Titus Andronicus.

Road Show Almost by Chance a Woman: Elizabeth It's a Man's World Titus Andronicus

Rather than speak ill of a deadhorse whose carcass will probably have been buried before this review appears, I would like to try to say something positive about Murray Schisgal's Road Show. Given that his jokes are opaquely unfunny, his celebrations of love, death and parental and filial affection mawkish, his sense of time and place inchoate and arbitrary, Schisgal himself must be a very nice person, for why else would Circle Repertory elect to showcase such a guaranteed box office dud? The sponsors' generosity of spirit is all the more remarkable in that Schisgal is not one of "their own': none of his forty-nine earlier plays appeared at Circle Rep. For them to have accorded Road Show a burial with full theatrical honors deserves commendation in proportion as the play deserves to be roasted.

Sometimes good actors can shine in abad play, infusing wooden characters with their own glowing flesh tones, and so it is with Road Show. David Groh, in the central role of a smirking screenwriter with a career history not unlike the author's, dresses in a light-hued suit with a lime green shirt and socks that almost match, and does so very well. Trish Hawkins, in the more demanding role of his college flame, now married to an Indiana druggist but once again inexplicably smitten with him, has lovely blond hair and a pert little nose, and a manner, when she is not required to sing or dance, like the young Julie Andrews.

Anita Gillette, as the hereo's naggingwife, is at a disadvantage in that she has to deliver so much more of Schisgal's script than her colleagues, including the ever-so-artless opening dialogue in which husband and wife exposit to each other how they came to be married and breed children. Later, as David philanders with Trish, she must anguish about it, and then, without skipping a beat, pretend to be consoled by the fourth cast member's Chaplin imitation. Short of going to prison on Schisgal's behalf, Gillettee could scarcely have acquitted herself more honorably.

Jonathan Hadary, by contrast, seemsalways to be trying to escape to another play where his talents might be employed to some genuine comic purpose. He leaps, he screams, he tap-dances with wild abandon, he mourns his father's death by doing his Chaplin bit, and at the final curtain he makes his face into a Mask of Tragedy and holds that pose for a slow fade. Hadary's long face exactly expressed my own feelings as I left the theater.

David Potts, whose stylized set designsserve so well for Circle Rep's concurrent As Is, has misapplied the same alphabet-block aesthetic here, though the rationale for his minimalism may simply be budgetary prudence. Mel Shapiro's direction and Candace Tovar's choreography seem to have been dictated by the same sane determination to get the show on the road with the least possible evidence of effort, lest anyone suppose they had been foolish enough to exert themselves in such a lost cause. Parents whose children are threatening to "go into the theater' are advised to take them to Road Show. Any young person seeing this will gain a new respect for such career possibilities as accounting or mortuary science.

After Road Show I didn't think Iwould soon see a comedy more painfully unfunny, and indeed it required a trip to New Haven to find one. There the Yale Repertory Theatre performed Dario Fo's Almost by Chance a Woman: Elizabeth. The press release and a long-winded prologue delivered by a member of the cast alert us to the producer's marketing strategy: Elizabeth is to be understood as a satire on President Reagan.

What a lucky president he's been tohave assassins who are such poor marksmen as Hinckley and Fo! And surely there is more than Teflon involved when, just as the Iran/contra hearings come to a simmer, fate lets him revive his most effective and best-rehearsed scene, a mass funeral for the innocent victims of yet another hi-tech military pratfall. Watching him and Nancy move down the line of mourners, with the cameras zooming in for cameo close-ups of the most vivid grief, who could help feeling a lump in the throat? And of course the inference of that lump, for all but the most obstinately judgmental, is that the President, as chief mourner and father of the national sitcom, must be forgiven for his bumblings about in the White House. Dads sometimes do dump things, but they ought not to be grounds for impeachment.

The good luck extends beyond merepolitics, for Reagan has presided over a decade starved of satire. The once trenchant Saturday Night Live turned to kiddy litter the moment he took office, and what was left? Whatshisname on PBS tiptoeing through innocuous monologues and singing twee ditties that would not have brought a blush to Eisenhower's ear. Insult to injury, the British have all the while been enjoying pasquinades of surpassing cruelty on Channel 4's electronic puppet show, Spitting Image, of which Americans have seen only a two-hour, highly sanitized sampling. So gently has the man been handled that he was recently able to host a gathering of political cartoonists and taunt them with the invulnerability of his image.

