On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Blood of Drama The American Place Theater has made another important find, Ed Bullins, author of three one-acts, The Electronic Nigger and Others, which recently...
...Their strategy turns into an agonizingly funny romp that goes over, around, and through the thicket of desks...
...Jack...
...The same cannot be said, though, for the careers of Paul Foster and Tom O'Horgan, whose latest collaboration has just made its way north from the Cafe La Mama to Stage 73, by way of Europe...
...Their lithe, careless movements and her jerky, helpless mimicking of them make up a fantastic stage picture, complicated by the presence of Jack who sits uneasily by, trying to decide whether he is being entertained or estranged...
...An example of a director's imagination that has been stimulated by a frugal budget was afforded by Robert Greenwald's two-night staging at Theater Genesis of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's The Alligation (published in Unfair Arguments with Existence...
...Tom Paine, Foster's first full-length play, is formless, pointless, and Paineless...
...Unlike the general run of young playwrights, Bullins does not spend most of his time showing what a whiz he is at creating monologists who gab endlessly in back rooms about their cranky existences...
...The artistic congruity of Bullins and Macbeth promises well for the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem under Macbeth's direction—that is, if some public-spirited citizens and foundations will now help this troupe replace the playhouse it recently lost in a fire...
...The juice of theater drains away...
...Unluckily for him, one student turns out to be a verbose know-it-all who disrupts the lesson and steals the allegiance of the other students...
...Four of the 24 scenes are entitled "improvisational...
...Behind the joshing of Indians off the old Universal reservations and of heroines out of Tennessee Williams, lies a comment about America's effort to live in domesticity with the jungles it sets up in its own backyards...
...Colored sheets are flapped to imitate waves or Marie Antoinette's dress...
...Symbolism...
...At the end, for example, Ferlinghetti's Indian puts his hands to his eyes and keeps them there...
...Indian like peace-pipe...
...Clara's Ole Man, which winds up the trio, is one of the best short American plays I have come across: realistic in manner yet throbbing with weirdness and driven by bursts of extravagant invention that make a definition by genre seem impertinent...
...The audience is left with some husks and dry stalks of noise and frantic gesture...
...All the cords that secured it suddenly become visible...
...O'Connor practically sucks lumps out of a half-gallon bottle of Gallo...
...Greenwald's equivalent for this is an improvement...
...he opens up its possibilities, makes discoveries, rather than falsifying with ornateness and so closing the play off, as O'Horgan has done with Tom Paine...
...And his emendations of the script serve it...
...Later I concluded that, since Paine lived at the end of the Baroque period of theater, the show was a neo-Baroque parody...
...The Electronic Nigger presents a young Negro novelist, Jones, conducting his first evening class in what prospectuses describe as Creative Writing I. Jones proudly tells his mixed garland of middle-aged and youthful students, "You won't be graded on how well you write, but on how you grow in this class...
...Carpin-yea operates bugging devices for the fbi, but if Bullins means us to put any anagogical construction on his play—a metaphorical overlay on the "learning situation"—he does not let it interrupt the hilarity...
...Through this tiny clearing in the metropolis roams Shooky, an alligator with a human head...
...The actors race around, shout, beat drums and insult various wind instruments...
...He gives his attention to the impact of one character on another, the blood of drama, not its gristle...
...Greenwald's designer, whose entire name is Morgan, came up with a ridiculously simple and novel setting for The Alligation...
...the t is silent and the word is pronounced "Carpin-yea," a sly bit of verbal play...
...Ferlinghetti asks for a conventional room...
...The least formally structured of his plays, A Son, Come Home, happens to be the least effective...
...Oh sure, it has an actor, Kevin O'Connor, hired for Paine's role, another for "Tom Paine's Reputation," and a listing on the program of about a dozen of Paine's famous contemporaries...
...like Robert Macbeth, works from within the text and expands outward...
...Clara, u winsome young woman, invites an innocent fellow named Jack to her apartment...
...The dramatics of Clara's Ole Man belong to Big Girl, played by Carolyn Y. Cardwell as a raucous wino with a laugh that shivers the house, and to Baby Girl, whom Helen Ellis gives a veracity that is almost too ugly to watch...
...So does a blind, Tire-sias-like Indian who comes and goes through a zipper in the parachute, and is bitter: "Who stole country...
...Neither do the actors, who nevertheless keep talking...
...During one of these interludes the actors loaf on stage, doing their darnedest to look relaxed as they try to engage the spectators in conversation about Bobby K., Vietnam, how nice it would be if Tom Paine were alive today, and other pressing matters...
