The practice may never imperil the feudal popularity of the reserved seat, but it’s a verifiable fact that audiences love to be moved around. From the pageant wagons of the medieval mystery plays to the coffee klatsch wanderings of Fefu and Her Friends, theatregoers have embraced the opportunities to break out of their armchair immobility like intrepid teenagers who are handed the car keys for the first time.
Since the happenings of the ’60s, some experimental directors have not hesitated to head ’em up and move ’em out. And at least three ambitious productions within the past year have demonstrated the varying possibilities created by tearing down the fourth wall along with the first, second and third.
Audiences at Ontario’s Shaw Festival production of 1984 last September received a strong dose of Big Brother. The group of 600, upon arriving at the theatre, was obliged to pick its way through a group of company members impersonating prostitutes, spies and rabble-rousers, whereupon all were promptly bussed en masse to a warehouse for processing and orientation. This involved being suited in identical coveralls, lectured on proper behavior, entered into a Big Brother’s master computer, handed supply kits containing such treats as buttons, flags and identity books, and then being divided into groups led by a personal dictator.
The groups, after viewing the formal opening scenes at the warehouse, were soon reunited in the town center to participate in a big parade, a hate rally and a public hanging. Other living Orwellian nightmares included book burnings, war films and anti-Shakespeare and anti-sex diatribes. Surveillance was ubiquitous: cameras and walkie-talkies were present at all times, and the experience of being observed was unrelenting. It is reported that audience members jumped all too willingly into the rally fervor, and before the evening was out, several members had informed on one another. Audience implication was completed with the climactic arrest of 30 of its members, and, in the evening’s coup de théâtre (if indeed one could be isolated), all 600 bore witness to the torture of anti-hero Winston by 100 rats.
By contrast, the long-running production of John Krizanc’s Tamara in Los Angeles is benign. For a $50 entry tab, one passes into an old Hollywood American Legion Post lavishly reconverted into a grand Fascist Italy estate Il Vittoriale. The assembled audience is then broken into four groups, who may wander through the estate’s 12 rooms over the course of the evening and witness the intrigue of the dashing Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio and Polish beauty and art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Each group follows the individual lead of one of the characters for the duration of the evening: one bunch, for example, tails a musician and Fascist spymaster named Francesco, while another is relegated to d’Annunzio’s head housekeeper and confidante (played à la Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca).
According to critics and word-of-mouth, the quality of the experience largely depends on which character one is saddled with for the evening. Members of different groups who compare notes discover that hugging by the oily Francesco guarantees an evening of political derring-do, while the housekeeper leads one into steamier, more carnal exchanges. If one isn’t thrilled by the voyeuristic delights of the assigned group, a bountiful intermission supper catered by Ma Maison provides the opportunity to sneak into another pack. Whatever the perspective, it is a rich olfactory orgy for everyone, with fritatas frying in the kitchen and jars of potpourri carrying flowery scents throughout the bedrooms and drawing rooms.
Last fall, in a third production to require some footwork, Ohio audiences numbering 100 or more marched around a variety of real-life storefronts that comprised the stage, settings and auditoriums of a play series based on a book of interviews by Louise Kapp Howe titled Pink Collar Workers. The dramatizations, with titles like Birth of a Saleswoman and Waiting Tables, were written by University of Toledo English professor Elizabeth Steele. The “theatres” were such Bowling Green locations as Monty’s Hair Fashions, Uhlman’s Ladies Apparel Shop and Kaufman’s at the Lodge restaurant.
The Pink Collar project was the brainchild of the Bowling Green State University drama department. Students under the direction of professor Lois A. Cheney enacted the routines and dilemmas faced by women in low-paying jobs, such as beauticians, waitresses and secretaries. The performances were given during post-business hours, and cast members led sold-out audiences in lively debate after each performance.
Reminders of a War
“Americans don’t like to be reminded of Vietnam,” said the Variety review of Home Front. Within a week of its Broadway opening, James Duff’s Vietnam play joined the casualty list of contemporary war dramas. No matter that it was actually set on the front lines of a sit-com domestic conflict, or that it opened to a satchel of good reviews (The New York Times notwithstanding). The trade paper’s military advisers had spoken.
It would be tempting to play devil’s advocate to Variety by waving the tattered flags of David Rabe and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as contradictory evidence, but it would be just as easy to shoot holes through their relative success. The soldiers in Rabe’s Streamers played out psychosexual tensions that never stepped beyond the confines of their American barracks; his Sticks and Bones was cancelled in its initial TV airing by CBS in fear of audience repercussions; Pavlo Hummel did not become even a vague household name until Al Pacino made it a star vehicle. As for the film Apocalypse Now, it was the stoned experience of 1979, with Brando, Die Walküre and napalm pageants all in breathtakingly beautiful technicolor and Dolby stereo.
Is it possible to make the Vietnam experience palatable for audience consumption without extra butter on the popcorn? Within the past year, a fusillade of Vietnam plays has hit the public consciousness. Memorials, books, omnibus television documentaries and stagings of new Vietnam dramas and important revivals have people sitting up.
Witness Gail Kriegal’s coincidentally titled On the Home Front, staged at ESIPA at the Egg in Albany last January; Pittsburgh Public Theater’s recent staging of Stephen Metcalfe’s Strange Snow; the January reading of Mikel Raley’s Ravaged at Portsmouth’s Theatre by the Sea. The significant thread that connects all of these works is that they function as after-the-fact therapy sessions for characters and audience: veterans of the war return home to heal psychic battle scars, and work through survival guilt, racism, changed relationships, dependency and the problems of reassimilation with their loved ones.
Therapy of a more gestalt variety permeates Tracers, which won accolades at Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theatre and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre prior to its January opening at the New York Shakespeare Festival. The “playwrights” of Tracers consisted of members of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theatre Company, who distilled their war experiences through a process of collective improvisation.
Where the earlier Vietnam works were implosive and dialectical, Tracers is physical and visceral, steeping the audience in the jangling smoke and light of battle, or the spray of cans of Budweiser during a moment of deceptive calm. Except for a climactic tribal chant of mutual trauma amongst the men, there is little comforting catharsis for either the audience or the veteran players at a performance of Tracers. A litany of unanswered questions (“You were there?”, “How does it feel to kill someone?”) are left hanging through the opaque clouds of grenade smoke and doubt-tinged introspection.
TCG Announces ’85-86 Registration
Theatre Communications Group is accepting applications for new Constituent theatres for the 1985-86 season. TCG was established in 1961 to provide a national forum and communications network for the profession and to respond to the needs of theatres nationwide for centralized services. Membership entitles theatre companies to a variety of artistic, administrative, informational and research services.
TCG’s diverse constituency numbers nearly 250 theatres throughout the United States and encompasses all types of professional institutions which meet basic eligibility requirements including nonprofit, tax-exempt status; completion of at least two producing seasons; professional leadership, orientation and standards. Other factors taken into account by the TCG board of directors include fiscal stability and extent of performance activity. An annual registration fee, based on a percentage of each theatre’s income, is charged.
To register, theatres should request application forms immediately. Completed forms must be submitted to TCG no later than April 15, 1985. For further information, contact Eric Leyson, Membership Department,
TCG, 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017.
