Hoss Opera and Mozart
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage HOSSOPERA AND MOZART BY ALBERT BERMEL Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime has won an Obie award, but don't let that fool you; it is a fine piece of theater with an almost classical agon...
...Anything can happen...
...Papageno sings his bird-catcher lyric from The Magic Flute as he pedals a bicycle and hurls bags of popcorn at the customers...
...The reigning champion can do nothing but sit tight...
...One was taking notes...
...their deaths are a sign of the times...
...And literally he does...
...Waiting for a kid who's probably just like me...
...Schechner's company, The Performance Group, has no actors to equal the stature, ferocity and versatility called for by the two big roles...
...Stuck in a mansion...
...She finally apoeases him with a plate of Rice Krispies, milk and a ton of sugar...
...Don Giovannfs Zerlina invites Mas-setto to beat her for her sins, backing up the invitation by offering him in turn a chair leg, an umbrella, a leather belt, and a bathroom pump...
...this is, after all, a play about performing...
...She listens sympathetically, then comforts him with a song...
...they are also open on one side, giving the impression of lanky phone booths or listening posts...
...He has now moved from Verdi to Mozart as Dramatist, a varied miscellany of scenes and arias from The Marriage of Figaro, Cost fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute, rekindled by his Masterworks Laboratory Theater at the beautiful Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn Heights...
...The play closes with a song that matches Hoss' opening number...
...This feeling intensifies during the second half of the play, when the challenger Crow arrives for the contest...
...On the other hand, a psychological reading, with the cast living the roles and pulling out all the realistic stops, would turn false...
...A "doc" he keeps on tap gives him a shot to pacify him, and this works for a while, causing him to slump into reminiscences of how he rose to the top, and to babble his head off to his girl friend Becky Lou...
...Some years ago in this column I reviewed his workshop production of La Traviata...
...In numbers of this kind Shepard uses the actor simultaneously as character and chorus, in the drama and out of it...
...In effect, Hoss had foreseen the end from the beginning, and could do nothing but destroy himself...
...Hoss, who likes and admires his opponent, does not really want to fight...
...Yet neither the girl nor the "coke" can reassure Hoss, who finally gets word that the challenger is on the way, driving "a '58 black Impala, fuel injected, bored and stroked, full blown 'Vet underneath...
...Then and there the victor gives the vanquished a lesson on the new deportment...
...The pillars are hollow and have see-through holes that Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore would appreciate...
...Losing, Hoss must begin a fresh career as a "gypsy...
...For a time he holds off, yet ultimately he is forced to make "an even trade...
...Waiting...
...so he reaches for all the items in his armory, the old roles-Such as a 1920s gangster and an ancient delta blues singer-That have served him well...
...At the Performing Garage on Wooster Street Richard Schechner's production of The Tooth of Crime does not try to meet the play head-on...
...The dialogue also occasionally slips into the language of big business, boardroom courtesies and discourtesies, or into boxing talk...
...The ascent of new singers is recounted in jargon purloined from Indianapolis or from those stretches of blacktop where 20-year-olds play "Chicken," often for keeps...
...You spend 10 minutes at the most in one spot, then join the actors elsewhere...
...Wooden pillars with ladders are linked to platforms at differing heights...
...Restless and anxious, Hoss has premonitions of his downfall...
...Shepard's argot intertwines the worlds of commercial rock music, organized crime and car racing...
...at times it nudges Die Meistersinger), Hoss tells us that heroes are dying like flies...
...What Schechner does have is a heartwarming "environment," a theater that looks like a corner of one of Central Park's adventure playgrounds, or perhaps a portal for a "habitat" building...
...The feeling here is similar to the one we experience in Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, where the contestants, Shlink and Garga, refract each other, distort each other, are each other...
...J^f current theater draws from time to time on opera, rock concerts and song recitals for its inspiration, the staging of opera has (thank heaven) lifted many ideas out of theater's bag of tricks in recent years, and Walt Witcover is probably the reason why...
...In the rendition of Cost the two soubrettes, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, marooned just off the coast of Long Island, maneuver a sailboat across the floor (don't ask me how) without losing their pitch or tempo...
