THEATER
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impact owed much to a sensltlve production that managed to contain
the script's potential treacle while at the same time salvaging its honest
emotion. For that feat of balance, the artleSi11ess of David Pressman's
direction and the simplicity of the cast's performance must share equal
credit.
Landford Wilson's
Untitled Play
at the Judson Memorial Church
had elements of real power, due largely to his intriguing insistence on
sabotaging his own creations (there is an affinity here with the current
vogue of "Destruction Art"). Wilson likes to swiftly dissipate moods
which he himself has skillfully built. And he encourages us to mock his
talent for language by having the two actors for whom his play is os–
tensibly performed withhold attention from its verbal portions. In place
of consistency of mood and emphasis on language, Wilson prefers (this
may owe much to the perspective of the director, Remy Charlip) to
draw attention to how the interplay of words, body movement and
"materials" can produce quickly shifting states of feeling, the shifts
themselves combining into a disturbing blend of elation and fright. I'm
not at all sure what Wilson's intentions are (if any) in aiming for such
a complex reaction - beyond, that is, producing the reaction itself. But
I was tempted to view the string of disparate sensations of youth, energy,
violence, despair, innocence, hate and unconcern as an apt meta–
phor, or emotional equivalent, for that Untitled Play we call the United
States. Wilson, though, would probably reject such a self-conscious and
rational gloss on his work.
The First Festival of the Radical Theater consisted of perform–
ances by five different groups: the Pageant Players, the Open Theatre,
the Gut Theatre, the Performance Group and the Bread
&
Puppet
Theatre. The evening was organized as a benefit for the Radical Book–
ing Agency, a nonprofit cooperative set up to arrange engagements for
participating members. My suggestion is that potential bookers avoid
the Pageant Players, a mime group literal in both theme and technique,
and think twice about the Gut Theatre, a group of Puerto Rican and
Negro street kids, aged 7-17, who act out, with occasional incoherent
charm, their problems and feelings.
On the other hand, Peter Schumann's Bread
&
Puppet Theatre is
an exciting company. It has been putting on shows for six years in New
York streets, lofts, backyards and even theaters, and for the "Festival"
offered
Johnny Comes Marching Home,
a good sample of its haunting
combination of mime, puppeteering, music, voices and lights. It also
demonstrated, incidentally, that the theater of political statement need
not involve the literal polemics of which it usually consists.
