On Stage
GREEN, HARRIS
On Stage MASOCHISTS' DELIGHT BY HARRIS GREEN T M HE FRENZIED applaUSC greeting the end of the Barbwire Theatre's production of The Cage deserves as much critical attention as the...
...That was back when realism was Cluchey's style...
...In addition, his weak grasp of sociology and surrealism defeats his attempt to bring inside the walls of the cell????his only setting????the society that condemns men to such an existence...
...I rather wished for a return of the two guards who, earlier in the evening, had beaten everyone into submission for making considerably less noise...
...During his seizures, Hatchet is given to symbolic fantasizing in which he impersonates Army officers, priests and judges...
...One of the cell's four inmates is a raving maniac called Hatchet (played by Cluchey in resonantly plummy intonations suggesting that he must have burglarized Richard Burton's theatrical trunk...
...Hatchet's reaction is, unfortunately, predictable...
...We are hardly prepared for Jive's confessing, after an extended mock trial, that he did indeed kill his 17year-old girl friend, as charged...
...Its author, Rick Cluchey, who founded Barb-wire after his 1966 parole from San Quentin, acts in The Cage along with five other excons, and????As you must have guessed????it's about prison life...
...Now who, exactly, is the "you" that willed this execution...
...The applause evoked by this can best be described as an eruption...
...The arrival in their midst of Jive, a blond young first offender, sets Hatchet to thrashing about in a clamorous frenzy of methodical madness...
...Acting now in the role of executioner, he clutches the youth by the throat and throttles him to death...
...No one, surely, who sloshed forth this rainy night to see a play "direct from San Quentin...
...On Stage MASOCHISTS' DELIGHT BY HARRIS GREEN T M HE FRENZIED applaUSC greeting the end of the Barbwire Theatre's production of The Cage deserves as much critical attention as the play, the first to be "written by an inmate and produced behind the walls of a prison...
...Middle-aged liberals, to stave off encroaching irrelevance in Youth's Era, will put up with anything: Most of those in the opening-night audience masochistically stayed in the lobby for a precurtain concert by a jazz-rock group whose brutally amplified cacophony only the narcotized young can savor...
...I must congratulate Cluchey for, as the saying goes, rehabilitating two acceptable actors, Robert Poole (Al) and Ernie Allen (Doc...
...rap????with the cast that is "Act II...
...Assuredly, his command of it was limited????doc, for example, spoke in an unlikely blend of clinically correct and flavorless insult ("sadistic son of a bitch") and true gutter eloquence ("your breath smellin' like six tons o' ape shit")????but even erratic realism could tell us more about these characters as human beings...
...As luck would have it, his two black cellmates, Al and Doc, oblige him by donning homemade costumes to appear as acolytes or lawyers, as the muse demands...
...And as I was leaving, nearly everyone was returning to their seats for the ques-tion-and-answer session????pardon me...
...Cluchey slaps down before us all of its sadism, degradation, perversion, and corruption????but with a solemnity that renders these varied terrors thoroughly monotonous within 15 minutes...
...I," he screams, jabbing at the audience with both index fingers, "have done????your will...
...But I never want to see them performing again unless they are in a decent work of art????the only thing that has any business being done in a theater...
...Hatchet's accusing fingers merely tickle the increasingly coarsening sensibilities of an audience that puritanically wants art to be "committed," and conversely flatters itself into thinking any sidewalk scrawl, folksong, wall poster, or riot expressing its commitment is art...
...Nor were lawnorder advocates likely to have seen The Cage when it played the regional theaters of Atlanta, Cincinnati and Philadelphia (which few Minute-men support), or was performed at the first national Citizens' Conference on Rehabilitation of the Disabled and Disadvantaged (hardly a Bircher front...
...Nevertheless, the opening-night audience wolfed it down and howled appreciatively...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 14
