Vacuum-Packed

By T.E. Kalem

L'OS/UBU THE IK THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

Some years ago, Marshall McLuhan made quite a splash among cocktail-party sophisticates by proclaiming that television was a "cool medium," whereas some other cultural forms were "hot media." In recent years, Peter Brook, a highly sophisticated director, and his Paris-based company Le Centre International de Creations Theatrales have devised modes by which theater can be turned into a cool medium, perhaps even stone-cold.

View the works on exhibit at Greenwich Village's La Mama. Device No. 1--skeletonize the text. Back in 1961, Brook announced: "I do not believe in the word much today, because it has outlived its purpose." This induces a vacuum of thought and feeling. Sounds and body actions are rushed in to fill the gap. Oriental masks and non-Western rituals are added, and de-individuate the actor. Superbly accomplished as this international troupe is, each member of it seems to be computerized by Brook's guru visions and will.

The most vivid of these brief theater pieces is The Conference of the Birds. Questing for a cogent purpose in life, a group of brave birds take wing on a perilous journey to find their true king, the Simorgh. The few survivors find that the quest was a moral lesson--to look for the Simorgh within themselves. The playgoers' reward is the way the actors become birds, with gold, red and white beaks, and swatches of silk plumage.

L'Os, a curtain raiser, is an African fable of greed, about a man who would rather be buried alive than part with a bone.

Ubu is a riotously funny re-do of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, a scatological, bourgeois-baiting, 19th century travesty of Macbeth.

Power as gluttony permeates a scene in which Mere Ubu (Miriam Goldschmidt in the Lady Macbeth role) entices an army officer (Bruce Myers) to join her and Mere Ubu (Macbeth) in their conspiracy to kill the king. The most ambitious work in the cycle is the least affecting. The Ik is based on Colin Turnbull's 1973 book, The Mountain People, the story of a Ugandan tribe that lost its hunting grounds. Ravaged by starvation, they became beasts, losing all traces of human compassion.

This should have been a tale of potent pa thos, but Brook's barebones staging starves The Ik of emotive power. It is a case of Less Is Not Enough.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.