Word: hochhuth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has taken up the cause of the American Indian and has tried to mesh segments of a vaudeville-styled Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. Stacy Keach, however, plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance and charm...
INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has taken up the cause of the American Indian and has tried to mesh together segments of a vaudeville-styled Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. Stacy Keach plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance and charm...
Virginia Woolf once wrote that after reading certain novels she felt as if she were expected to write out a check. Such sermonettes, with their demand for moral reparations for evil deeds of the past, infest the modern theater. If one were really to believe Hochhuth (The Deputy), Weiss (The Investigation) and Arthur Miller (Incident at Vichy), one would conclude that the playgoer is responsible for every human crime and flaw since Adam ate the apple. The latest playwright to join this tiresome mea culpa crew is Arthur Kopit. His play Indians argues that Americans were once beastly...
...Peter Weiss' Marat/ Sade, the tear-jerking was decorous and concerned the plight of social revolution. One was expected to sob a little more audibly at Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, since, by the playwright's 15-watt intellectual lights, Pope Pius XII had it within his power to have prevented the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. Weiss rejoined the tear-bucket brigade with The Investigation, a static charade in which stand-up German tragedians testified that they were merely following orders in the massive extermination of the Jews...
...practical difficulties. Only ecclesiastical courts have any authority to annul a marriage; religious education is mandatory in public schools, even for non-Catholic children; defrocked priests may be kept from holding positions in which they meet the public; and despite free-speech guarantees, an iconoclastic play like Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy may be barred from performance in Rome because it allegedly defames Pope Pius...