From Greece to America
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage FROMGREECE TO AMERICA by albert bermel s W uddenly the House of Atre-us is flourishing again, and open to visitors. The old foundations stand, but the upper floors have undergone...
...Jeff Bleckner's directing ingeniously converts Agamemnon's demise into Orestes' birth by having the one expire in a pit and the other emerge from it to the accompaniment of smoke bursts...
...Publicly financed murders in Indochina and murders by private enterprise in California are the particular crimes Rabe is investigating...
...Rabe loosely follows the outline of the Greek story...
...Orestes materializes in the genial, bewildered likeness of Cliff De-Young, who can act, sing, orate, turn a professional somersault, impersonate normality, and submit to being hoisted 15 feet above stage level in a mock crucifixion, without a net and without losing any lung power...
...many of the youngsters capitulate to the dangers of mysticism with a terrifying abjectness...
...of all things, comedians...
...a member of the Manson "family" recounts the Tate killings...
...On a stage combining a conceptual gymnasium and sports stadium with a battlefield, the actors do not spare their bodies...
...Orestes perpetuates the tradition by doing away with his mother and her lover...
...you must bathe...
...Rae Allen and Marcia Jean Kurtz put poetic feeling behind the double-Clytemnestra's prosy sentiments...
...a director/ orchestrator like Leonardo Shapiro who knows how to spin several incidents along at the same time...
...m our Greek plays also provide the underpinning for a show of athleticism, Children of the Gods, presented by a group called Shaliko for a limited run in a New York University workshop at 111 Second Avenue...
...Or maybe the word is "thyme...
...Mariclare Costello holds to a face of stone and a voice of velvet as the Manson follower who tells what happened in Sharon Tate's home...
...We see her on a balcony making phone calls to her brother below...
...Having chosen the stern material of the classics they are damned if they're going to handle it solemnly...
...This allows Apollo to deaden Orestes' conscience with more drugs and phony motives...
...At last Orestes, the orphan of the title, sings that he is going to complete the circle of his O; he promptly hits the revenge trail that leads into the palace and to his prey...
...In going back for evidence and parallels to Attic tragedy he deduces little and proves even less, mostly because he has not come to grips with the genuinely religious impulses behind the Greek dramas...
...But Electra, who in the myth helped Orestes into action and conspired with him, hardly manages to enter Rabe's play at all...
...Py-lades, his mythical sidekick, here revamped by that gifted actor, Peter Maloney, into a pusher who does conjuring tricks, inducts him into the drug scene...
...There are people who berate im-provisational actors for their self-indulgence...
...and work, work, work...
...All it takes is confidence of the most brazen kind...
...and Richard Lynch embodies an Apollo who has purloined a few numinous traits from his brother-in-Zeus, Dionysus...
...Aegisthus (another of Clarke's roles) hurls Electra to the ground, dives on top of her and pummels wickedly at her ribs and chest...
...Around and above the playing area, designed with utter simplicity by Norvid Roos, stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses...
...Fortunately, a good play explains itself, and this is a good play, pretentious in the best sense (having big pretensions), crowded with exciting scenes and some of the most entertaining soliloquies I know...
...Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers...
...Elec-tra's few phone communications hint that she is about to turn into another Clytemnestra...
...a willingness to risk getting crippled...
...they now glow with novelty, as they should...
...Even though Rabe's Greece is a questionable hodgepodge of impressions, we recognize in his America a fractured and damaging portrait of ourselves: Many of the elders among us unimaginatively fight off all the calls of mystical experience...
...Blue lights furnish a familiarly eerie glow, and a mood of acute deja vu settles, but is swiftly shattered...
...On and off through the evening I kept thinking of Manson's apparently spontaneous outburst to the judge during his trial, surely one of the most astonishing statements ever printed in the New York Times (and buried on something like page 43...
...Orestes and Apollo were speaking in unison in that California courtroom, and one could not tell which of them was prompting the other...
...The old foundations stand, but the upper floors have undergone renovations...
...Electra (Candace Tovar) murmurs to Orestes (Bruce Cobb...
...Hauled out of various closets, the skeletons of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Elec-tra, Orestes, Menelaus, and Aegis-thus have been dusted down and reanimated...
