Word: gelber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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About five minutes after an off-Broadway play called The Apple, by Jack Gelber, begins, a character picks up a spatula, slings blobs of paint at a transparent plastic canvas, and then kneads the goo together with a rolling pin. Peering around this cunningly messy parody of abstract art with a confiding leer, the actor announces to the playgoers: "I'll admit why I'm here-therapy...
...gaudy African headdress wheels on an outsize baby stroller containing an intricately entwined couple and shouts: "Doctor! Doctor! Two of my villagers are stuck together!" The critics were not amused ("nightmarish frenzy"; "vast perversity"), but the vigor of their responses suggests that 29-year-old Playwright Gelber has touched some exposed nerve ends of the contemporary scene as he did in his first play about dope addicts, The Connection. Gelber likes to break the neck off the bottle of experience and jab the audience with the jagged edges, including several unhousebroken words. The result may not be drama...
...Broadway, the temptation to titillate looms even greater, and is widely indulged. The Living Theater, which produced Jack Gelber's earliest, The Connection, his latest, The Apple, and Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of the Cites, is particularly guilty. The Connection deals with dope, jazz and all that evil stuff. It sells as a result. His new job, The Apple, is set in a coffee house that reproduces the visiting salesman's image of Greenwich Village...
...Hayes, June Havoc, Leif Erickson and Helen Menken did The Skin of Our Teeth and The Grass Menagerie there. And this week Manhattan's Living Theater group arrives at the Théâtre des Nations with Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities and Jack Gelber's The Connection...
Among the better evenings: Call Me By My Rightful Name, an interracial-triangle drama; The Connection, Jack Gelber's graphic re-creation of a junkie's pad; The American Dream, Edward Albee's surrealistic situation comedy; The Zoo Story, Albee's famed mano a mano between Natural and Ivy League Man, running on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's lucid monologue, Krapp's Last Tape; Hedda Gabler, another excellent production in the Fourth Street Theater's Ibsen series; The Balcony, French Playwright Jean Genet's superb argument that the world...