Desire Under the Tent

Pablo Picasso should have stuck to painting. Back in 1941, he wrote a play called Le Desir Attrape par la Queue (Desire Caught by the Tail). It was a jumble of absurdist fantasies, peo pled with characters named Big Foot, Fat Anxiety, Thin Anguish, Round End and Onion. There was no plot -- just a splattering stream of Freudian chaos, a surrealistic carnival revue dwelling on food, money and sex. Le Desir was per formed twice, by experimental theaters in Manhattan and Vienna; shortly after the play was written, a cast headed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir gave it a formal reading in Paris under Albert Camus' direction. Nobody else had tried it since; the show is more of a happening than a play.

Exactement! thought Jean-Jacques Lebel, the "pope" of European happen ings. Last week, as part of his Festival of Free Expression, he and his hairy band of happeners staged the show in a blue tent pitched on the outskirts of the seaside resort of St. Tropez.

The cast, which included Stripteaser Rita Renoir as "Tart," entered against a background of a pile-driving rock-'n'-roll band, go-go girls, and slides of Picasso paintings projected on the backdrop. Tart got right down to business, stripped to the waist and shimmied around wildly, while the rest of the ensemble cavorted about in a grotesque little dance.

The action throughout was punctuated with flashes of eerie light and sound effects of thunder, lightning, sirens, whistles and whooshing jets. Exclaimed Big Foot at the close: "We sprinkle the rice powder of angels on the soiled bed sheets and turn the mattresses through blackberry bushes! And with all power the pigeon flocks dash into the rifle bullets! And in all bombed houses, the keys turn twice around in the locks!"

The performance may not have been exactly what Picasso had in mind, but the audience of 600 found it stimulating, clapped loudly after every scene. As for a much-publicized urination scene --one reason why the mayor of St. Tropez had prohibited the performance in his town--it was, all things considered, a model of discretion: Tart squatted in the middle of the stage while the sound track made appropriate noises. "We had to keep that scene," says Lebel. "We're not at liberty to emasculate a work of art in order to pander to bourgeois sentiment." Still, he would have felt better if there had been just a few cries of moral outrage on opening night. "The fact that there's so much opposition to the kind of thing we're doing," he explains, "is what gives me faith that we're on the right road."

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