260
LESLIE EPSTEIN
Batty ("brute in the junkel stays and man goeth separate ways"),
is
reborn after he is destroyed, transmogrified into a new creature,
the
audience's own true love, mate of its hidden desires, spouse of the mas
mind. In
Dionysus
'69 it is the audience, not Pentheus, which loses its
head in the dance and does not get it back; instead we are supposed
to
find our bodies in a series of ceremonies
SO
inept they carry no more
force than charades. What these two plays share, aside from
their
inspiration by Euripides, is their wish to be taken as ritual, not theater;
as action, not the imitation thereof. And this is so not only because
they force the audience to participate - even Broadway throws the ball
to the crowd once in a while - but because they clearly conceive of
themselves as acts of communion with the magical capacity to
trans–
form the audience into a congregation, free
it
of the mind's tendency
to, as Batty says, "cage, categorize, define," and make it wholly a crea·
ture of instinct, polymorphously perverse perhaps but otherwise amor·
phous, without boundaries, ameboid Bacchantes.
Imagine a theater in which Prospero does not break his wand
bu~
like Dionysus, contrives to emplant it in his worshippers, like an
elec·
trode, close to the heart. "Oh, brave new world," cries Miranda,
to
which the old magician, out of rabbits, replies simply, "'Tis new
to
thee": which is to say, reality has not budged, only the goat is gone.
But the new rituals of communion, no less than the old, are content
with nothing less than to change the world. On election day, a pig.
headed member of SDS stood in Union Square and gave a performance.
It was, at first, a traditional mimetic drama, that is, there was no doubt
that this was an imitation of a candidate's press conference -
What will
you do about the crisis of the cities?; Rome
was
not destroyed in a day!
- and that the pig's head was a mask. The turning point may have
occurred when the actor dropped his NLF standard and picked up
and kissed a Nazi flag.
It
seems a swastika possesses as much of
the
sacred as a butterfly. In any case, soon afterward the revolutionary
was answering questions -
What is your platform?
-
by running about
and squeeling,
Oink! Oink! Oink!
The distance between the actor and
the political processes he portrayed had been collapsed. He was
the
embodiment of the very forces he had intended to ridicule. The man
and the mask were fused. But he had not lost his audience, which stood
about in clusters, many costumed, many tattooed, their hair long as
the
corybantes', their minds dimmed with drugs as their predecessors' had
been with wine: a generation more open to incantation, clearly,
than
to interpretation, communion than commentary - fierce possession,
never point of view.
What are we to make of the exhaustion of a tradition that has
S\JSo
