Word: shows
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seen The Proposition twice, but I went again last Wednesday to a free Vietnam Moratorium Performance. They had decided not to close, in the conviction that art doesn't suspend itself for politics, but a member of the cast announced at the beginning that they wanted to give a show about what had happened during...
Because they are using an almost entirely improvisational approach this year, most of their material was in the hands of the audience, who suggested the same sort of cute bits The Proposition usually does: "the Mets," and "French kissing." No one through two shows suggested Vietnam, so the Moratorium aspect of the show was never realized...
Still, the show had a different flavor than it had when I saw it last spring. At that time, the original Proposition was running out of gas. The show had started with a small group of Harvard people, but the founder and original director, Jerome Leven, had left to form The Light Company, which had turned out to be as much of a flop as the Proposition has been a success. The cast was tired, and spent a lot of time anguishing over what was wrong. But the show kept going, and the laugh count, despite the problems, kept building...
Albert says of the show when he came to it. "It was a history of doing things the wrong way. This little theater group was operating under 'the star system.' The actors would cut each other's throats for laughs. It had a canned quality, and in that, it was almost like a TV show. The show was artistically bad, and it was boring. The actors didn't respect themselves or each other...
...cast of The Proposition, a Living Theater approach seemed unreasonable. So Albert worked with the cast, using sensitivity training, bio-mechanics, and games therapy, which he admits are non-sexual substitutes. "We played games because The Proposition is about games. 'Dating Bar' [one of the skits in the show] is only a very sophisticated game between frightened people. To help our improvisational skills, we played 'ghosts,' which shows you that you've got to link words together...