On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage FROM THE SHALLOW TO THE SUBLIME BY LEO SAUVAGE Shows having limited engagements are often over before a review can appear in a biweekly magazine. Some of these productions must be noted,...
...Of course...
...and another replies, "Gamma...
...Even two hours are too long since, as one of the characters says, "I have never heard such nonsense in all my life...
...Initially motionless, they eventually begin to undulate their upper torsos to the growing pitch of mechanized snoring that is, in turn, infused with bleating, screeching, scraping, rasping, and piercing sounds...
...Early in the current season, Ben Kings-ley was hampered in his one-man Shakespeare evening by a weak script called EdmundKean, which pretended to be a play...
...She is looking for something," the chorus confirms, as if aware that by now we would not expect so natural an action...
...The Playbill credits read, "Music by Raaja Fischer...
...Gamma...
...There is only one scene in The A rchae-ology of Sleep that is not purely insane...
...The first of the four was the worst, yet also typical of the lot...
...At times this is supplemented by bits of discussions that actually make sense, but mostly we get more of the Living Theater's shouting, bleating and toneless reciting...
...These include, he tells us, "homages" to Cocteau, Mal-larme, Picasso, and John Lennon...
...If few of them can be called actors, all of them are well trained and physically disciplined...
...The final Living Theater exhibit was Ernest Toller's Expressionist epic, Masse Mensch...
...Playing the role of "The Doctor" on stage, Beck has his pupils and patients illustrate what he recites about the phases of Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma in the cycles of sleep...
...IanMc-Kellen' acting Shakespeare has been a bright jewel of this season...
...Judith Malina and Julian Beck's recent visit to New York with their Living Theater troupe was a noteworthy disaster...
...A woman walks around the beds, apparently looking for something...
...Strangely, The One and the Many was the only production in its repertory that let the Living Theater express its confused political ideas...
...Thus one group intones, "Afraid...
...Brecht's Prologue calls for "Ein Brullen von aussen," a howl from the outside...
...Although she left those parallels unexplored, the waving of red flags and the singing of the Internationale on stage make her view of the world clear enough...
...Some of these productions must be noted, however, either because they were so arrogantly dreadful that they should not be allowed to pass away in peace, or so stirringly beautiful that they should be remembered...
...His recent one-man show at the Ritz Theater, Acting Shakespeare, proves that McKellen can do great theater all by himself...
...Inspired and inspiring, poetically exalted and contagiously funny, McKellen gives us a wonderful evening of dramatic art and theatrical craftmanship...
...After all, he already had everyone in his grip as they watched, fascinated and delighted, from their seats...
...And while he happily avoided the obnoxious aggressiveness of the Living Theater, I still don't see why he placed spectators on the stage in agimmicky bit of " audience participation...
...Titled here The One and the Many, this pessimistic play was written in jail by a libertarian poet who, with other poets such as Erich Mtihsam, had vainly tried to maintain a revolutionary government in Munich during the six-day Spartacist upheaval of 1919...
...In addition, the early, noisy minutes have company members walking hieratically from one side of the stage to the other, or freezing into positions that they hold with impressive muscular rigidity...
...Greenish lighting gradually illuminates the set: five beds, with room for one more to the rear...
...Not everything works...
...The only utterance on stage is "Aaaaah...
...Shaw considered Methuselah his best stage work, an opinion shared by few...
...Mtihsam was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1934...
...This is unexpected behavior in the animal world, comments Dr...
...Inher Playbill note, Malina observed that the years right after World War I had " a political climate with striking parallels to that of the 1980s...
...Unavoidable components of the Beck-Malina "style"—yelling, roaring, barking, and baying—keep the audience from doing what should come naturally: going to sleep in their seats...
...Gamma...
...As for the two leads, Judith Malina was the worst Antigone I have ever seen, and Julian Beck's ludicrously grimacing Kreon was simply awful...
...The third production was The Antigone of Sophokles, "translated into English" by Malina from the Bertolt Brecht script based on the German translation of Frederich Holderlin, and directed by Malina and Beck...
...A bit later, someone is put into a strait-jacket, but it is not Julian Beck, M.D...
...Ian McKellen's A cting Shakespeare was one of Broadway's few shining hours this season...
...To demonstrate the effects of sleeplessness on cats, he has one man, playing a demented cat, mount another one, who plays a dead cat...
