly different from what he thought it was in Paris in the 1930s...
...not only the American theater...
...Before the onset of his insanity he was frequently snubbed by theater people, from Jouvet to the director of the Comedie-Francaise...
...A conscience is an irritant and it was easy for certain irritated people to dismiss the Becks by calling them too-willing martyrs...
...shorter runs, the abolition of runs (repertory...
...The fact is that those hastily mocked-up first-night impressions are notoriously unreliable and the more suspect when they are unanimous...
...The Great White Hope, has a soundtrack that includes ear-numbing noises...
...not only Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-off-Broadway and the regional companies...
...Rather, like every earlier theatrical innovator, he wished to find ways of speaking to them as directly as he could...
...What does it imply...
...they did Pirandello as well as Paul Goodman and other disenchanted American writers...
...not only the producer who milks a hit...
...It brought their anarchy to fruition...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