...All the characters are Negro, but I suspect the play would (and probably will) function almost as well with a German, Japanese or Turkish cast, provided the director and performers are equal in ability to the present group...
...It has a polyphonic action, with voices from the present and past interwin-ing, and concerns the irreconcilable separation between a mother and son...
...Now and then O'Connor and the Reputation get into a double back armlock and have themselves a harmless bout of wrestling and sweating...
...He get cigar...
...The mimed and stylized staging by Robert Macbeth does little to overcome the embarrassment of the actors...
...Morgan has given this unconventional play a parachute silk: It draws an irregular, transparent boundary around the playing area and juts menacingly toward the auditorium...
...When the play lacks fire the actors hold little gadgets that give off sparks, or sit in a circle with grindstones and give off more sparks...
...The Indian removes his dark glasses and...
...It is an inspired final touch for a performance and a sincere tribute to the play...
...At first, I thought Tom Paine was a take-off on that terrible Broadway musical Ben Franklin in Paris...
...The roles are acted out in bravura farce style by Wayne Grice and L. Errol Jaye...
...He proclaims that he is working on Common Sense and a bystander promptly adds, "He wrote that book...
...Big deal...
...But the mind and emotions starve...
...Once again Macbeth's staging feels its way uncannily into the moods of the drama, from a table conversation in which Jack is relentlessly humiliated by Big Girl to an abandoned rock 'n' roll number done by three punks who drag Baby Girl into their gyrations...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Blood of Drama The American Place Theater has made another important find, Ed Bullins, author of three one-acts, The Electronic Nigger and Others, which recently moved to the Martinique...
...The considerate spectators are then accused by one actor of being afraid of a moment of freedom...
...They do not cohere, so Foster licks them together with sticky patches of literary purple: "Death ran in the streets like a mad woman in the snow...
...The neighbors, evidently White Citizens' Council types, make nasty phone calls that break into Ladybird's Jocasta-like enjoyment of her half-reptile...
...Some of them are made almost bearable for the eyes by Johnny Dodd's clever lighting...
...Pale Face come, Pale Face say, 'You give up country you get own cigar store.' But Indian no like cigar...
...O'Connor speaks some of Paine's written lines and the Reputation speaks others to a mouthed accompaniment by O'Connor...
...But Greenwald does not push Ferlinghetti into obvious "meanings...
...Properties become actors, actors become props...
...She shares the place with Big Girl, a huge rubbery male woman, and with Big Girl's sister, Baby Girl, a teen-aged spastic who repeats any obscenity she hears in a croaking distortion...
...The script seems to ask them to rein in their feelings, and is the more commendable for that reticence, but lyricism, even when suppressed, has too many dangers and Bullins has not negotiated them all...
...The worse thing about Tom Paine, however, is Tom O'Hor-gan's production...
...He smoke cigar, he no get peace, he get heap smoke, fire...
...The last effect has to do with the descent of the guillotine blade...
...New Directions, 118 pp., $1.50...
...It is packed with empty activity, physical rhetoric...
...Macbeth excels himself with the contest between teacher and obstructive pupil, who is twice the teacher's age...
...His name is Carpenter...
...Some of the play's longer, sloppier sequences are supposed, for no rewarding reason, to take place aboard ship...
...He has been raised by a lady named Ladybird who has a Mississippi accent and calls herself Shooky's "Mummy...
...The "ship" consists of two curved bars with struts of wood lashed to them...
...The suspense grows out of the intimidation of Jack, who takes a long time to realize that he has landed in a lesbian nest and has unwittingly challenged Big Girl's ownership of Clara...
...The spectators have nothing to say...
...perhaps the most excruciating moment is Miss Ellis' attempt to pick up and eat a sandwich...
...Nor does Macbeth's direction, which defines all the oddball students without crudely typifying them...
...Then, instead of the "long silence" decreed by Ferlinghetti, Greenwald has the parachute collapse on Ladybird and Shooky so as to bury them in its silk...
...This contraption rocks back and forth and also turns on its center...
...But Paine is represented as little more than a tedious lush and whore-chaser...
...But the heightening of the story depends on the victim...
...Roscoe Orman takes on this part with good-natured, obtuse optimism, trying his best not to be offensive and finding at last that his very politeness does him in...
...All in all, a few minor bones of history and biography are coughed up...
...for the first time, begins to stumble and lose confidence...
...As a substitute for the 18th century's Italianate excesses (fireworks, naval battles behind the proscenium arch, cherubim and winged stags floating by on wires—an avalanche of design to dam and build up a trickle of a play), O'Horgan has provided itsy-bitsy director's stunts that can be devised on (or maybe with) a shoestring...
...Greenwald...
...He comes into his own with the title play...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 9
