Word: gelber
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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...
...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...
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...