THEATER 67
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them in
The Deer Park,
and this defect is not repaired, as it might
have been, in Mailer's play.
The play is, in fact, inferior to the novel in almost every respect.
Pressing esthetic and historical considerations once led Meyerhold to call
for a cinematization of the theater. Mailer, apparently straightfacedly,
suggests that he employed film techniques in
The Deer Park
because
Hollywood is its subject.
I
can easily believe that his director's imitation
of "zoom" shots, and sharp-focus photography is inspired by some such
misguided intention. But Mailer's "montage" of eighty-eight scenes,
and the very considerable tedium of the evening, are surely the result
of attempting to reproduce his novel, relatively intact, on the stage. He
seems never to have considered the potentialities, or the hazards, of the
new medium. Plays do not require narrators, and there was no reason
to continue Sergius in this capacity on the stage. Especially so, as
Sergius' narration is a conspicuous failure even in the novel. Norman
Podhoretz found it impossible to believe that Sergius, callow and a bit
priggish, could have written Mailer's remarkable and subtle book. On the
stage, Sergius, whose role in the action is minor, inevitably gets lost for
long periods of time, and we certainly have no sense of witnessing
events through his eyes; when he does unaccountably turn up it is
usually to split a few philosophical hairs ("Rather think of Sex as
Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits" ), or to tell us how
he's making out (since Lulu, no new circuits). He has been made a
little more portentous in the play to help him create an impression,
but he seems dramatically otiose and esthetically vestigial. The great
triumph of Mailer's novel was his account of Eitel's affair with Elena.
It
was, however, a distinctively novelistic accomplishment, a psycho–
logical analysis in the tradition of Lados, Stendhal and Proust, and it
proves impervious to dramatic presentation. What, after all, is one to do
with a hundred passages like "... Eitel noticed that Elena's thighs were
beginning to show dimpled hollows.
It
was the only blemish on her skin,
and yet it depressed
him
deeply"? Without them one has a skeleton key
to
The Deer Park
and this is very importantly the impression the stage
play makes. Mailer has by far his greatest theatrical success with the
Hollywood moguls Teppis and Munshin (a father-in-Iaw-son-in-Iaw team
reminiscent of Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick) who seemed,
in the novel, to verge on being stage villians and stage Jews. The scene
in which Teppis, a sanctimonious hypocrite, tries to force Lulu Meyers
into marriage with a "faggola" for her own good, and to please the vast
American public, has more political bite than
Viet Rock
and
MacBird
taken together.
