Monday, October 2, 2017

Theatre Versus Entertainment

Theatre originally functioned as a platform
for entertainment, instruction, and moral
contemplation. 

Greek drama showed man's foibles as did
Shakespearian drama and Restoration
comedy, as well as entertaining audiences.
Dada and Absurdist theatre manifest the
breakdown of social norms. Experimental 
theatre of the late sixties painted a picture
of society that offended the prescribed status.

The best movies were also instructive in
observing social trends. "The Big Chill" 
demonstrated the loss of idealism of the
sixties as hippies faced the real world. 
"Apocalypse Now" demonstrates the horror
of war, as well as the hypocrisy of USA's
involvement. "The Graduate" showcased the
American Dream as well as one person's 
journey of awakening from it. "JFK" renewed
the debate on assassinations.  This was a
time when movies tried to tell some truth.

Things are different now. In the late sixties,
there were over three hundred and fifty 
independent theatre companies in the USA,
performing their own, original material. Now,
there is only one left, the one I acted in, in '71,
Broom Street Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin. 

How many young people have seen live 
theatre? Movies, television, and the internet
are now the sources for what before could 
only have been done by actors live on stage.
That industry is not interested any longer in
instruction, edification, or dissemination of
intellect. It is purely for entertainment, 
diversion and distraction; i.e. brainwashing  
that masks reality for the benefit of powerful 
people. Actors are no longer artists, but,
rather, corporate shills and pasteboard icons.
The truth is left to the comedians.

The barbarians/Christians are back at the 
gates of the Library of Alexandria, already 
vandalizing common sense and enflaming 
rationality. Will this activity lead to a new 
Middle Ages where wisdom and knowledge 
are circumscribed, and people are kept in the 
dark?  The presence of the internet 
seems to say no at this time. Stay tuned.

(Reviews of the play I was in in 1971
appear as comments)
















4 Comments:

At October 3, 2017 at 1:41 PM , Blogger John Tischer said...

Beware of the Food Fairies!
By Chris Morris
As a reviewer, I try to use flowery, high-flown metaphors and similes to impress you with my style and wit. When confronted with something like Broom Street Theater’s Hot Wankel, however, the metaphors wilt and the similes poop out. All I can say is that it’s the best damn show I’ve ever seen at Broom Street and one of the finest pieces of theater I’ve seen anywhere.
Hot Wankel, conceived by director Joel Gersmann and the Broom Street Acting Company, is a four-hour evening of four one-act plays from a collection of non-royalty scripts about nutrition and hygiene written for grade-school children discovered by accident at a BST rehearsal.
While this material might not seem like the most exciting basis for an entertaining or enlightening presentation, it proves to be quite the contrary. Hot Wankel is an excitingly diverse and perverse production. It is also maniacally funny; the humor never lets go of you, and ultimately drains the spectator completely. Gersmann and his Broom St. actors have the expertise to make banality uproarious.
"The Importance of Personal Appearance" takes a tract on physical hygiene and turns it into a comic spectacle of brain-bending proportions. Most of the presentation is devoted to a play-within-a-play entitled "How it All Began," an outlandishly written piece of schlock about the first cavemen.
All of the conventions are there: the discovery of fire, the invention of clothing, the first child, etc. By means of stylized motion and gesture, Gersmann’s actors undercut every line and ren this Ohio passion play asunder. "Hot It All Began" also features the most monstrously overplayed death scene in history; through excellent mime work, the audience is sent into convulsions.
The second play, "Mother Hubbard’s Birthday," takes a simple preachment on the importance of food and metamorphoses it into a scathing depiction of the straight American party. The synthetic grins and all-pervading torpor of a night out are beautifully conveyed by hallucinogenic ensemble movement by the Company. The improvisational method used increasingly in the acting company is demonstrated in this play in a long scene of alternating silences and gags.
"The Awakening of Amy Brant" turns the plight of a young girl who eats insufficient breakfasts into a Greek tragedy of epic proportions. Of the four plays, this one lags the most. It betrays an old Gersmannian fascination with screaming, wild gesture and heavy breathing. All these techniques are used to lengthy disadvantage and the excellent acting is incapable of salvaging it.
"The Food Fairies’ Party" is the capper for the evening, the undeniable jewel of the show. When this play was first performed at Broom St. Bacchanal earlier this year, its potency nearly drove me out of the theater. It’s more stunning than ever. A coy parable about two youngsters’ journey to "Healthland" is transmogrified into a terrifyingly funny naturalistic drm[dream].

 
At October 3, 2017 at 1:42 PM , Blogger John Tischer said...

