Knocking the Nation
SAYRE, NORA
Knocking the Nation by NORA SAYRE History as a hanger, a coat hook, a contemporary hang-up: The theater can—and often does—do worse. Arthur Kopit's Indians is the most robust play on Broadway,...
...Deriding the sorrows of suburbia predated black satire from the ghetto...
...He deserved it...
...She has just given the hero a copy of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: "This book is an outcry, Phil...
...But that benevolent drawl grinds loud enough in anyone's short memory—as does the voice of the general who said he had to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to preserve it...
...Hence Indians has been partially overpraised...
...The themes are what we live with now: property and ownership, treating people like objects or animals, genocide...
...He pathetically entreats the audience to buy some feathered headdresses, postcards, and Indian dolls...
...Last year, after a preview of The Great White Hope, an elegant audience gave the sweating James Earl Jones a standing ovation...
...As the poet of cliche, Miss May has directed her cast to uphold a bright, brisk nose-to-nose delivery: They are meant to be unconscious of their own acute self-consciousness...
...He says that the sale of these trinkets will help the Indians "to know themselves, and raise their spirits...
...However, when he asks what a Negro is, she evokes birds and bees, light and dark flowers, adding sweetly, "God gave black people to white people to enjoy...
...He unfurls the currently fashionable political excuse: lack of information at the time...
...Dying of a coronary, he lists his unfulfilled ambitions, such as sending his son to a college where he could make good business contacts, and being able to "eat out without fear...
...Virility, rawhide, old Westerns: power notched by the number of scalps swinging from the belt...
...Surrounded by such money, one wonders if the May or Kopit points hit home at all...
...A few fingers are waved at the New Left and the CIA, but the context is pre-pot, pre-Revolu-tion...
...Arthur Kopit's Indians is the most robust play on Broadway, granted a fragile competition...
...Like a politician of the Sixties, he protests, "Things are just getting beyond me...
...as the jouncing, rearing, sidling animal fights against its rider, it is impossible to believe that the actor's own body bestows all of life to this prop...
...Hence he kills thousands of buffalo without realizing that he is depriving the Indians of their food...
...The play was NORA SAYRE is the New York correspondent for the New Statesman of London...
...I suppose you think I'm crazy for having ideas like this...
...Later, the ghost of Sitting Bull details the humiliation in "imitating our own glory" when the conquered Indians perform in Bill's Wild West shows...
...in the Fifties, it merely meant mocking social behavior and the cliches of pop psychology...
...His wife tells him that he aimed too high...
...A psychiatrist reveals that "we can't change the world until we change ourselves...
...The jokes of the Silent Generation weren't deadly or daring...
...A girl explains: "I have this problem...
...Under flickering silent-movie lights, drums throb and threaten, flutes squeal, and there is an actual stink of sulphur from the effects...
...The happy banalities she parodies fill the lobby after her play...
...At the end, he still clings to shafts of self-defense: "Anybody here who thinks that we have done something wrong, is wrong...
...it sounds quite like the rhetoric about self-determination which used to spurt out of the poverty program...
...Still, Miss May's mild play does bristle with her marvelous deadpan use of platitudes, recalling the devastating-ly straight lines which she and Mike Nichols used to fling at each other, often tinged with the triumph of discovery...
...And there are swatches of boredom, when the Indians talk slowly, proclaiming their own nobility...
...he later says that he did not know that buffalo reproduced so slowly...
...During a massacre, when the dying Indians drop to a stylized white sheet of snow, some frozen arms stick rigidly upright...
...I can give but I can't take...
...Knocking the nation now means deploring or condemning policies and history...
...she replies, "Sex is a term...
...The savagery towards the Indians naturally suggests the persecution of blacks and the killing of Vietnamese...
...Or perhaps conscience has become a sagging trampoline: numb flab that has been jumped on too often...
...It is far stronger as a metaphor than as a full dramatic experience—partly because the lines have a definitive flatness which makes them awkward for spoken delivery...
...In a delightful scene in which Bill presents a self-justifying skit at the White House, Italian and German actors take the Indian parts, snorting through their accents to play primitive: "Ze white man izz grrreat, ze Indian—nothink...
...Still, critics are usually grateful when a play yields them a subject worth writing about...
...Those who think it exaggerates a native ruthlessness must have snug lives indeed, bereft of even audiovisual aids...
...Buffalo Bill lollops up to the footlights on a wonderfully nervous (wooden) horse...
...Perhaps only Jules Feiffer has managed to do both...
...both his wife and his mistress ask, "Where are we going, Phil...
...The child of Wasp liberal parents asks his mother what sex is...
...Ladies near me at Indians kept saying what fun it was, with all the horses and the costumes...
...But self-congratulation sparkled in the air: they seemed to be applauding their own liberalism...
...Winning maturity points for guilt and dissembling, he becomes a prosperous hotel manager, complete with home and debts, plus two doubting women...
...However, the strongest line is narrated, not shown: When Sitting Bull was shot, his horse began to dance—because a gunshot was his cue to perform in the rodeo...
...it has also been called "sick at heart" and "a guilt glut...
...The tableau recalls many news photographs we have seen from Vietnam...
...Bill is not presented as a slavering villain: The treatment is sympathetic when he learns that his promises to the Indians are being betrayed by the Government...
...A few cold-water radicals have complained because Stacy Keach, the rousing young actor who had the lead in MacBird!, resists the wheezy temptation to mime Lyndon Johnson again...
...one man said, "Oh God, it's all so true"—and referred to his suburban neighbors...
...Perhaps merely sitting in the theater bestows a sense of safety, of being inside, laughing at or censuring those who aren't there, or at the amusing-awful creatures on the stage...
...But Indians is no mere text: There are flashes of fine theater...
...And the audience laughs faithfully, on cue...
...But, at $10 a ticket, most of the cosy, fur-backed spectators personify the very American failings that Arthur Kopit and Elaine May have decried...
...there was thumb-sucking (as in this play), but no flourished fists...
...an excellent idea, and we do need some red studies...
...Buffalo Bill is characterized as the wrong-headed modern liberal, who helps to destroy what he claims to save, patronizes those whom he pretends to champion, sells out the constituents who have been derailed by his false promises...
...many plays unveiled characters who "couldn't get through to each other...
...Most of our theater is for the already secure...
...Another girl says, "I believe that we've got to try to be good instead of bad...
...Indians has a stinging scope: It hurts when you think about it later— more so than when you watch it...
...But the parallel is not slammed into our skulls—it doesn't need to be...
...Elaine May's Adaptation is a gentle skit which seems at least ten years old, thin but nimble, safe in its references to all the traumas that we know and love...
...The comedy of love gone wrong was hung on alienation rather than sexual discord...
...His self-delusions are so lavish that he doesn't perceive that he is lying while—drunk on public relations—he reels away from facts...
Vol. 34 • January 1970 • No. 1
