tom o horgan - nyt

7/30/2019 Tom O Horgan - NYT

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Is Futz The Wave Of the Future? by Eleanor Lester

The New York Times - June 30, 1968

A theatergoer who plays his cards right these days can have some groovy experiences withactors. Warm, tender hugs and kisses. Orgies, with multi-sexed dionysiac hands feeling hungrilyon all parts of the body. Passionate kisses. For sublimated typed there are dancing, gifts of flowers, verses or sweet nothings whispered in the ear - even intellectual conversation. And for those whose interests run to the exotic, there is - rather was for three heady (or should we sayfootsy) evenings - toe sucking.

All the way from the depths of the East side to Broadway, actors, apparently on the rebound fromyears of alienation on cold Brechtian and absurdist stages, are loving it up with audiences in a

perfect frenzy of involvement. Some of the milder forms may be experienced in "Hair", in whichhippie-actors bestow posies and kind words on members of the audience, and in "Tom Paine", inwhich it is supposedly possible to make intellectual chit-chat with actors on-stage during

intermission. But one must move downtown for robust physical contact. For warmth andtenderness there is "The Concept", Daytop Village's production at the Sheridan SquarePlayhouse, and for dancing, orgies and whispered secrets, there is "Dionysus in 69" thePerformance Group's work in a converted garage at 33 Wooster Street. The toe sucking was anepisode in Megan Terry's "Changes" presented by the La Mama Troupe earlier this year anddirected by Tom O'Horgan, who has scored three hits this season - "Hair", "Tom Paine," and"Futz."

These intimacies are not being bandied about casually. They represent an intensive drive on the part of advanced theater experimenters to inject new blood into the theater. The ideal theater of these experimenters would be ancient ritual drama in which the whole tribe participates, ending

the separation between actors and audiences. Looking toward this ultimate goal, they are tryingto bring the audiences into as close contact with actors as possible. In their new theater the wellstructures play, presented by actors carefully trained in diction and deportment, gives way toloosely structures scripts, enacted by vigorous young performers who are more concerned with

physical agility and self-expression than traditional acting techniques. Words, although they may be numerous, are not in themselves interesting or moving. The words are like cues that set off stage activity, and the actors, unpolished and often unpretty, are stimulated to bring up basicresponses to a variety of basic stimulations. This is essentially visceral, grunt-and-groan theater.The goal is to reach out to the audience with fresh effects - new staging, offbeat subject matter,improvisation, and an acting style that may be best called Action Acting (like Action painting, inwhich the activity of the artist in the act of getting the paint on canvas is the moment of truth).

The idea is to create a new experience in both actors and audience.

However, novel effects, by definition, quickly wear out and constant escalation is needed tocreate surprise. New taboos must constantly be broken. Nudity, still handled with someinhibition, must inevitably get bolder, today's near copulation is likely to give way, in the not-too-distant future, to the real thing, fulfilling a prediction Kenneth Tynan made about two yearsago. After the actor-to-actor copulation, will it be actor-to-audience? In "Dionysus in 69"members of the audience are pulled on stage for an esoteric group grope, presumably intended tocreate a state of sympathetic excitation that would, under perfect conditions, move everyone to



rush on stage and join the orgy, much as earlier in the play the audience came on stage and joinedthe rock dancing, initiated by Dionysus. After that much involvement, surely the next step must

be programmed rape of the audience by the actors - or perhaps vice versa.

Of course, sexual relationships are not the only kind possible between actors-and-actors andactors-and-audiences. Violence is also interesting. British director Peter Brook had the maniacsrush threateningly toward the audience at the end of "Marat-Sade". But that was tow years agoand the audience remained safe behind the invisible audience/actor barrier. In New Orleans lastwinter at a production of Ionesco's "Victims of Duty" performers forced bread down the throatsof various members of the audience. And a year ago at the International Theater Conference in

New York, Polish drama theoretician Jan Kott observed that because of all the shocks that are being given by the real world these days, there is a need for real shock in the theater. "We getthat from sex and violence," he said. "It is possible to show love making on the stage today, but," he added with a tinge of regret, "it is still impossible to murder." But of course, that was lastyear.

