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SUSAN SONTAG
historical disk jockey ensconced stage right, wearing earphones and
fiddling with his apparatus all evening. The production itself, directed
by Burgess Meredith, wobbles through several different styles. The
realistic parts come off best. In roughly the last third of the play, which
takes place in the courtroom, the play founders completely; all pretense
at verisimilitude is dropped, there being no fidelity to courtroom rituals
observed even in darkest Mississippi, and the play crumbles into bits of
internal monologue, whose subjects have little bearing on the present
action, which is Lyle's trial.
In
the last part of
Blues for Mister Charlie,
Baldwin seems bent on dissipating the play's dramatic power; the director
needed only to follow. Despite the flabbiness of the direction, though,
there are a number of affecting performances. Rip Tom, a sexy rough–
trade Lyle, rather upstaged the other actors; he was fun to watch.
Al Freeman, Jr. was appealing as Richard, though he was saddled with
some remarkably maudlin lines, especially in the Moment of Truth With
Father scene, which has been obligatory in the serious Broadway theatre
for the last decade. Diana Sands, one of the loveliest actresses around,
did well with the underrealized role of Juanita except in what has been
the most praised part of her performance, her downstage-center-and–
face-the-audience aria of lament for Richard, which
I
thought terribly
forced. As Parnell, Pat Hingle, an actor spectacularly embalmed in his
own mannerisms, is still the very same indecisive lumbering old dear that
he was last year as Nina Leeds's husband in the Actor's Studio production
of
Strange Interlude.
The best occasions
ill
the theatre in the last months were free–
wheeling efforts, which made wholly comic use of the mask, the cliche
of character.
At a small theatre on East 4th Street on two Monday evenings in late
March, two short plays,
The General Returns From One Place to Another
by Frank O'Hara and
The Baptism
by LeRoi Jones, were performed.
The O'Hara is a set of skits involving a kind of General MacArthur
type and his entourage in perpetual orbit around the Pacific; the Jones
play (like his
Dutchman)
starts more or less realistically, and ends in
fantasy; it is about sex and religion and takes place in an evangelical
church. Neither the O'Hara nor the Jones seemed to me very interesting
as plays, but then, there is more to theatre than plays, that is, than
literature. Their main interest for me was as vehicles for the incredible
Taylor Mead, poet and "Underground" movie actor. (He has been in
Ron Rice's
Flower Thief.)
Mead is a skinny, balding, pot-bellied, round–
shouldered, droopy, very pale young man-a sort of consumptive, faggot
