PAR TIS A N REV lEW
483
THEATER 69
The 1968-69 theater season was chiefly notable for an ef–
florescence of "black" plays and for the fullest diet we have yet had of
"new theater" - particularly as presented by The Perfonnance Group
(Dionysus in
'69), The Living Theater and the Open Theater. These
are the two features of the season I want to comment on at length, but
let me first mention briefly a variety of other theatrical events, if for
no other reason than that many have been praised out of all proportion
to their merit (and a few unwarrantably ignored).
A number of our better-known writers were represented this sea–
son, but in almost every case, their plays were a disappointment. Jack
Gelber's
The Cuban Thing,
at its core contrived and trivial, was a far–
and alarming - cry from his earlier work,
The Connection,
a play of
intense seriousness, of almost obsessional authenticity.... Equally de–
pressing was Tennessee Williams'
Bar in a Tokyo Hotel,
an album of
lifeless photos from his earlier plays - the sexual aberrant, the suffering
artist, the tyrannical female - all further deadened by being embalmed
in a stilted, pseudo-philosophical prose. Williams
has
lately been giving
his plays to directors who are pretentious lightweights (last year
it
was
Jose Quintero, this year Herbert Machiz) - but perhaps the plays have
only been seeking their proper instruments. . • . At the Gelber and
Williams evenings my primary reaction was bewildennent and sadness,
respectively. At Joseph Heller's
We Bombed in New Haven,
it was
anger: the grandiosity was so immense, the accomplishment so slight;
Heller's "philosophizing" is on a par with his dramatic sense - which
is to say, rudimentary. . . . Another talented writer gone bad this
season was Israel Horovitz. His
Honest-To-God Schnozzola,
a grab-bag
of overworked symbols of decadence (even to a dwarf!)
a
la Isherwood
and the thirties, proved a poor successor to his impressive debut last
season in
The Indian Wants the Bronx.
...
Harold Pinter fared slightly
better. His two short plays,
Tea Party
and
Basement,
at least had effec–
tive moments (especially
Basement).
But they suffered from their
origins as television scripts, designed as they obviously were to take
advantage of the medium's ability to accomplish visually sudden shifts
of mood and scene. The stage can't accommodate such quick shifts;
they come through only as painful pauses, unexplained transitions.
Pinter's best work is characteristically spare and elusive, but these two
