Weirdness & Wit

Three playwrights--an English poet, a French ex-convict, an American scarcely out of college--are giving off-Broadway audiences more philosophy (both weird and traditional), more wit and more theatricality than can be heard or seen in Broadway's most wretched season.

The Death of Satan. As the curtain went up last week on Poet Ronald Duncan's play, three comfortable chaps were reading newspapers in a club in Hell. One by one they revealed their faces: Shaw, Wilde, Byron. Happy shades, they play poker for their professional reputations ("I'll wager Mrs. Warren's Profession"--"I'll raise you Childe Harolde") and tolerate Satan, dressed as a clergyman, as he steals their jokes.

But the Devil is nervous. Something is all too pleasant in the state of Hell, and the residents are too contented to be there. As if in extension of Shaw's Man and Superman, the Devil decides to send Don Juan (Robert Mandan) to earth to see what is causing the trouble. Up goes Don Juan--into a most un-Seville world. He tries to guitar his way through a modern woman's window, but she (Beverly McFadden) is impatient with all that jazz. Her door stands open. He purrs softly: "To describe your beauty, night, which veils your modesty, would blush." "Modesty?" says the broad. "I only slipped this on because it's a little cool after the sun goes down." Her husband (Alex Reed) enters with unbatting eyes, offers his wife's new lover a friendly drink. Don Juan is crushed. He is looking for trust to trespass against and has found none.

In the person of a married Englishwoman (Susan Brown) who is a careering editor as well, Don Juan finds his Dona Anna. He woos her with tender memory, and she answers him with Freud. She finds him "quite obviously immature." In her anthropocentric indifference to Heaven and Hell, Don Juan finds a 1960 form of gaiety that is full of desperation, loses his love for her because "if we don't love something greater than ourselves, we are incapable of loving one another."

With whetstoned humor, but marred by too many obvious jokes and an inadequate production, the play leads Don Juan back to Hell, where Satan is in bed sick at heart, cursing his doctor ("that damned Faustus with his ridiculous penicillin"). When Don Juan reports that men on earth "have freed themselves of belief," Satan dies. The moral is obvious but far from negligible: without God, there can be no Devil.

The Prodigal. As Playwright Duncan is drawn to fantasy, Manhattan-born, 24-year-old Jack Richardson (Columbia '57) is drawn to myth: with the courage of youth, he has walked straight into the house of Atreus to kidnap King Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra. But what might have been merely a leached-out academic exercise is a fresh, deeply written play that uses classical means for a 20th century statement.

Richardson makes Orestes (Dino Narizzano) his central figure, a sort of angry young anthropos who expresses his discontent less by looking back in anger than by looking forward in mockery. Considering the fate of Argos, he laughs at the armored simplicities of his father Agamemnon's military policies and at the naive democratic humanism of Aegisthus. In self-exile after his father's murder, Orestes wants only to marry a ripe, full-breasted girl and settle permanently away from Argos. The Trojan War has taken place, and by stopping the pendulum of revenge, Orestes would try to prevent other wars. A Cassandra (Josephine Nichols) who resembles Hedda Hopper in appearance and Dorothy Parker in wit sadly tells him that the force of the popular majority overwhelmingly demands "dramatic justice." Since life is "popular drama, the majority dictates the plot." Thus the audience itself is slapped with guilt as Orestes unwillingly leaves for Argos to put the sword to the murderers--and by extension, to the human race. "I will murder and say it's for a better world. That must be said to avoid insanity."

The Balcony. Less serious is France's Jean Genet, although Manhattan audiences--probably in stilted awe of the avant-garde--seldom crack a laugh at his sharply comic inventions. An oft-convicted jailbird of 49 who was once sprung on the petition of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and the late Andre Gide, etc., Genet is proud that he has been called "the one genuine outsider of this century." The viewpoint shaped by Genet's life is expressed more in the play's structure than in its wild threshings of language. The scene is The Grand Balcony, a brothel where the prostitutes help their customers pretend to distinctions far above them: wearing ego-puffing shoulder pads and cothurni (the elevator shoes of Greek tragedy), ordinary gasmen and bank clerks become make-believe bishops, generals, judges.

When a revolution overturns the established power in the city, the pretenders in the brothel suddenly become actual potentates and the madam their queen. Genet makes his point: a house is not only a home; it is the entire world.

Genet's uninhibited imagination swings freely from the raucous to the raw. The city's real police chief (Roy Poole) is disheartened because no customer at the brothel has yet shown an interest in pretending to be the police chief. And after, the rebellion, the same cop announces that he would like to dress as an enormous phallus to "symbolize the state." Earlier the evening has a moment so vibratingly mad that it all but leaves the audience unhitched from the third scene on. The "general" stands dressed for battle. Into his presence, pacing voluptuously with long-legged precision, pawing the earth with impatient sensuality, comes history's first whorse. With the help of her dancer sister Arnette, Actress Salome Jens has trained herself to perfection in the gait and rhythm of an Arabian mare. Last week Arnette was temporarily replacing Salome, who had been whisked away by Hollywood. But Salome will soon be back in Manhattan, where patrons of the arts return night after night just to hear that seductive whinny.

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