The Big Snore

Much of the week-in, week-out traffic of the contemporary U.S. stage needs a reverse vocabulary to be properly understood. For improvisation, read amateurishness. For dialogue, read grunts and obscenities. For speaking out on the issues of the day, read rant and cant. For the theater of fact, read out-of-context quotes and falsification.

The eternal ideal of the theater is to hold a mirror up to nature. Nowadays, it too often appears to be holding its nose in a latrine. The latest entry, Chicago 70, intersperses sequences from the Chicago conspiracy trial with absurd bits from the trial in Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately, no one can parody a parody. The cast is from Canada, and they do a fair, though not exact job of imitating Messrs. Hoffman (Julius and Abbie), Bobby Seale, William Kunstler, Mark Lane and Allen Ginsberg, as well as riding around on tiny tricycles. During the evening they spew rage at everything from air pollution to Miss America--very tired stuff, which has become easier to sleep through than sit through.

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