420
PARTISAN REVIEW
S:
Something's hurting you?
B:
(Denies it.)
S:
You dirtied your pants. You did. Come on now. Were
you scared?
B:
(Completely confused.)
S:
Come on now we'll clean you up . (They go behind a tent
or away from the crowd.) Here now let's clean you up .
Here, wipe yourself with these leaves . (She cleans herself,
diarrhea runs down her legs.)
S:
You shit your pants . Here let me. (He cleans her up.) Take
off your pants, you can't do it that way. (Beppi cleans her–
self with his help.) Wipe yourself with this. Here let me .
(He takes his handkerchief and wipes her with it.) It's all
right again. Come here. (He takes her and deflowers her.)
The scene is of course harsh, unsettling, "embarrassing" to
witness. But what strikes one throughout is the entire inability of the
girl to speak about or to the situation (although she is slightly re–
tarded, she is in no sense a mute) and the man's extreme matter-of–
factness in his speech to her, a matter-of-factness that is greatly at
odds with what the theatrical spectator is conditioned to expect and
that prepares the way for the brutal abruptness with which he takes
the girl's virginity. The cold terse stage direction in which this is
indicated is an exemplary instance of Kroetz 's methods
(if
that is the
right word; I would prefer to say his angle of vision): the absence of
either preparation or aftermath, the refusal of comment, the sudden,
isolated, terrifying act of violence . An actor or director might wish,
out of obedience to notions of proper "theatricality," to insert some
stage business between the last line of the dialogue and the rape, but
it is precisely Kroetz's genius to cut through such dramatic integu–
ment in order to present the most naked, unmediated and , to the
degree that this is possible,
unestheticized
gesture and image.
This cold, grave quality of Kroetz's plays, their eschewal of
judgment, argument, and authorial bias , the absence in them of any
trace of tendentiousness, of "color" and emotional solicitation of a
traditional kind and, ftnally, their extreme simplicity of incident and
iconography, are what so sharply distinguish them from the species
of drama we have historically called "naturalistic." Apart from a
mutual repudiation of fantasy and the elevation to the status of
characters of previously excluded beings-the poor, the outcast-his
