Dance of Death

By T.E.K.

Imagine the ancient stone heads on Easter Island having bodies. Suppose them transformed into papier-mache puppets eight to ten feet tall. Picture these puppets moving as if they were in some prehistoric slow-motion silent film. This is hierophantic theater, as old as time, as young as the infancy of man. To see The Grey Lady Cantata as performed by the Bread and Puppet Theater is rather like waiting in the mystic whispering groves of Delphi to hear the oracle speak. Despite the primordial trappings, this virtual dumb show is as contemporary as tomorrow's bombing raid. It is a cantata of death, an immensely sad and strangely affecting tale of the wartime slaughter of innocents.

Glass Tear. The show begins amid the banal frivolity of a beer party. A group of the Grey Lady's giddy friends have come in to guzzle Budweiser and Ballantine's ale. These are not puppets, but men and women wearing decadent, citified masks. At the sound of a funeral chime, which is actually two lead pipes clanged together by the agent of fate at the side of the stage, the beer cans are whisked away. The guests leave and the stage is occupied by a puppet father and mother and a masked son.

The father looks much like Churchill and he smokes a white cigar, but the black wings on his shoulders signify that he is the Angel of Death. The mother, or Grey Lady, is the mater dolorosa, a woman of sorrowing countenance, possibly the mother of Christ; her huge supplicating hands resemble those of a piet`a. She sends her son off to war and we feel that she knows he will be killed. A single glass tear slowly descends her right cheek.

Blare of Music. A white dove of peace chirps briefly, but flies off as a black widow spider of a model plane wings its way with a searching deliberateness across the rear-stage curtain. We see the bomber's victims-to-be, other grey-lady puppets. They sway and huddle together in mute terror. We feel their pain all the more acutely because, like wounded animals, they cannot articulate it. Think of Picasso's Guernica unfolding in slow motion and you have the image of these women dying. The evening ends with a jolly blare of music. The Black Angel and the Grey Lady wheel to the music--a Totentanz, the dance of death.

This may not be everyone's idea of how to spend a little under an hour in the theater, but for anyone who wants to seek out and comprehend the deepest wellsprings of drama, it is an hour well spent. Within the past two weeks, Joseph Papp's Public Theater, where The Grey Lady Cantata is housed, has offered playgoers: Subject to Fits (a free-form fantasy based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot), Slag (claustrophobic feminine hysteria in a decaying British girls' school) and Here Are Ladies (see below). The handsome landmark building on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan carries the exciting bee-hum of dramatic activity on every floor. Here is life, imagination, audacity and skill.

. T.E.K.

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