The Trouble with Inbreeding

The avant-garde is suffering from intellectual hemophilia. It seems temporarily bled out of fresh ideas. The off-Broadway enterprise called Theater 1965, run by Producers Clinton Wilder and Richard Barr and Playwright Edward Albee, is trying to supply some new blood by professionally producing experimental work by young U.S. dramatists, but except for scattered, fitfully exciting moments, the points of view are derivative, repetitive and predictable.

> Balls, by Paul Foster, stars two spotlighted pingpong balls that throughout the play swing back and forth over the pitch-dark graves of two long-dead though volubly tape-recorded sailors. Dramatically grave-robbed from Beckett, this is a good isometric exercise for the neck, but lames the brain.

> Up to Thursday, by Sam Shepard, is an Ionescute little shadow play replete with vapid teen-age antics. An impudently hilarious finale features a boy and girl twitching with copulative ardor under an American flag to the swinging beat of a Beatles' record. To dodge the charge of desecration, the play uses an out-of-date flag. No penalty exists for desecrating drama.

-- Home Free!, by Lanford Wilson. A poignant fairy-tale quality pervades this story of a brother and his incestuously pregnant sister and helps the play achieve an astonishingly tender tension between sickness and sweetness. The boy (Michael Warren Powell) and girl (Joanna Miles) live in a fantasy playroom of imaginary companions and real toys, such as a miniature Ferris wheel. The atmosphere has a suffocating intimacy, an airless immunity to reality that recalls Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, with its similarly incestuous relationship. Reality finally intrudes with cruel pathos as the girl's birth pangs become her death throes.

>Pigeons, by Lawrence Osgood, tries to strut like Albee-cum-Pinter. The most aggressive of a trio of women attempts to invade the privacy of spirit and being of the others, to get not only under the skin but into the psyche. Lacking Albee's venom or Pinter's menace, these are three dead pigeons.

> Conerico Was Here to Stay, by Frank Gagliano, gives another squeeze to that rind of a man, the antihero. He shows the standard stigmata--conformity, terror, absence of identity, lack of responsibility and commitment--yet after he is stranded on a Manhattan subway platform, the vulnerable humanity of Mark Gordon's expressively modulated performance makes one care about him. Gagliano has a gift for capturing the acrid flavor and jagged tempo of the city's mental and physical derangements. A blind man, his white stick rattling frenetically, goes into a convulsive attack of "the crazies" as the city's noises slash unendurably at his brain. A girl (Linda Segal) is raped by a pair of subway toughs, and the agony of it is its casual lack of horror. Despite the madness and the hurt, Playwright Gagliano keeps a funny tongue in his head, and, after a fashion, even redeems his antihero.

Of the quintet of would-be dramatists, Wilson and Gagliano show the most skill at playwriting, while the rest more often play at writing. All of them display the defect of dramatic inbreeding, attending plays instead of observing life. They share the avant-garde's peculiar complacency of despair. They seem to have acquired pain without suffering, ideas without thinking. As weather prophets of some endless bone-chilling night, they need to remind themselves that the sun also rises.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.