Passions Pretended and Preserved
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeige The presentation of Oh! Calcutta! at the Eden Theater has placed the seal of chic approval upon the explicit theatrical documentation of certain matters our ancestors...
...Still, when we compare the people who inhabit Strindberg's world with the sexual gymnasts of our most advanced drama, it seems that the modern debauchees have lost much of their character along with their clothes...
...their existence is of no conceivable benefit to anyone...
...He and his wife, a former actress with genteel pretensions, have made enemies of all the other local inhabitants...
...turns out to be a rather antiseptic conglomerate...
...And in his work he preserved this passion for us to behold and wonder at...
...Meanwhile, across town, in the cellar of a Chelsea supermarket, the Roundabout Theater has revived some of the pre-'60s frankness— Strindberg's The Dance of Death...
...it was fairly elementary stuff, yet Lahr, while never uttering a foul word, implied with a deftly raised eyebrow here, and a vocal slur there, an infinite panorama of satyriasis...
...The Dance of Death reminds us that larger men have walked the earth...
...They did their job so thoroughly that the seemingly indestructible idols they attacked are now only dust scattered by the winds of time...
...Yes, friends, we've done it...
...Indeed, it is the depth of his attachments that the young today, despite all their openness, might have difficulty understanding...
...We've come through with the latest theatrical triumph of 20th-century civilization...
...This kind of drama is not easy to perform, and the Roundabout's relatively inexperienced actors do not always rise to the occasion...
...The only secrets are the tactical diversions they use to bushwack each other...
...While he rejected the 19th-century worship of domesticity, he was not as sanguine as the Ibsen of A Doll's House about the meeting of the new man and new woman...
...Today their revolution has reached an ironic conclusion...
...See masturbation mimicked before your very eyes...
...We like to pretend we can do anything and mean nothing...
...they expend their piddling emotion in fits of titillation, ending not with a bang but a giggle...
...Unfortunately, we can never recover the great sense of daring and boldness the original audiences experienced in watching the works of these playwrights...
...Though he criticized the feminist mystique, he spent a lifetime grappling with individual women...
...He lived in the teeth of the tempest and felt the currents of life whirling and shaking his soul...
...his work suffers from the very intensity of his vision...
...And all to the accompaniment of the grooviest music, the most modish scenery, the very smoothest refined choreography...
...Ours is an outwardly cool age...
...But his was hardly a cold nature...
...Yet his sincerity and the depth of his uncovered emotions are still imposing...
...Strindberg dwelled upon sex as hard and ferociously as any writer...
...Actually, Oh...
...They are scarcely noble people...
...We often try to escape before the harsh clamor of his truth unnerves us...
...They have been fatefully joined for 25 years, the only possible release being death...
...Come one, come all, and see a girl's behind exposed for minutes on end, while a gentleman of education and culture edifies you with a discussion of its socio-philo-sophical implications...
...In this piece he explores that lifelong battle between man and woman that society calls marriage...
...This is your opportunity to hear those four-letter words so dear to adolescent libidos, uttered in all their stark glory before a mixed audience...
...It must be admitted that Strindberg has his limitations...
...There is no gradual unfolding of emotion as in Ibsen and his successors, but a pitched battle right from the start...
...Thus the couple is superbly isolated and can concentrate on trying to destroy each other...
...Men as ardent as Strindberg are extremely rare...
...The energies of the combatants are too great for the usual well-made play, and they never try to deceive themselves or hide their malignant feelings...
...It may be that our cool ways are less taxing, but I doubt that he would have desired such an existence...
...Strind-berg would not have welcomed the current vogue, with men and women dressing, looking and acting alike...
...As she climbed down, she lifted the straight folds of her blue dress, showing her perfect feet and slender ankles, looking at me furtively with a sidelong glance, tempting me to the betrayal of her husband, soliciting me with that treacherous, that voluptuous smile I had seen yesterday for the first time...
...Gaze upon the private parts of both men and women...
...I also have seen this occur at the performance of a contemporary play, presumably somewhat behind the times, by a Central European dramatist...
