416
MARTIN DUBERMAN
With all categories under challenge,
wi~h
each day spawning hybrids
in the performing arts, a "theater reviewer," short of reporting the
argument he had with his maid yesterday over a broken lamp, can
reduce his obligations only by resort to the following formula: "I'm
going to tell y'all about some nights I spent out on the town this year
watching some people perform something." It's feeble but flexible. And
it allows me all the modem prerogatives: to define a critical problem
without trying to resolve it, to stand on subjective intuition, to employ
the random, staccato beat, to do my thing.
So. There were two evenings that especially appealed to me:
In Circles,
and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. These are the only
theatrical events I want to write about in any detail. But before doing
so, let me briefly report on a number of other productions.
MICHAEL MCCLURE, THE BEARD
The most arresting part of the evening was the program notes on
the author, which reported that he composes "post-psychedelic songs"
in a style called "Cowboy Shiva," and also writes
in
a mammalian
tongue he has daubed "beast language."
The Beard.
was apparently a
sensation in San Francisco, .and it found vocal defenders in New York.
It has some strengths: the originality of its basic idea (a dialogue
between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, enshrined in some Blue
Heaven) and, occasionally, its verbal ingenuity. But McClure's "fuck–
you" shock tactics have by now become tedious. By the end of the
evening I had to rely for enlivenment on the dialogue of the middle-–
aged couple seated behind me. As Billy the Kid began the well-publicized
act of cunnilingus (First Time Anywhere On Any Stage!!) the em–
barrassed lady behind me said to her equally embarrassed escort, "Is it
over?" He: "The stage is getting darker." She (ambivalent tone):
"Can you still see them?"
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN, SCUBA DUBA
Richard Gilman has already done a definitive skewering job on
this bit of banality (and at a time when all others were shouting its
praises), so I'll try to be brief. Sample level of comedy: the oldish
landlady says seductively to her young tenant, "My petals still open–
not as often as before, but wider than ever." The crudities are matched
by the cliches, even to the Jewish mother placing the guilt-provoking
phone call to her son - a replay, with bad needle, of the Nichols
&
May original. More basic to the evening's failure is Friedman's un-