...At the Public Theater David Rabe's The Orphan piles Euripides on Aeschylus on Rabe, Greece on America, fact on fiction, myth on make-believe...
...Although, like most playwrights today, he has a sure touch when he manipulates gruesome effects and farce, in serious speeches he is liable to turn windy...
...Clytemnestra (Margaret Pine) begs her husband for the truth, though every time he opens his mouth she cuts in to tell him he is lying...
...Achilles (Jordan Clarke) races around and around like a quarter-miler and handsprings over two actresses while delivering a soliloquy...
...Orestes thrashes about in his madness, banging his head, back and heels against what is audibly a hard floor...
...then she peters out, member by member, as reports come in that Aegisthus has successively cut off her hands, tongue and head...
...B. Brydon) comes to convincing modern life as a Western farmer whose profits and statewide reputation could not be higher—only, goddammit, Mom and the kids won't see things his way...
...Apollo's oracle did plant in Orestes the duty of killing his mother (in order to force a debate over whether a child's blood line descends from the mother or from the father...
...The Shaliko troupe, however, confirms that hardly anything is more enjoyable than watching performers who enjoy what they do...
...Iphigenia (Mary Zakrzewski) flies up on the shoulders of Agamemnon (Tom Crawley...
...The actors, all NYU theater graduates, have ripped chunks of argument and action out of the dramas and set them to improvised movement...
...to suggest a world of all time and all space...
...at the moment when you expect them to thud together with an almighty crashing of bones—they do...
...After intermission the play belongs to Orestes, a carefree, self-loving flower child who gives way to some murderous impulses, because he has "nothing to work with but the names of the dead...
...Throw in one matinee a week and they would all be drawing workmen's compensation...
...They warm up with one of those coming-to-birth exercises: Wearing red blindfolds, circling one another warily and waving wooden swords to feel their way, they give out wailing sounds...
...No wonder the number of performances is limited...
...Santo Loquasto has set this maze of stories on a tilted, oval platform that is lit in pink and green (for flesh and mildew...
...The rest of the cast equally do Rabe and Bleckner proud...
...and a charming one-lady chorus with a microphone in her right hand and a chrome wand in her left steps in and out of the scenes, attempting to enmesh the past and present by means of a quasi-scientific commentary...
...The latter, for quick identification, have their names stitched on pants or shirts or, in Agamemnon's case, on a lifejacket...
...Thus the moments borrowed from the ancients, especially the debates between Agamemnon and his wife and daughter, seem forced, if not bloated—wistful tries at Statements of Eternal Significance...
...The result is five competing subplots: Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia at Aulis...
...There are already two in the play—one innocent, the other experienced-and between them the Clytemnestras share the wooliest and most nagging lines Rabe has written, such as, "Agamemnon, you smell of time...
...The first half of the production takes us up to the deaths of Iphigenia and Agamemnon, which occur as matching events...
...Two of them rush toward each other...
...her face is now on a level with the gods and she proceeds to chat affably with them about her pending execution...
...Perhaps it is just as well...
...Unlaced and alone, waving a half-empty whiskey bottle and scratching his chest, Rabe's Agamemnon (W...
...The evening is aggressively theatrical...
...Once the players get rid of the blindfolds and fumbly preparations, they turn out to be...
...After 75 minutes of such nonstop punishment, the cast is still able to get to its feet and smile graciously at the applause...
...You better take Aegisthus' head and hide it so mother doesn't see it till she's dead...
...What I am," he said in effect but much more eloquently, "you made me...
...a text on which they can embroider crazy variations to their hearts' content...
...Clytemnestra "sacrifices" (her verb) Agamemnon...
...At Joseph Papp's invitation, Rabe has appended a program note of the same caliber that, like all program notes, should never have been written...
...When they are not on stage they can be observed in cavelike cubby holes under the scaffolding, dragging at cigarettes, changing costumes, remaking hair styles, draining coffee from styrofoam cups, and shouting choral lines into the arena...
...His big-city counterpart, Aegisthus, is a stiff and waxen Greek usurper, but as soon as he relaxes into an accountant-cum-lawyer specializing in, say, municipal bonds, wiretapping, and managing electoral campaigns, he lets actor John Harkins carry him to the hilarious bounds of probability...
...I am still haunted by that speech...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 12
