RICHARD GILMAN
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growing concentration of land and capital in the hands of a few
oligarchic families, which contains a direct call to tenants and the
exploited generally to join the Communist Party. His most recent
play
Das Nest
carries him further along the retreat from his earlier
stance of pure untendentious vision as well as, thematically, from
his
icy tales of the dispossessed. A drama about ecology and the con–
flict between values and power, its characters are of the middle class
and have no difficulty at all in "expressing" themselves.
But perhaps the most disturbing evidence of Kroetz' s change
is in his having rewritten an earlier work in order to make it conform
more closely to his present belief and attitude . This play, originally
called
Men's Business
(an ironic title conveying Kroetz's erstwhile
deep sense of women as even greater victims than men), ended with
a shocking, unbearably painful yet superbly revelatory scene in which
a couple playa "game" with a rifle and so :ulow their mute antago–
nisms and unfulfillment to find their fatal expression. Kroetz has
retitled the work
A Man, A Dictionary,
which comes from a nearly
untranslatable folk saying, and much more radically, has eliminated
the culminating scene and given the playa more or less "happy"
ending.
Kroetz is young, and he cares. We have to sympathize with him
in his dilemma and refrain from condemning in the name of "art"
what seems to be a movement toward an obvious and unresonant
facticity. Some time ago he spoke poignantly of what lay behind his
changed position:
My pieces are oriented on very Christian conceptions: they ap–
peal primarily to empathy, to love among people, to insight,
to understanding, to giving something up of one's free will, to
improving something of one's free will; they are touching, they
do not agitate, offer no solutions, and therefore lend themselves
particularly well to being absorbed as a kind of warm breath.
If
he fails to see the truly remarkable dimensions of his earlier
accomplishment, its revolutionary shift in consciousness and power–
ful, exemplary beauty, he is surely justified in his suspicions of the