Fo's Queen Elizabeth is a generic despotwhose comic interest derives from incontinence, vanity and lust rather than the abuse of political power. Admittedly, she directs her chief of police "to continue engaging in . . . illegal activities without telling me about them,' and the press release promised other, more pointed, parallels, but I couldn't stay the course, though I shared the audience's hunger for a lampoon at Reagan's expense, even one as half-baked as MacBird! We were so eager to participate in the burning of the effigy that when cast member Joe Morton stepped before the spotlights to read, as prologue, a letter from Fo affecting to thank Reagan for contributing to his reclame by denying him a visa, and underlining the ways his play could not possibly be considered a satire on the present Administration, we laughed at the slightest cue. Our laughter became much more subdued as the play began and passages of sophomoric wit ("His head is so empty that if an idea ever got into it, it would die of loneliness!') alternated with inept slapstick and elbownudging ribaldry, as when the queen's guards must feel about under her bodice, and lower, searching for the pistol she's dropped, and she gets all excited, and then the gun goes off and she thinks she's been shot in the ass and is about to die but no, she's only--Har! Har!-- pissed on herself! The worst of it was Joan MacIntosh's eye-rolling imitation of a female impersonator "doing' Bette Davis's Elizabeth, a piece of ham so overdone and tardy off as not only to make the judicious grieve but to sadden even the unskillful.

At some point in Act I , our sense ofduty overcome by an instinct for self-preservation, my companion and I exchanged a glance of desperate resolve and fled the theater. Being better acquainted with Fo's earlier work and accordingly more astonished at the witlessness of what we'd seen, my friend then put forward a hypothesis that goes far to explain how Fo could make such a great Fo pas: the playwright has been the target of a C.I.A. plot. This would not be the first time the agency has used mind-altering chemicals on unsuspecting victims. To induce near-idiocy and manic euphoria, and then to see that he receives an invitation from Yale Rep to write a satire against Reagan set in Elizabethan England--truly an inspired revenge on the man who's given the State Department so much grief. Is this the real story behind Fo's Elizabeth? Only William Casey could say for sure, and he has taken that secret with him either to the grave or (as some rumors have it) to Chile, where he may be amusing himself even now by watching a videotape of the performance.

As I share the popular superstitionthat disasters occur in sets of three, it was with some trepidation that I went to the Mabou Mines premiere of It's a Man's World in their new home in the Apple Corps Theatre on Manhattan's West 20th Street. Earlier in the season I'd attended revivals of two of the company's prior prize-winners. I'd loved one (Cold Harbor) and hated the other (A Prelude to Death in Venice), and felt equivocally about the company's general approach to theater, in which (as in so much film criticism) it is the director who is the auteur, the written text being only a pre-text for an inundation of images, innuendoes and rabbits out of hats.

It's a Man's World is in this samevein, written by Mabou Mines veteran Greg Mehrten as a vehicle for himself and then systematically re-engineered by the director, David Schweizer, to yield a theatrical experience as little implicit in the naked text as Mozart's Magic Flute is in Schikaneder's libretto. Mehrten's plot is a fictionalized account of the last days of Sal Mineo, after his years as a teen-age archetype were over and he'd become a pariah in Hollywood for being openly homosexual. Like most actor-written scripts, It's a Man's World offers its star ample opportunity for emotional calisthenics, and there are also memorably funny routines for Ruth Maleczech as his comic monster of an agent. But the successive scenes don't knit together as a story, and it is hard to interpret the hero's offstage death as other than a suicide. Sal Mineo was, famously, murdered, and the play does not specify the nature or explore the meaning of this event.

Staged as written, It's a Man's Worldwould be remarkable only for its author's uncanny resemblance to his screen original, but as presented by Mabou Mines it becomes a graduate seminar in Entfremdungseffekt. All through the play, three closed-circuit. TV cameras prowl the stage, taking close-ups which are processed through a studio that overlooks the auditorium and then projected onto three upstage, overhead monitors. One's attention is constantly being seduced from the onstage action to its processed image, and the menu of screen images is varied with such resourcefulness, ingenuity and wit that the editing soon becomes much more interesting than the story. The real stars of the show, therefore, are not the actors, though they all turn in yeoman performances, but the videographer, Paul Clay; the sound and set designers, L.B. Dallas and Philipp Jung; and the onstage camera operators, Barry Brenig, Heather Norton and Karen Williams. Seldom has any centipede given such a persuasive account of how exactly it walks.

