THEATER
THE SEASON
I saw forty-eight productions this season, about evenly
divided between Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway. Even
so, I missed (for a variety of reasons) a few events which other critics
thought important: Julie Bovasso's marathon play at La Mama;
Con–
quest
0/
the Universe,
the masterwork of the Theater of the Ridiculous;
and the apparently talented off-off-Broadway debuts of playwrights
Roma Garth and Olwen Wymark.
My first observation, therefore, is to sound the dirge for the solitary
reviewer: it is impossible for one person, even one with my compulsive
instincts, to report comprehensively on the theater scene in New York.
Nor is it at all clear these days what a "theater chronicle" should
chronicle. Any event that takes place on a stage? Surely not, or, like the
ubiquitous Barnes, I'd have to cover Merce Cunningham's first New
York dance season, as well, perhaps, as Aretha Franklin's debut at
Philharmonic Hall, Ronald Reagan performing as Chubb Fellow at
Yale, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi making like Ayn Rand
In
drag (or is that redundant?) at the Felt Forum.
Okay, then maybe a theater chronicle should deal only with those
stage events in which the spoken word is central. That definition would
allow me to pass over Charlotte Moorman's full-breasted cello recital or
Ralph
Ortiz
'tearing a live chicken limb from limb (at Finch College,
no less), but it would also force me to exclude the Evening of Mixed
Media at the 92nd Street Y and to include Vera Zorina narrating
Peter and the W
01/.
Besides, to define theater as that which employs
the traditional materials of a stage and words, is to emphasize the very
elements which some theatrical experimenters are trying to discard. The
champions of "environmental," "improvisational," "gut" and "kinetic"
theater want to move out of buildings and into streets, to erase "artificial"
boundaries between life and art, to recognize and create drama wher–
ever we happen to be: subways, doctors' offices, urinals.
