Word: bohemias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This latest specimen of "fictionalized biography," based on the yet unfinished life of Pablo Picasso, rattles along like a tourist train through the garrets and grandeurs of Bohemia. First stop, Spain: guitars, poverty, bullfighters, the inevitable gypsy temptress ("She kissed him. He kissed her. It was alive in him, and urgent"). Next stop, Paris: chimney pots against the sky, artist's life, nightlong arguments, more temptresses ("On the sixth day when Leah came to the studio he took her brutally in his arms. 'Damn you,' he shouted and gave her a long cruel kiss"). Last stop...
Anthony next meets Christine in a bar, 18 years later; he has "lowered myself, as by a rope" into squalor--the cobwebs and cracked plaster of bohemia, to find "reality." He is betrothed by a mixture of lust, masochism, and jealousy, to a teen-age chambermaid who occupies as many beds as she makes...
...roller pin, committed the ultimate betrayal of privacy every TV evening: the advertising grab-bag of under-arm deodorants, living bras, toilet tissue, toe-nail paint, perfume, mouthwash, and the Potato Sack look. Sex was the province of the Ladies Home Journal. Dr. Spock replaced the Bible. Bohemia in pink panties was more organized nymphomania than Art. Greenwich Village was overrun with mop-headed, turtle-necked, tweed-wrapped, smudge-faced, and beer-reeking femmes fatale, with Wallace Stevens under one arm and Well of Loneliness under the other...
David Hays '52 has designed some fitting modernistic settings. He clearly indicates the shifts of locale between Bohemia and Sicilia by suspending representations of two different suns overhead, with a Damoclean sword for the trial scene and a double font for the final reconciliation scene. The sheep-shearing festival, with the whole stage and its inhabitants bathed in garlands, is a delight to the eye. Marc Blitzstein has composed rather modern music--appropriately dissonant or consonant as the situation warrants. The backstage instrumentalists are not yet wholly at ease in their parts, but a few more performances will fix that...
...tried to escape. I went out for House dramatics, hoping that I could enter into the world of Bohemia but I was cut off from that land by the glass wall. My acting--like a robot, they told me. I tried growing a beard but it was no use. I knew it was wrong, knew I was nothing but a Pyrex flask with a fiberglass beard. So I gave up and shaved it off. I began to think that perhaps it was my fate to become an Erlenmeyer flask. But fate or not, still I struggled...