...Both are utterly selfish...
...The casual manner in which the actors flip aside their dressing gowns in the opening scene of Oh...
...the writers seem so stunned by their newly acquired right to exploit nudity and obscenity that their usual skills are hobbled...
...at the Eden Theater has placed the seal of chic approval upon the explicit theatrical documentation of certain matters our ancestors preferred not to mention publicly...
...With the covers ripped away, with men and women free as never before to say or do whatever they want, they do not meet in titanic gusts of liberated passion...
...He is an inveterate poseur, but I think the Captain has much of this self-dramatizing tendency, even if Jensen does not succeed in suggesting the scarred strength the character must have needed for a lifetime of struggle...
...The sketches by such literary lights as Samuel Beckett, Jules Feif-fer, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, and Kenneth Tynan are extremely labored...
...Perhaps as the forms of society disappear (and clothes are merely a metaphor of many currently unobserved barriers) men no longer have any means of defining themselves as individuals and dwindle into puppets, mechanically simulating an inner life with a more vivid show of flesh and fashion...
...I once saw Bert Lahr deliver one of his old sketches...
...Here men struggle to avoid exposure, and when they are naked shriek in agony because it is not so nice, not so pretty, and it means everything...
...and their life together is a hell of mutual torment...
...sums it up nicely—"Well, here it is—so what...
...Now we smile at such strong sensual obsessions...
...Actually, the situation is static, and the sole change is in the increasing violence of the protagonist's emotions...
...Suddenly I imagined her naked by letting the soft lines of her clinging dress, lines which I knew by heart, be transferred to a white body...
...The dialogue will not embarrass you, but the level of the passion makes you squirm in your seat as the spouses strip away one another's moral pretensions, revealing their own deformities in the process...
...Pitching everything so high, he has little effort to spare for grace and control...
...Perhaps one of the Minsky brothers was correct to complain (in the New York Times) that these intellectuals are giving sex a dreary name...
...Whereas Strindberg is anything but casual...
...I wonder, too, how the current freedom would seem to the overwrought Swede who wrote in his autobiographical A Madman's Defense: "When I raised my eyes from the pages, which I had read without understanding a word, I seemed to see her as in a vision coming down the spiral staircase...
...Several ardent declarations in The Dance of Death were greeted with embarrassed laughter...
...Here you are made uncomfortable not by a display of flesh but by the baring of souls...
...Yet nothing shocks, nothing grates, and no one will have the slightest cause for offense...
...Yet their conflict is not a drab family squabble...
...And when he is sick, she lets him see that she wants him to die...
...As the characters tear at each other, all the while rending the air with mighty battle cries, they bare gaping wounds that pull them toward desolation and death...
...The very openness of their strife presents certain formal problems to Strindberg, who relies on such accoutrements of melodrama as intermittent heart attacks and the Captain's taking possession of a rival's house and furniture to maintain some semblance of progress in the plot...
...The entire evening is a gala both of nudity and gentility, completely open and frank...
...In one past fit of anger, he tried to drown her, an incident witnessed by their daughter...
...In the central role of the Captain, Sterling Jensen prances and pouts his way through the evening...
...Ibsen and Strindberg, the great dramatic emancipators, while they agreed on little else, shared a common mission of castigating the hypocrisy of 19th-century society...
...Since Catherine Bernbach as Judith shows occasional touches of the right instinct, I should like to advise her to forget completely that she is a well brought up young lady, and concentrate on the fires smoldering within Judith, who is very much her father's daughter...
...The husband, a self-made man who would like to trample the world beneath his boots, is a failed Army officer relegated to the command of a small offshore island...
...His play lumbers along, freighted with portent...
...At the center is Strindberg's usual domestic broil, the only difference being that this time the male is the blacker of the two parties...
...the plot has a great specific density and creaks and groans ponderously under its immense burden...
...Brian Hartigan is sufficiently forthright and perturbed as the couple's only friend, but the women all have a tendency to drawl their speeches...
Vol. 52 • July 1969 • No. 14
