91
SUSAN SONTA6
with this admonition: "Let it be added here that this lover about whom
we speak need not necessarily be saving for a wedding ring- this lover
can be a man, woman, child or indeed any human creature on
this
earth." But it is one thing to read vacuities like these, another, far
more fearsome, to hear them recited intact in the tony accents of
Roscoe Lee Brown, the Brooks Brothers Negro narrator camping invisibly
among the poor white trash who plunge headlong into their "calamity."
To this awful farrago of tautology and sensationalism, the audience
responded with an unctuous voyeurism. One might describe it as a
kind of complacent titillation, made even more possible by the artiness
and the artificiality of the production. Everyone is only pretending. Of
course, the dwarf Cousin Lymon is another, and sinister, matter, since
the actor Michael Dunn who plays him really is a dwarf. Two entirely
different realities- a theatrical sensationalism and a nude and absolutely
real deformity- bisect each other on the stage of the Martin Beck
theater. But, however modified by the unsettling presence of the dwarf,
phoniness wins the day. The play does not really shock; it only (and
the audience knows this perfectly well) plays at shocking. What is
wrong with Albee's work-or Tennessee Williams', for that matter-is
not the emphasis on freakishness, sexual perversion, or the· like. It is the
insincere, shallow use of this material. The perverse situations are not
really probed. They are used, rather, as a conventional device for exciting
an audience. Compared with, say, either the hieratic and florid per–
versities of Genet or such stylish trashy delights as certain films of Robert
Aldrich
(Kiss Me Deadly, What ever Happened to Baby Jane),
Albee's
dark arts reveal themselves as arbitrary and tame.
The sensationalism of the events in
The Ballad of the Sad Cnle
is
ersatz shock, because the only real shocks in art are those that pertain to
form . The real shocks, which the American theater lacks, are those of a
bold image carried to the point of a genuine sensuous assault upon the
audience. Sometimes one can locate exactly the deficiency. Thus, the
main effect on me of John Dexter's intelligent production of Arnold
Wesker's rather moving
Chips With Everything
was to make me ap–
preciate the last production of the recently slain but, one hopes,
shortly to be resurrected Living Theater,
The Brig.
All the Living Theater
productions had something hysterical and gross about them; and
The
Brig
was no exception, though in this genre probably the best thing
the group had ever done. I was of two minds about
The Brig
when I
saw it last year, for it seemed to be so well done, though it was not
a play at all, but something between a ballet and a demonstration.
But compared with
Chips With Everything,
the relentlessness and
