In Pursuit of Relevance

...but it is not without pertinence to those who demand of art that it embody a life style, struggling against societal repression, bringing man in maturity to an acceptance of the libidinal peace of childhood...

...Consider this opening sentence of the essay grandly entitled "The Language of Laughter": "Stage laughter, once the gaudy barometer of America's feverish leap into the twentieth century, now limps in search of a new voice...

...Well, if anyone can, it is John Lahr...

...stupid, and those patrons of the arts who make such shallow, fashionable demands are not interested in works that enliven and recreate the great Western tradition but in mingy little scrawls, smears, yelpings, and gropes that conform to their own grubby esthetic...

...For it is precisely these qualifications that give Lahr his only qualification as a critic...

...No, all of them share the same gloriously redeeming social feature: They are now\ Or were, in the three years this collection was appearing in Evergreen Review...

...Seems Shakespeare, too, eschewed the big climactic stroke for maddeningly small-scale Pinter effects...

...A filmmaker as brutal and tedious as Godard is a perfect victim to be covered over by that prose Miss Sontag grinds out in her cement mixer or whatever it is she uses...

...He writes: "The audience expects a large gesture--to see the King skewered and writhing in violent action...

...with which he merely "grazes" Claudius--according to Lahr...

...Examine the statement and immediately it starts to fall apart: There were certainly capitalist "ideals" at play in The Little Foxes, but what was "vague" about the aspirations of the Hubbards...

...I can cite only one example, since that was all Lahr could find, but it should tell you volumes--about Lahr...

...He religiously quotes all the current subculture heroes, including Mailer, Norman O. Brown (note the above reference to "libidinal peace of childhood"), Marcuse, and McLuhan (we are assured that Pinter's language is "tactile...

...Just as Pinter has his characters in The Homecoming argue about something small (a cheese roll) in a moment of crisis, so Shakespeare, in the final moments of the duel in Hamlet, directs the audience's attention to the naked, poisoned point of the sword in Hamlet's hand ("The point en-venom'd, too...

...Grotowski's notion of drama was ideal fertilizer for Richard Gilman's gnarled, juiceless writing...

...Instead the gestures are small, almost intimate...

...were failures as artists, revolutionaries and mythmakers...

...or worse...

...He rather fancies Pinter, too--but there's no contradiction to a mind like Lahr's in supporting both the improvisers, who roam the sidewalks and the aisles, and a writer, whose words are intended for the proscenium, that fourth wall of Lahr's typically tough and typically dated title...

...Occasionally he tries to justify the stuff he's pushing in terms of the classics (at their expense), as when he likens Pinter to Shakespeare...

...A closer reading of the play might have shown Lahr that Claudius is not a character to be taken at his word...

...New playwrights--if one may call them that--receive encouragement rather than criticism, and the performances are barely mentioned, much less analyzed...

...Putting aside for the moment the matter of whether Lahr is referring to the way actors simulate gaiety or the audience's reaction to Kaufman & Hart, let us pity that poor barometer, so worn from measuring leaps (feverish ones, too) that it has not only pulled up lame but gone mute to boot--punishment, no doubt, for being so ostentatious and carrying on in such a manner...

...Sometimes the obvious appears as a searing question: "Is it possible for intellectual dishonesty to masquerade as the creative act...

...Besides, Laertes has obviously been stabbed in a vital spot, not grazed, since he dies before Hamlet...

...Clearly he is striving desperately for the fabled "relevance" in pronouncements like: "Melodrama is a form which gives structure to vague aspirations and justifies capitalist ideals...

...Always the essays take the stultifying form of an unrewarding ramble amid quotes guaranteed to impress the readers, not to mention the editors, of Evergreen Review and break up just about everyone else...

...They just wanted more...

...McLure's description--and, for that matter, McLure--seems vulgar and...

...Lahr usually draws the by now familiar, and still false, analogies between the kind of theater he favors and the tendencies of other contemporary arts (as if those were good examples to follow...

...It certainly sounds like a Pinteresque duel...

...There are other faint stirrings of dubiety in Up Against the Fourth Wall, places where Lahr seems to be turning his back, slightly, on all the bourgeois-jolting achievements he has been hailing ("Hair will have its influence, but most likely for the wrong reasons," begins the final paragraph of several devoted to the show...

...Abstract Expressionists and action painters were fit objects for Harold Rosenberg's polemics about "the tradition of the new," which set all of them up for oblivion once something newer came along...

...The havoc so trivial a standard can wreak on criticism is best shown when Lahr rhapsodizes over Michael McLure's The Beard, a two-character affair set in the afterlife that "attempted to gorge a new, more physical consciousness, a Platonic tidbit" (it ends with Billy the Kid going down on Jean Harlow): "McLure's description of the play (T see [it] as a poem in meat on a shelf in space.') may seem preposterous or mystical...

...Lahr alternates between attempts to pander to this essentially philistine readership and to wow it...

...Yet Lahr fans must not holler, "Cop out...

...he could well be attempting to cover up as long as possible the fact that he knew about the venom...

...He even lumps the Living Theater's hate-filled quasi-happening, Paradise Now, in with "other literary quests--Thoreau's Walden, Melville's Moby Dick, Twain's Huckleberry Finn...

...A mere publicity man would never admit to such qualms...

...Lahr invariably undercuts himself in this manner, since neither writing nor thinking are disciplines in which he excels...

...Almost every one of these 15 essays begins with either a muddle of metaphor ("A radical theater is not new to America, nor is the ferment against Broadway's mooning over its middle-class rainbow") or a restatement of the obvious ("America has always been fascinated by stories about itself...

...He also uses "bourgeois" as a pejorative very often, perhaps to convince his public that he, too, is fighting the good fight for the life style...

...Reviewed by Harris Green Our purported trailblazers in the arts today generally get the critics they deserve...

...And how, really, can one make a "small, almost intimate gesture" out of Hamlet's forcing the poisoned wine down Claudius' throat...

...It must come as something of a relief for his readers when Lahr finally admits what should have permeated the essay: that the Becks & Co...

...Why not Claudius, too...

...Now street theater, the Living Theater, the Open Theater and all the other substitutes for theater that have sprung up like weeds among the flower children on the West Coast and in New York's Greenwich Village have their ideal spokesman in John Lahr...

...But the stage direction that editors attach to Hamlet's action is, "Stabs him"--not "Grazes him"--and Claudius' insistence that he is "but hurt" is no proof he's been grazed...