On Stage

...On Stage DEBITS AND CREDITS BY HARRIS GREEN Richard schechner, Acadernias master of the rebels, has rounded up another pack of wild ones and set them to prancing, yowling, snapping, and pawing in his latest improvised extravaganza, Commune Collectively they are called The Performance Group, the same drab, redundant name given a previous Schechner company (It met the inevitable fate of a troupe both radical politically and wooden artistically It splintered ) Schechner hopes his newest herd will be more cohesive, and so do I, I would hate to run into one of these players m anyone else's production The entire bunch deserve to be stranded where they are now, m a sublimely inconvenient garage well below Greenwich Village I just wish we could also confine with them the pernicious trends in contemporary theater that this brutish production flaunts As spelled out by Schechner in an article for the Sunday New York Times, these trends include "environmentalism, organic use of the whole space, simultaneity, audience inclusion, nonlinear mise enscenes, rigorous personal discipline, textual montage, whole body-and-self involvement' All, he boasted, were "pioneered" by the original Performance Group (and derived from Jerzy Grotowski, he might have added, just to give debit where debit is due) I will not explain m suitably low English what each lumpish term means since the reader can obtain a much better idea of the tedium, simplistics and brutality of Commune by considering that more familiar word, "pioneered " I will simply caution that an evening wasted at the Performing Garage bears the same relation to theater that a log cabin does to Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufman House in Bear Run, Pa In the absence of seats, the audience must either squat on the floor or perch, legs a-dangle, on the scaffolding hung about the high-ceilinged room But the accommodations are far less primitive than what passes for a play As the audience enters, the young cast of nine is already caroming about, performing calisthenics and mock sexual assaults, and once Commune heaves itself under way, the actors expand upon these preliminaries only by offering frenzied little skits Occasionally they foist themselves on the audience, scampering up to chat with a knot of cringing spectators near the ceiling They yell a lot, too, mostly about the Sharon Tate murders and My Lai 4 These atrocities, Schechner insists, are related "to the typical American experience the violence and religiosity and sexuality seeded in our hearts " Well, that's a thought, surely, perhaps to offset its banality--as well as its dubiety--his performers pile on a great deal more violence, sexuality and outright animalism than one might have expected from persons allegedly repulsed, not intrigued, by such matters Did they really have to strip their least charming actor--who had been letting it all hang out, anyway, as he scampered about in an insecurely buttoned suit of tie-dyed long underwear--and put the now ingloriously naked wretch through a typically American crucifixion...

...When, dear...

...I think not I am aware that Shakespeare indulged m some rather grisly stage management in King Lear, but he counterbalanced his cosmic horrors with incidents and characters of pristine goodness, and an artistry that m itself affirmed humanity's grandeur Commune's closest approach to human warmth comes in one of its calmer moments, when the players advance upon the spectators to chat, or to extend an invitation to join them in a merry little march around the scaffolding But that is hardly surprising Actors egoistic enough to presume that their improvisations can fill an evening with intellectual and esthetic delight would also be solipsistic enough to presume that close contact with their enriching personalities--even a deep gaze into their never-quite-focused eyes--can offset a night of shrill, frenetic viciousness Nor can we expect much better from academics like Schechner, a professor of drama at NYU He has succumbed to the multiple pressures now warping higher education into an increasingly permissive experience, instead of a challenging expansion (Fear of bemg scorned as "irrelevant" by their young charges has led some professors to outdo Rolling Stone reviewers in their salutes to the artistry of Jagger or Dylan ) Schechner, in his Times piece descnbmg how he and his new pack began creating Commune last summer m "New Paltz--a small college town just below Woodstock" (I'd have thought it nearer Altamont), kept repeating "young" or student" as if these were incantations, synonyms for "purity" (certainly not for "immature" or "beginner") The New Paltz kids' acceptance of his group performance somehow sanctified it His sole reference m this article to the hard-won Western tradition of individualism was an assertion that "decisions regarding the mise en scene were part of the director's function " That will give you an idea of who the great creators are going to be in this "pioneering" new theater And the playwright'' Schechner would have us believe he is no longer needed "Theater is an un-literary art, a here-and-now experience Its finest expressions are immediate, gestural, involved, inclusive, and participatory " The deviousness of such special pleading, m which the performance has been confused with the thing to be performed, is too obvious for comment Some words do manage to emerge m Commune amid all the "gestural" and "unliterary" "here-and-now", the high point of the evening, in fact, is a paraphrased scene from Richard III More often, though, the Group's utterances are lost in the maneuvers Nor is there any mention of the new American spirit that has reportedly brought 2,000 communes into being, and what we are told about America is either shallow or idiotic ("In the beginning, all the world was America") Yet the insufficiency of what is said is rendered less culpable by the manner of its saying, the dialogue is delivered so painfully that I almost wished there were none The only progress I was able to detect m Schechner's pioneering since his big hit, Dionysus in 69 (which he recapitulates here and there), is his increased contempt for the audience To enter the playing area, you must remove your shoes, piling them by the inside door (Later, the actors may put them on for their jolly romps ) This, the professor explained, is the only way you can give to the actors as they give to you But The Performance Group does not give anything You pay to get in, and you may well pay with sniffles the next morning for sitting around in exposed feet If you wish advice on where to sit so the actors cannot get at you, I recommend your living room Steven Tesich's The Carpenters, the latest extended one-acter produced by the American Place Theater, seems a masterpiece in comparison to Commune But it is not, I fear Tesich fails to provide a steady drive of incident--a weakness Eugene Lesser's direction underlines rather than offsets--and what incidents there are needed more verisimilitude to increase their symbolic density The Carpenters, a solid, stolid American family, discover that son Mark, home from college, has hidden a bomb ("a red bomb, with a nasty black trim") in the basement He says changes are m order around here and, incidentally, Father has to go Father (well done by the ever dependable Vincent Gardenia) strains manfully to see his son's point of view, but the instinct that made him build his house (where all the appliances are now malfunctioning) also makes him kill Mark, in a struggle that looks heart-breakingly like an embrace I dare say better plays will be written about the current hideous clash of values that has already sent the happiness of so many families toppling into Generation Gap, I doubt that many will have Tesich's bold simplicity The boldness and the fairness is all the rarer tor coming from a 28-year-old Yugoslav who first arrived on these shores 14 years ago He betrayed his origins only m one linguistic oddity, a reference to something "amputated out of me", much of the time he showed a sharp and often antic ear ("Mom, was I a bastard...

...I hope that American Place, which showcases people because they are reputable writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Niccolo Tucci) or because they are black (Ed Bullms, Charlie L Russell), will continue to encourage Tesich merely because he has dramatic talent...