Word: theater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...THEATER...
...THEATER OF THE ABSURD. A beautiful girl gets into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce,takes off her clothes and climbs into a bathtub brimming with Calgon bath oil. The Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense...
...THEATER OF CRUELTY. To demonstrate a new type of insulating foil, Union Carbide places a baby chicken in a small foil-lined metal box and then lowers it into a beaker of boiling water. Several long moments later, out pops the chick, frisky and unfried. The initial plunge is not exactly Grand Guignol, but it does provide a bit of a shock. A recent spot for American Motors shows a gang of men demolishing a competitor's car with sledge hammers. Who would admit to hating autos? Still, there is a certain undeniable thrill in seeing all that shiny metal...
Appearing at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, the company opened with two plays that are blithe of spirit and scant of substance: Planchon's adaptation of Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Moliere's George Dandin. Musketeers is a nightlong spoof of the romantic spirit. The production presents Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan as meddlesome buffoons, a quartet of Gallic Ritz Brothers. In one sequence, neon-lit ropes arc the stage like tracer bullets while the cast ruefully announces that it has lost the threads of the plot...
Peter Weiss, author of Marat/ Sade and The Investigation, is best known as one of the more strident practitioners of the theater of fact. Therefore it should come as no surprise that this novel contains little fancy; it is frankly and almost completely autobiographical. Like his plays, Exile is a characteristically raw and intensely passionate statement. Weiss's first-person hero is a German-born half Jew who at 18 leaves his country to get away from the Nazis. He subsequently sojourns in England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden (where Weiss now lives). But the title refers not so much...