Word: gelber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps after Jack Gelber's Career went successfully from television to off-Broadway, other authors subsequently decided to skip the first step. The result is a cluster of television plays attitudinizing on live stages. But until any valid equation between Trendex potential and good theater is proven, plays which aim at the Bell Telephone Hour level of art ought to be kept off or swept off the boards. A good case might be made for these shows, though, on the grounds that plays with any dramatic pretensions are preferable to those which are explicitly commercial. A monstrosity entitled Greenwich Village...
...Connection. Playwright Jack Gelber makes a devastating assault on theatrical illusion, presents a pad full of junkies in a formless, utterly naturalistic play that has sporadic distinction...
...England prep-school English teacher, seeing a performance of Jack Gelber's The Connection (at off-Broadway's Living Theater), called the play "ferment in the armpit of society." The New York Times called it "a farrago of dirt." But Critic Henry Hewes of the Saturday Review decided that it is "the most original piece of new American playwriting in a long, long time." Playwright Lillian Hellman said it is "the only play I've been able to sit through for years...
Needle Stab. After the fashion of Pirandello, Author Gelber takes an ax to the footlights, tries to smash all barriers between the play and its audience. Two characters in The Connection are moviemakers doing an avant-garde film of the supposedly real junkies in their pad, and another is the "author," who loses control of his characters, gets a fix himself and falls in drugged stupor while the actors continue on their own. One actor gestures toward a couple in the audience, says that there are other addicts, "people who worry so much-aspirin addicts, chlorophyll addicts-hooked worse than...
Playwright Jack Gelber, 27, who freely admits he has used every drug from heroin to peyote, is ultimately unsuccessful and self-conscious in his assault on theatrical illusion. But if The Connection and other Living Theater productions have perhaps earned more praise than they deserve, it is because critics with an eye on the future are recognizing that the group is hunting for new ways and forms. "I'm trying to sell an idea," says one character in The Connection. "What's so immoral about that?" Then he adds: "Swing, baby," and in its own odd way, Living...