The present movement has actually been several years in the making. The Living Theater was

moving in the new direction in the early 60's when its directors, Judith Malina and Julian Beck,were studying the Total Theater theories of Antonin Artaud. Under the Becks, the company haddeveloped an intensely personal style and was thrusting toward audience involvement. In their

production of Jack Gelber's "The Connection" actors harangued members of the audience in thelobby during intermission, and in Gelber's "The Apple", Beck auctioned off a spontaneouslycreated action painting during each performance. With the Living Theater's production of Kenneth Brown's anti-authoritarian drama, "The Brig," real life erupted onto the stage when thecast gave a performance in a theater besieged by Internal Revenue Service officers who had comeabout a little matter of unpaid taxes. The audience got involved by clambering over rooftops toget into the padlocked theater.

Shortly afterwards the Becks took their theater to Europe, where for the last four years they haveenriched a style of acting and staging that is deeply related to their passionate belief in the needfor radical social change (They are Gandhi-ish anarchists). Their influence on all experimentersis enormous and is likely to become even more important when they return to the United Statesfor a tour this fall.

When the Living Theater left for Europe four years ago, the Off-Off-Broadway movement wasust developing a full head of steam and the young inheritors of the post-Albee theater, mainly

under the influences of Albee, Beckett and Ionesco, were writing highly concentrated skits thatwere like bleak, inconclusive screams of pain. The lone actor, or small number of actors on the

bare stage delivered ambiguous, often hysterical lines and left - leaving the audience cold and

numb with shock and an intensified sense of loneliness.

An early sign of a development in an entirely new direction was the remarkable anduncompromising work of Joseph Dunn at the Bleeker Street Workshop in 1965. Somewhatahead of his time, Dunn, influenced by Artaud, produced works by Ferlinghetti and Arrabal in afrightening and compelling environment designed in a loft. Members of the audience wereushered in, grimly, one by one, and exposed to nearly two hours of intellectual and sensory painin what appeared to be a blasted-out world populated by tormented beings. It was difficult towalk out, even if one were being reduced to an emotional pulp, because one would inevitably



walk into actors - sometimes on motorcycles. They were all over the place.

At this period, Joseph Chaikin, who had worked for many years with the Living Theater, wasdeep in experimentations with his newly-formed Open Theater. His idea was to develop newacting techniques that would break through what he felt were the limitations of the Stanislavsky-

based Method. Also at the same period, Tom O'Horgan was busy creating a company out of actors who had performed the works of young and still unknown writers at La Mama and other Off-Off-Broadway spots. And Richard Schechner, editor of the Drama Review, which at thattime was attached to Tulane University in New Orleans, suddenly became extremely interested inHappenings. Happenings, a development out of action painting, had just gone past their firstsurge and lost their sense of urgency when Schechner, liking their freedom and spontaneity,claimed them for the theater.

Chaikin, O'Horgan and Schechner were later to be exposed to the work of Jerzy Grotowski,director of the Polish Laboratory Theater, an experimental group that performs only from time totime for small audiences in Poland. Grotowski believes the future of the theater depends uponclose contact between actor and audience and he has many elaborate theories about how actors

should work to produce theatrical magic. Schechner's current production of "Dionysus in 69," acontemporary take-off on Eurinides's "The Bacchae," follows the Grotowski idea that the classicsshould be freely appropriated by modern actors and directors for their own uses. The strangeacting techniques in "Dionysus" also follow Grotowski's idea that the actor should shift betweenhis real self and his role and that he should change roles and styles rapidly during the

performance. However, it is inevitable that the intense, highly-disciplined Grotowski theater of ultimate confrontation should undergo dilution in the hands of a group of American kids whose

basic philosophic stance is the holiness of Do Your Own Thing.

A final important factor in bringing about the current theater scene is the socio/politicaldevelopment of the past couple of years. With the hippies holding love-ins and political activists

holding bash-ins with the police in such Total Environments as Whitehall St., Grand CentralStation, Washington Square Park, the Columbia campus and the Pentagon, and experiencing theexhilarating sense of communal acting-out and dramatic confrontation on a basic brute level,there was drama everywhere except in the theater. It was clearly time for a change. Alienationand its alter ego, Pop, may be seeing their last days this season.