The well-scrubbed symbols of this vacuous play are turned into Lower East Side deviants: junkies, greasers, bikers, speed freaks, prostitutes, pushers. The whole piece builds to a kind of negative hysteria; the viewer finds himself poised somewhere between laughter and horror.
Hot Wankel’s trek through the American cultural desert explores almost every conceivable style of acting; it serves as a sort of compendium of the theater. Each exquisitely played role, each magnificently delivered line tears away at the shallowness of American fetishes and preoccupations. Hot Wankel is a revolutionary crawl through the bottom of the American barrel.
There is something basically wrong with pointing out individual performances in a play created by a collective group which views itself not as a collection of parts but as a whole. However, there are certain performers who distinguished themselves so highly that I cannot restrain my enthusiasm. The list is long: Fred Murray’s Great One, Weasel Schuler’s Dear One and John Tischer’s little One in "How It All Began"; Esther Kurz’s Mother Hubbard in "Mother Hubbard’s Birthday"; Linda Hammond’s Amy Brant, Judy Dolmatch’s mother and Mark Anderson’s father in "Amy Brant"; Murray’s Mother Nature and (in a performance above and beyond the cause of sanity) Dave Klein’s Health Fairy in "Food Fairies’ Party."

 
At October 3, 2017 at 1:49 PM , Blogger John Tischer said...

The above shouldn’t be construed as a critique of any of the other company members. The ensemble of 14 is blindingly brilliant, to a man amazing. Nowhere is this more true than in "Food Fairies’ Party," where every cast member turns in a dynamic and complete portrayal.
Gersmann in referring to Hot Wankel before its opening, sometimes referred to it as "the end of theater." Though he meant it in a different sense, it could be an end for theater to you. This circus of demented actors in a destructive, outrageous, psychotic boomerang of a play might give you a fear of ever entering a theater again. You never know what kind of clown could grab for your neck in the dark

 
At October 3, 2017 at 1:50 PM , Blogger John Tischer said...


‘Wankel’: Broom St. Madness at Its Best
By Dave Wagner
"Hot Wankel" is the most ambitious production Broom Street Theater has ever attempted.
It is four hours long, Some people brought blankets, pillows and bag lunches to performances last weekend.
The script is taken from a book of "Plays for a Purpose," a collection of pieces about physical hygiene written by a group of junior high home economics teachers and students during the 1930’s.
This show is both a monument to perversity and a breakthrough in the "junk" method of creating theater, which Joel Gersmann and the Acting Company have been experimenting with the past y ear.
Junk to Gersmann, it appears, is any element of popular culture which, by virtue of its banality or simplicity, expresses the real content of ruling ideas – that is, without the evasions of pretenses of elite art. In the past, the troupe has turned fashion and confession magazines into scripts; the results were funny and effective as satire, but there were limitations in staging prose that parodied itself so easily. There was no sincerity to push against.
But with these plays for a purpose (probably closer to folk art than to popular art) there are rudimentary qualities of classical drama which allow the company more flexibility. They can build imaginative situations over the bare frame of the dialogue.
The first of four hour-long pieces in "Wankel" is "How It All Began," a re-creation of presumed incidents in man’s early history, for example the discovery that meat tastes better cooked than raw. It is a play within a play, enveloped by lines from "The Importance of Personal Appearance," which details how one Katherine Brown lost a part in the caveman epic because of her untidy hygiene.
 
The second part is "Mother Hubbard’s Birthday," a suburban party attended by Mother Goose characters in elegant dress, each of whom bring along some healthy food for Mrs. Hubbard to approve and recommend to the audiences for its nutriments.
"The Awanening of Amy Brant" is the story of a young girl’s failing grades (attributed to her poor diet) enacted in part as Greek tragedy and partly in the style of the Christian morality play.
With "Food Fairies’ Party", the work makes a full cycle. There is a return to the epic style – in the sense that biker movies like "Chrome and Hot Leather" are epical. Mother Nature, who introduces a number of her friends (like Patrick Protein and Viola Vitamin) to two children eager to go to "Healthland," is cast as the biker chieftan of the Mother Nature Motorcycle club from Valparaiso.
As you may gather, this is outrageous. That’s why it’s funny. But beyond the humor, there is a real structure to the thing. The caveman story is really an imposition of history of the idea that the nuclear family is "natural" and inevitable. In a sense, the "lessons" of all characters who follow come from the same cast of mind, including Amy Brant'’ hysteria over food and the bikers'’ violence. At the end, the revelation comes that one of the children who wanted to go to Healthland had actually been waiting to make a connection for his daily junk (heroin). It is shown to be the promise of escape from the environment of "tragic" banality as well as the essence of the selfsame banality.
Yet Mother Hubbard’s birthday party is the most arresting piece of work in the show. The Acting Company’s famous skill in movement is brought to bear on the description of ordinary movement. In those scenes the party phenomenon itself is examined, and at one point, when the un-intelligible chatter rises and falls in regular waves while the actors hold rigid party positions, Broom Street reaches an old goal: to achieve ‘pure form’ with no loss of meaning.
For the first time a large number of the 14 actors are set off individually. Another innovation, for this theater at least, is the extensive use of sets and props.
It’s Broom Street madness at it’s best.

 

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