...Or, if you like, study the audience...
...Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Meli-sande was once done this way-approximately...
...the champion cannot understand what is happening to him through the three rounds of their combat...
...Or you can watch them reflected in a tilted mirror...
...Just like I was then...
...The most impassioned and relentless of Shepard's plays to date, it depicts the decline and fall of a pop singer who is supplanted by a new performing language, a new generation, a new king...
...The duel between the two principals may be played over your head as you squat next to a pillar...
...In his opening aria (the play is not too far from opera...
...As Crow puts it, "I give you my style and I take your turf...
...The actors considerately wait for the audience to catch up and choose new sightlines before launching into the next scene...
...Yet in the prevailing atmosphere of bonhomie the tension written into the action evaporates...
...We meet Hoss the hero at the hump of his power curve and accompany him down to defeat...
...In it Crow sings that he has "called the bluff in God's own face," and pleads, "Now keep me from my fate...
...Witcover's operating principle seems to be that a singer is a whole body, not mere lungs, lips, and hysterical eyes, while a libretto is a life, not simply a plot structure with pauses for sensation identification...
...Shepard is astute enough not to let the three rounds appear one-sided, though the victory was ordained from the moment that Crow, after entering and inspecting the premises, sat himself in Hoss' chair...
...Amid rearranged pews, stained glass (including one superb blue rose window), and a high-vaulted roof, a tremendous playing area has been opened up to accommodate this modern-in-Gothic revival of Classical art...
...At the dramatist's country home, a converted abbey in Normandy, the spectators followed the players from scene to scene, carrying campstools and stopping off in rooms, on terraces and out on the grounds...
...Strictly speaking, the play and production are two separate occasions that have coincided-which is to say that some of the bite of Tooth goes un-felt...
...The "code" forbids him to go out and meet the contender halfway: "Stuck in my image...
...My guess is: "Encore...
...Just like turnin' the blade on ourselves...
...He consults his "star man" for favorable omens...
...Hoss is itchy, ready for action, looking for a "kill...
...Spaulding Gray (Hoss) will even repeat a sequence if he thinks it went well...
...If the arias sound glorious, they do on recordings, too...
...It could not do so...
...it is a fine piece of theater with an almost classical agon (meaning both "contest" and "ordeal") at its heart...
...What with the balconies, platforms and perforated pillars, you are able to see the show from dozens of vantage points while pursuing the cast around the theater...
...The Performance Group's showing, however, is one of those rare outbursts, like Orlando Furioso, that presents a different production each night...
...Mozart does not intimidate them...
...But Crow beats Hoss because he walks, sings, moves, and grimaces in a new style...
...and sometimes they lapse into operatic hamming...
...A lady in front of me who was savoring this scene more than she dared to admit wondered aloud, "What would Mozart say...
...When he finds that an interloper "rolled the big one" and "took Vegas," which is part of his "turf," he craves to go on the offensive against the "gypsy markers" who are "coming up...
...It was over mine, and an event of that closeness makes the spectator feel not merely welcome but integral to the performance...
...A number of recognizable theater people did exactly that the night I was there...
...As it happens, the company can boast at least two genuine voices, one soprano and one bass, plus a general level of singing and vocal arrangement that ought to arouse the envy of any self-respecting opera company...
...The Performing Garage is no abbey, although it has plenty of charm of its own...
...It is theatrical to its bones, personal, memorable...
...Various interpretations of this accomplished work will be offered in the future and I hope to see them...
...Suicide, man...
...Still, he must defend his crown by trying to put Crow down verbally and musically...
...The plot struts forward without excursions...
...The actors treat the textual imagery with love but they remain outside it, as commentators...
...The designer, Jerry Rojo, has put this structure in the middle of the floor and left odd space around it, as well as heaved balconies and stairways onto the walls...
...But he cannot face starting all over and, putting a pistol in his mouth, he pulls the trigger...
...But whom does he think he is imploring...
...We're fightin' ourselves...
...You go to the MLT to watch the music...
...But these singers can also act and clown...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 13
