PARTISAN REVIEW
495
over and starts rubbing their leg, or shouts at them to shed middle-class
inhibitions and join the on-stage orgy - a simulated, a phony one, at
that - they retreat from the assault, turn off their emotions, and feel
outraged at the intrusion into their privacy. Schechner would argue, of
course, that to leave an audience alone is to settle for the traditional
solution of how performers and audience should share their space. Yet,
assuming that new audience-performer relationships are needed, it scarce–
ly follows that all experiments done in that name become self-validating.
The crassness of the Pedormance Group's assault on the audience pre–
vents many of its members from participating in even the traditional
sense of listening and privately responding to the events on stage. And
where
Dionysus
does bring some members of the audience into closer
physical contact with the performers, the basis and quality of the con–
tact is itself at issue, for the main experience being shared, it seemed
to me, was self-congratulation. Those who joined the revels seemed
more engaged in a kind of revival meeting, a gathering of the faithful
to confirm the rightness, the superiority of their way, than in the per–
sonal confrontation or the encounter between seekers that Schechner
claims to be advancing.
His brave formulas for revising the traditional roles of playwright
and text prove equally disastrous when measured by actual results. It
is fine in theory (so I
think,
at least), not to allow the written word to
dominate totally the purposes of a performing group, to use the text
instead as one element in helping the group to articulate individual and
collective purposes. But the
particular
uses to which The Performance
Group has put Euripides'
The Bacchae
are confused and puerile. There
is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with mixing the classic Greek text
with contemporary allusions and jargon; it is quite possible that the
two could be combined in ways illuminating to both. But this is not
the case with
Dionysus.
Instead of the classic and the contemporary
subtly intermingling, they crudely jar; one actor, delivering a speech
from
The Bacchae,
for example, is suddenly interrupted by another
actor asking a third, "Is he putting us on?", and "Is Vicki taking tickets
at the door?" The result is hokum, the Elks in loin cloth - though the
Elks, to be fair, are masters of ritual.
If
Dionysus
had been deliberately
designed to suggest that the radical young are mindless and vulgar, it
could hardly have achieved its purpose more completely. Fortunately,
the radical young are far better than this farrago which pretends to
represent them - and so they will survive it.
The Living Theater, while in some ways more horrendous even
