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Harry Langdon. How it is possible for such a physically self-effacing,
underprivileged looking fellow to be so immensely attractive on the stage
is hard to explain. But one simply cannot take one's eyes off him. In
The Baptism,
Mead is delightfully inventive and funny as a homosexual
in long red underwear camping-in in the church, prancing, wisecracking,
kibbitzing, flirting, while all the spiritual doings are taking place. In
The General Returns From One Place to Another,
he was more varied,
and even more captivating. Rather than a role, this part is more like a
set of charades: the General saluting while his pants are falling down,
the General courting an inane widow who keeps popping up along his
route, the General making a political speech, the General mowing down
a field of flowers with his swagger stick, the General trying to crawl
into a sleeping bag, the General dressing down his two adjutants, and
so on. It was not, of course, what Mead did, but the way he did
it.
The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself,
wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy. Nothing is
more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of four.
This is the quality Harpo Marx has; Langdon and Keaton among
the great silent comics have it; so do those four wonderful floppy
Raggedy Andy dolls, the Beatles. Tammy Grimes projects something of
it in a very stylized and exciting performance in an otherwise unremark–
able Broadway musical now running,
High Spirits,
which is based on Noel
Coward's "Blithe Spirit." (The marvellous Bea Lillie is in it, too; ·but
either she doesn't have enough scope for her gifts in this play or she
just isn't up to form.) Another person around who has this quality,
although in this case in a very slight perishable form, is a Greenwich
Village nightclub performer named Tiny Tim. He is a very tall young
man with shoulder-length hair who sings Shirley Temple songs (in a
rousing fa:lsetto) and Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonald favorites (both
parts) while accompanying himself on a tiny plastic Woolworth guitar.
Again, it is not what he does but the somnambulistic concentration with
which he does it.
What all these performers have in common-from Buster Keaton to
Taylor Mead-is their total lack of self consciousness, in the pursuit of
some absolutely invented idea of action. With even a touch of self–
consciousness, the effect is spoiled. It becomes insincere, distasteful, even
grotesque. I am speaking of course of something rarer than acting ability.
And since the ordinary conditions of work in the theatre promote a great
deal of self-consciousness, one is at least as likely to find this kind of
thing in informal circumstances, such as those in which
The General
and
