494
MARTIN DUBERMAN
Royal Shakespeare Company all share certain identifying marks. These
were described by Richard Schechner, founder and director of The
Performance Group (which this season presented
Dionysus in
'69) in a
Times
article of January 12, 1969, as a concern for "communities,
personal confrontation, experiments with text, audience and space."
Spelling out those goals in more detail, Schechner explained that the
new theater groups want to find a place for nonverbal as well as
verbal language ("to articulate their bodies as well as their heads and
hands"), to establish new audience-performer relationships and to create
a theater that would "define 'ritual' for our time" and serve as an
instrument for reconstructing society.
I am sympathetic to most of these aims of the new theater. And
I realize, too; that they can't be achieved overnight; many experiments
and even false starts will be necessary. (Schechner, for one, is weB aware
that theories are one thing and performances another, that the new
theater "has a long way to go.
It
is plagued by part-time commitments,
lack of discipline, no-talent performers and directors.") Yet after making
all allowance for the necessary errors of a beginning, and with a willing
sympathy for the new theater, I still have to judge The Performance
Group (however provisionally) on the 'basis of what its presented so far.
And on that basis, the news is not good.
According to Schechner, the new theater groups want to give their
members "more than employment or even a place where art can
flourish"; they want to provide as well an environment where personal
growth and a microcosmic confrontation with social problems become
possible. "Life style and performing style," Schechner believes, "are not
(
separable. You simply cannot be a great performer and a lousy human
being." But that, it seems to me, is nonsense. W. C. Fields was widely
regarded as "a lousy human being" - he was also a great performer.
Moreover, Schechner at least implies that if one
is
a fine human being,
the transition to becoming a fine performer is not only simplified out
probably assured.
Judging from
Dionysus,
I would say The Performance Group is
encouraging counterfeit versions of both personal and professional
growth. Under the guise of promoting an awareness of the body, of
spontaneity, of a ritual sharing between performers and audience,
et. al.,
it
is sponsoring only the spurious versions of these - self-indulgence,
voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Most members of an audience have a sense of privacy that won't
allow them to engage in acts of intimacy, or exposures of their deepest
feelings in front of strangers.
If
a total stranger, actor or not, comes
