PARTISAN REVIEW
485
first written several years ago, it can be viewed as prophecy, further
confinning Feiffer's incisiveness as a social critic. Even so, the evening
is only a partial success. Despite the brilliant inventions of director
Alan Arkin and some splendid performances, especially by Elizabeth
Wilson,
Little Murders
never quite integrates the two levels, real and
surreal, on which it's meant to operate; the semiindividualized char–
acterizations of the play's first half don't sufficiently prepare for the
semiarchetypal abstractions of the second.
The one playwright this season about whom I can work up any
pronounced enthusiasm is Ronald Tavel. He is the chief luminary of
what he has himself dubbed The Theater of the Ridiculous - though I
think it might more aptly be named the Theater of Fantasy, since, to
quote a Tavel line, it scorns "questions whose only jurisdiction is the
brain." This year, rather belatedly, I caught up with Tavel's work,
seeing his two new plays,
Arenas of Lut.etia
and
Boy on the Straight–
Back Chair,
and a revival by John Vaccaro (another Ridiculous
luminary) of Tavel's earlier play,
The Life of Lady Godiva. Ar,enas
was
the least impressive of the three, perhaps because Tavel made the
mistake of directing it himself, and at a pace and volume so hysterical
that it was impossible to hear half the lines. That can often be a blessing
in the theater, but not with Tavel, whose verbal ingenuity is his most
pronounced talent.
Tavel needs a director able to discipline, without at the same time
strangling,
his
intricate inventions and parodies. A director, that is, like
John Vaccaro. His revival of
Lady Godiva
at the Gotham Art Theater
was a triumph of artificality - brittle, polished, exquisitely mannered
and, not least, very funny. Vaccaro's elaborate tableaux are the appro–
priate visual counterpart for Tavel's conviction that "it's all in the how,
not the what," and his transvestite visions are a perfect embodiment of
Tavel's insight into "the changing fashions of madness." Yet impressive
though the production was (more so, indeed, than the script), hysteria,
even when functional, becomes tiresome, and two acts of
Godiva
proved
one too many.
Tavel's own talents were best revealed in the American Place
Theater production of
Boy on the Straight-Back Chair,
a kind of horror
version of
Our Town
-
the freakiness of everyday life. Tavel was
greatly aided by a clever director, Lee Von Rhau, by the lyrical, ironic
music of Orville Stoeber (who is all of twenty-one and who, I'm willing
to bet, is going to have a notable career as both composer and per–
former), and by some highly stylized acting, especially that of Jacque
. Lynn Colton, who was so impressive last year in Carmines'
In
Circles.