...He shrinks the leviathan to about two hours, part of this featuring the forcible introduction of Kandinsky sentences, several of them recited in German...
...Besides the wailing sirens, there are screams from everywhere, as some people drop to the floor of the stage and others collapse in the aisles...
...He intelligently assembles scenes from Shakespeare, binding them together with witty or moving transitions drawn from anecdotes, critical appraisals, recollections, or satirical impersonations...
...She opens a drawer and finds a phone directory, from which she reads names, addresses and phone numbers...
...Toller hanged himself in a New York hotel shortly before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939...
...He arrives swinging a whip, puts lighted collars around the necks of a man and woman kneeling before him, then leads them on a leash into a cage...
...Often they chant, either to the spectators or to each other...
...Having completed the evening's single piece of pure Surrealism, she takes the phone book with her into a glass coffin, presumably her natural habitat...
...The second effort of the Living Theater' s visit was The Yellow Methuselah, an attempt by Hanon Reznikov to mix George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah with Wassily Kandinsky's Yellow Sound...
...He uses the company, for example, to show the painful results of nightmares translated into electric shocks...
...Lacking much else to look at, I watched him: not once did he make the slightest movement...
...Ten years after its frenzied claims for a peculiar kind of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Beck-Malina company, or "commune," visited Manhattan to display the results of its studies and practices while "in exile" abroad...
...Deciding that the play is not the thing, McKellen offers a traditional, but imaginative, reading...
...The play opens silently, as 13 characters slowly creep onto the stage and sit face-to-face for eight minutes...
...For the performance, we not only have McKellen as Hamlet, Hal, Bottom, Falstaff, Richard II, and Prospero, but also as David Garrick, in a hilarious example of how not to die a Shakesperean death (Alas, poor Garrick...
...One man played the corpse of Polyneikes for at least an hour...
...There are endlessly repeated incantations of words like "opium-morphine-barbiturates," adapted in spirit if not verbatim from the rites of the Krishna cultists...
...and that is not in Brecht's text...
...Afraid...
...Afraid...
...In fact, the Theater Guild mounted Methuselah in 1922 over five successive evenings...
...Most of the time, however, Beck lectures on the problems of sleep...
...Brecht's Antigone, ambiguous to begin with, became even more murky in the hands of the Becks...
...Reznikov, who also directed, retains the titles of the five plays for the five acts of his "adaptation...
...I was not enthusiastic, for example, about the way McKellen portrayed both Romeo and Juliet in the same scene...
...Several of the group move in and out of the beds, others remain frozen in complicated postures, still others rush up and down the aisles or grope their way along them, playing blind men with white canes...
...Beck...
...One of the homages—no more identifiable than the others —refers "of course" to Hamlet...
...Since this is supposed to be "art," and even "poetry," Beck'sPfoy-bill note goes beyond invoking Adler and Freud to calling our attention to the "literary and artistic references" he has "woven" into the text...
...Wearing a white medical gown, Julian Beck first appears in a short, sadomasochistic scene...
...Though he subsequently cut it down, it was originally written and published as a gigantic cycle of five fulllength plays...
...Again, this was translated and directed by Malina, and again she played the lead, a tormented pacifist, deplorably...
...But those are small carpings...
...It should be brought back in coming years as a marvelous tonic for a chronically ailing Broadway...
...The opening 14 minutes of the Becks' travesty, however, feature air-raid sirens...
...N ^ ^ ew York audiences who saw Ian McKellen as Salieri in Amadeus know he is a great actor...
...For this stay at Off-Broadway's Joyce Theater, the Becks selected four productions they are doubtless proud of...
...Written by Beck and directed by Malina, The Archaelogy of Sleep develops the "glimmer of a dialectic" that Beck says he caught while "meditating on the structure of the sleep cycle and reflecting on the theories of dream-formulation hypothesized by Freud...
...Occasionally the incantations take the form of endlessly repeated questions and answers...
...Toller's 1920 classic deserves better than this inchoate mess...
...For the criticism, there is a superb imitation of George Bernard Shaw spouting off in the wrong mood...
...The result is an evening that centers on the person and the characters of Shakespeare, yet deals with the analysis, criticism, and performance of his plays...
...He does some clever editing, too...
Vol. 67 • February 1984 • No. 4
