THEATER,
ETC.
293
about the play. For
T elemachus Clay
tells an embarrassing story which
eventually collapses under the weight of its pretentiousness. The plot
line
is
almost effaced by verbal ornament; the beginning and end,
str.ongly reminiscent of
Under Milk Wood
with a touch of
Our Town,
were particularly cloying. Some of the central scenes in Hollywood seem–
ed unhappily adapted from bad movies about H,ollywood. The intrusive
and useless reference to myth (Telemachus seeking his father, etc.)
is
awful, as
is
Carlino's self-consciousness about modernism. (The program
contained a silly glossary of hipster slang used by the characters.) Yet
the play had some excellent moments-as in the party scene and the
seduction of Tel by the scriptwriter's wife (touchingly played by
Scottie MacGregor), and in the speech of the "prophet" (played by
Clayton Corbin). Carlino has an accurate feeling for two emotions
which are wonderfully dramatic-nastiness and euphoria. For all its
faults,
Telemachus Clay
is
a play with s,ome life.
Adrienne Kennedy's short play,
Funnylwuse of a Negro,
strikingly
directed by Michael Kahn, was presented in January. Miss Kennedy's
play comes out of Genet's
The Blacks;
it is derivative, excessive, and
full of mistakes (like the suicide of the heroine at the end). But the
body of
Funnyhouse
works with a beautiful idea of hallucination-the
deranged girl in colloquy with four incarnate ideas of herself: Queen
Victoria, a Grand Duchess, the murdered Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus
Christ. As a play about the Negro problem, it is dull and garish.
As
a play about cracking up, whose content happens
to
be painful fantasies
about being black, it is sensitive and promising.
The best play by far in recent months lasts only eighteen minutes.
It
has three characters, named Woman 1, Woman 2, and Man, all of
whom are dead, and confined up to their necks in adjacent urns. Not
only is each immobilized but each character can speak only when a
beam of light, which moves irregularly, strikes his or her face; there are
183 light cues in the eighteen minutes. In
Play,
Samuel Beckett has
brought his dramatic art to a point of perfection. It is directed, beau–
tifully, by Alan Schneider. The actors are Marian Reardon, Michael
Lipton, and Frances Sternhagen; Robert D. Currie controls the lights.
To fill out the evening, a sleek, heartless, amusing one-acter by Harold
Pinter,
The Lover,
is on the same bill. But
Play
is the thing.
Susan Sontag
