BOO KS
High above everything else in
A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum
is the mighty Zero Mostel, towering like a
monument hewn out of the whitest Parian--cheese. Pungent,
fatty, succulent, infinitely malleable, he is the memorial of (at
least) twelve Caesars rolled into one, carved out of goat cheese,
and lecherous like the goats it came from. No--it is, to para–
phrase Pater on the Mona Lisa, a grotesquerie wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, large cell by cell, of
strange thoughts, fantastic reveries and exquisitely gross passions.
No--it is a sacred white elephant desecrated by his bestial
cravings and trying to compress himself into a harmless mother
goose. No--it is Zero Mostel, for whom Plautus already wrote
his
Mostellaria,
and who will multiply even unto infinity like
the zeroes in the defense budget. As Pseudolus, the wily slave,
he manipulates the outraged pawns of the outrageous plot
with the
savoir faire
of a cloudful of
dei ex machina.
When
Mostel dances, he trips up the light fantastic; when he sings,
it is like a choir of angels weeping; and when he mugs, we
recognize the face that launched a thousand hardships on
spectators averse to cluttering up the aisles with their rolling
bodies. And his lines?
If
it is a line that has to be hit, he
smacks it smartly with the back of his hand in the solar plexus,
so that it never recovers. And if it is a line to be thrown away,
he tosses it off with princely casualness, only to pull it short
in mid-flight by an invisible rubber band.
If
ballet has its
prima ballerina assoluta, Latin its ablative absolute, science its
absolute zero, the theatre can proudly point to its Zero Absolute.
157
Delightful, evocative, and true. But-the line is very hard to draw
--one comes to feel that the pleasure taken, the loving care, is deflecting
itself from the performances of Mostel to the performance of Simon.
There are times when the voice, the person, we hear speaking in the
book becomes too simply a personality.
In the last essay in the book, Mr. Simon praises Robert Warshow
for always looking "for that in an occurrence,
in
a work of art or non–
art, which goes beyond the analysis of components and the evaluation
of immediate causes and impacts." This is exactly the sort of critic
that Mr. Simon is not. He himself is, thank heavens, very much the
critic of occurrences, the analyzer of components, and, above all, the
evaluator of immediate cases and impacts.
David Ferry
