Word: calcuttas
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Down through the ages, pestilence and poverty have made death an all too frequent visitor to Calcutta. Last week politics was the cause. For two days, rival political and labor factions rioted in Calcutta with spears, swords, clubs and daggers. By the time order was restored by local police, stiffened by 1,000 special officers, 34 lay dead...
...disorders had been building up for 13 months. In early 1969, a shaky coalition government took power in West Bengal, the most turbulent of India's 17 states and the one in which Calcutta lies. Since then, against a backdrop of bitter political strife stirred up by the coalition's strong Communist faction, unrest, violence and crime have been increasing. In the past year, the state has had 584 murders, one-fourth of them in Calcutta. Never the safest place on earth, the teeming metropolis of 8,000,000 has become a city of fear. Aside from...
Blood All Over. In the countryside, Marxist agitators stirred discontent among landless peasants. In Calcutta, they won big pay increases for 1,000,000 tea, jute, textile and engineering workers. To make sure that no one interfered with the Marxists' tough tactics, Party Boss Jyoti Basu saw to it that Bengali police were deeply infiltrated by the party faithful. The political shenanigans soon led to a breakdown of law and order throughout the state...
...sacred, the other profane, both of which, like diastolic and systolic pressures, have always been at the heart of theater. With Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theater, the emphasis is on the sacred, on a lacerating spiritual intensity, a stripping to the soul. With Hair and Oh! Calcutta! the emphasis is on the profane, on Dionysian revels, a stripping to the body. A reverse movement is also present, with Grotowski illuminating the profanation of the soul, and the nude shows illuminating the sacredness of the human body...
...that mentality sprang the social protest plays of the '30s and the Group Theater. The mentality of Freudian psychology prefigured Tennessee Williams and all the psychologically oriented plays of the '40s and '50s, together with the Actors Studio and Method acting. What Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and The Company imply and anticipate is a mentality of paganism, quite possibly the first such mentality ever to shape the course of the American theater. As yet, this mentality lacks a commanding playwright or an acting discipline, but it seems distinctly likely that these are lurking in the wings...