The commercial theater got its first whiff of the New Thing with "America Hurrah" and "VietRock," which had both come out of the Open Theater. At the Open Theater workshop,

playwrights create their work along with actors and directors from the start. As is natural, bodymovement and staging become more important than words. Although "America Hurrah" has

been hailed as an important piece of social satire, it is actually very bland and its success may

perhaps be attributed to the fact that it caught a mood of disaffection with the Johnsonadministration and the whole American scene just emerging in liberal audiences.

The appearance this season of three successful plays directed by Tom O'Horgan brings the new physical theater, with its vigorous ensemble playing and gut-to-gut audience contact, officiallyinto the commercial theater world. "Hair" brings uptown the delights of East Village sweat andgrime processed into a romantic Broadway package. It is basically a musical developing out of the tradition of "Oklahoma!" and "South Pacific," with St. Mark's Place replacing Bali Ha'i as theidyllic spot far from the daily bustle that the tired businessman can dream about. Audience-actor



contact in "Hair" is geared to delight middle-aged couples who don't have a hippie of their own athome. Who wouldn't want to take a flower from a love-child? But it's only when they freak outon your living room floor that you get really involved.

As for Tom O'Horgan's staging of "Tom Paine," there is a mistake in the manner of involving theaudience. The cast has been having a wild time, exhibiting La Mama-style physical exuberance,singing, playing instruments, undressing, rocking and rolling in a boat, drinking gin and, ingeneral, whooping it up with one another. One would think they might invite the audience tostep up and join them. Instead, at intermission, the actors suddenly plunk down at the edge of thestage and confront an audience which has remained decorously quiet and seated throughout theorgy, and they ask the viewers for some thoughts about Tom Paine. To be sure, some basic factsabout his life have been shouted from the stage during the uproar. But why should the audience

be required to put these into an intellectual structure? In fact, they generally decline theopportunity.

With "Futz" director O'Horgan puts the audience back into its traditional passive role, but the castis evidently unable to do without some togetherness. They sneak up on you in the dark theater

and just sit in the aisles making an unearthly humming. You could probably grab one of them if you tried, but i wouldn't recommend it. They're very acrobatic and strong.

"The Concept", staged by Lawrence Sacharow, may set up some painful some painful conflicts inthe sensitive theatergoer. The "actors" are young men and women who have undergone grouptherapy for drug addiction at Daytop Village, and they enact a typical emotional progression fromrage and despair to self-acceptance and openness to love. As they move offstage and into theaisles at the end, they open their arms and ask hungrily of individual members of the audience,"Will you love me?" The chosen one is obliged to rise and proffer a prolonged fervent, if

platonic, embrace. Afterwards many members of the audience freely approach actors with hugsand kisses. It all seems very spontaneous and moving until you start thinking all this

emotionalism erupts like Old Faithful every night the show is on and it's been going for a coupleof months now.

The matter of programed spontaneity also creates something of a credibility gap in "Dionysus in69." In this play, as in the O'Horgan plays, the actors have rehearsed for many months and their highly polished crudity belies the concept of immediacy that is an important part of the

philosophy of this theater. Director Schechner has pointed out that primitive ritual is performedover and over, yet the participants presumably remain totally turned on to the deep meanings of their actions, and he has suggested that the same might be true for performers in a play.However, this gives theater people the burden of shaping productions that reveal the deepest

psychic currents of our complex and volatile society. This seems a rather large order for young

people who, although thoroughly dedicated, lack deeply-rooted philosophical concepts. . It is precisely this lack that makes the writing of full-bodied relevant plays so difficult, evenimpossible today. It is possible that gesture and design based on a makeshift dogma of protestcan be compelling enough to truly involve an audience? Proponents of the New Theater make animportant contribution by showing up the unnecessary limitations and rigidity if the old theater,

but when the gimmicks run out, they may find that the powerful voice of an authentic playwrightis still needed to save the play. And where will they find one if the new "writers" can only createsensory awareness exercises with the director and actors?

tom o horgan - nyt

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