MARTIN
DUBER~AN
The final company, Richard Schechner's Performance Group
of·
fered
Birth Ritual,
a segment, we are told, of a larger work in progress
called
Dionysus in
'69 (a version of Euripides'
The Bacchae).l
The
fInt
section, consisting of rather banal free-form exercises done in the semi·
nude, bored me, and I was reduced to semipornographic reveries about
the wondrous scenes that must take place during "body" auditions for
the company. Yet when the actual "births" began on stage, I had
to
offer silent apologies, for the effect was remarkably powerful.
It
may
be
that I found the second portion more effective because of the admixture
of language, to me still an essential ingredient of theater. Indeed
throughout the "Festival" I kept thinking that "Radical Theater" could
best be defined not by its political content, but by its insistence on non· .
or minimal-, verbal interaction - in other words (for one who believes
in the centrality of language), anti-theater. In any case, there seems
to
be a conscious metaphysic behind the Performance Group and a likeli· ,
hood of it producing some significant departures; a single
segmen~
though, is not enough on which to base an understanding or evaluation
of the Group's prospects.
BRIEF MENTION
The new Negro Ensemble Company impressed me most for man·
aging to make Peter Weiss's ponderous
Song of the Lusitanian Bogey
an
interesting event. This success was due in part to the acting talents of
the company, but even more to the direction of Michael
A.
Schultz,
who sensibly decided that under no circumstances should the script
be
allowed to stand on its own. Schultz opted for a kind of music/dance '
spectacle which deliberately distracted attention from Weiss' elephantine
prose, engulfing the audience in a masterly charade of choreographed
movement, color and sound. This was Schultz's directorial debut in •
New York and it was a resounding success....
An
"Informal Evening
with the Open Theater," created to raise funds for the troupe's visit
to Europe, had some marvelous segments. The company's extraordinari·
ly sensitive ensemble work manages, through physical movement, actually
to evoke internal states. Some of the troupe's sketches disappointingly
aped current fashions in mixed media, but there was, on the whole, a
lovely liberating quality to the evening - I mean for the audience,
as
well as the actors.... Joseph Papp's production of "Hamlet" was a
sophomoric bore, nothing more than an unrelated series of gimmicks,
sight gags and vulgarisms; once in a while a joke worked - as it does
in any evening of vaudeville.... Harold Pinter's
The Birthday Party
1
Dionysus
in
'69 opened in New York shortly after the Summer
PR
went
to press.