The Rome of Charles Ludlam's TitusAndronicus is the capital city of all anachronisms, and in this, if in little else, it is entirely faithful to Shakespeare's play. It is riot institutionalized, a state of plague masquerading as business as usual, the end of the line for civilization as we knew it, a harrowing night under the stars of Central Park, and so funny it hurts. How wonderful to be able to see Shakespeare's youngest tragedy in a production of such exemplary daring at the same time that the Beaumont is offering his youngest comedy with (hopefully) equally iconoclastic flair.

Twenty years ago Ludlam's Tituswould have been unthinkable; indeed, almost any Titus, for its horrors seemed too grotesque and excessive to be supportable. When it was performed, the gore and grue tended to be toned down by adopting such Noh-derived stylizations as red ribbons for blood. Ludlam's Titus, by contrast, has been created as a kind of feast for the ghoulish audiences of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To watch Lavinia's rape and mutilation is to be present at Marla Hanson's slashing. When Aaron the Moor chops off Titus's hand, it is hard to believe one is not witnessing a real amputation. Ludlam even adds to the play's legendary horrors by offering in dumb show a cannibalistic cooking lesson (Ludlam himself performs this ultimate Julia Child parody) as prelude to the banquet scene. Then, as Tamora and the other banqueters are wolfing down slice after slice of the giant calzones entombing her sons, the first rows of the audience are invited to share the actors' feeding frenzy.

However, all these excesses (andmany more, which it would be unfair to reveal) are set against a background of such systemic comic horror that the action of the plot seems an ecological necessity, as inevitable as the headlines of our daily papers. The stage is always littered with the corpses of women and children, Goths slain by Romans, Romans by Goths, and bumbling stagehands are constantly having to clear space for the living actors. There is a steady succession of "deaths' in the bleachers as well, and though the medical teams that clear away the corpses assure us that these are imaginary deaths, it is nonetheless disquieting to witness the slow decimation of the audience.

This is, of course, a completely hypotheticalTitus Andronicus, cut from the whole cloth of my own imagination, for before he had the opportunity to exceed, as he always did, our wildest expectations, Charles Ludlam died, the latest high-profile victim of AIDS. It is hard to believe that he was only 44, for I have thought of him as a Major Figure in Modern Theater for almost twenty years, ever since I attended a midnight-to-dawn performance of Turds in Hell in 1969--a spectacle that no subsequent piece of stagecraft in my experience has ever exceeded for sheer anarchic mind bogglement.

Ludlam would then have been aboutthe same age Shakespeare was when he wrote Titus, and he had the same infalliable instinct for making a splash. Like Titus, Turds in Hell was an exercise in piling the Pelion of excess upon the Ossa of outrage. It started at midnight, and round about 2 A.M., after many lunacies I no longer recall, a long dialogue commenced, in Spanish, between a thorn-crowned Christ and a horned red devil, which I was later informed was a classic text of the Golden Age. That dialogue proved to be prelude to a wonderful psychic auto-da-fe, in which one by one, in various stages of dress, undress and cross-dressing, the zanies of the cast did their thing to an endlessly recirculating tape of Swan Lake, each of them hermetically sealed into a daydream of bedlamish beauty. Full frontal male and female nudity was then a much greater novelty, and generally reserved for endeavors of high seriousness, like The Performance Group's pioneering Dionysus in '69 of that same theater season, to which Ludlam's revels acted as a kind of satyr play. In hindsight Ludlam's now seems the more seminal work, in the sense of having produced viable progeny. New York theater in the 1970s and 1980s would not have been the same without his example and inspiration.

Ludlam went on to create--as writer,director, star and force of nature-- the most extensive oeuvre in American theater since Eugene O'Neill. Now, at the point in his career when the promised production of Titus for Shake-speare in the Park and other large-scale works-in-progress augured a success scaled to his achievements, he is dead, and his death will seem for many of us the epitome of the horror and waste of the AIDS epidemic. No doubt the dead are all of equal degree. But when an artist of Ludlam's stature dies in the prime of life, the loss of what more he might have achieved becomes a common loss, and our futile regrets for the great performances we now will never enjoy (how I wish I'd seen his Salammbo while I could!) are like the futile regrets we feel for other times we have been negligent of the demands of love.

On the weekend after his death thevicinity of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company on Sheridan Square became the site of a spontaneous memorial service, as Ludlam's admirers honored him with their words and with funeral bouquets. Here's one more.

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Title Annotation:	Charles Ludlam
Author:	Disch, Thomas M.
Publication:	The Nation
Article Type:	Biography
Date:	Jun 20, 1987
Words:	2668
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Topics:	Dramatists Appreciation Playwrights Appreciation Theater Criticism and interpretation