Douglas Messerli | "Service" (on Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter)

SERVICE

by Douglas Messerli

Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter / first performed at the Hampstead Theatre Club, London on January 21, 1960 / subsequently performed at the Royal Court Theater, London, on March 8, 1960

Harold Pinter The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961)

The "dumb waiter" of Pinter's play of the same name is, of course, Gus, who with his partner Ben murders unknown individuals they are assigned. Each time they meet in a room and wait for the arrival of the victim, accomplish the dark deed, and leave. This time around they are holed up in a small room that appears it may once have been a kitchen for a restaurant or bar above, a presumption they must accept since there is a dumb waiter and a speaking-tube between the floors.

Gus is dumb not only in his inability to fully express himself but in his choice of career—although unlike his partner, Ben, he seems to have some sort of sense of guilt, at least, for their last job, the murder of a girl:

GUS: I was just thinking about that girl, that's all.

GUS sits on the bed.

She wasn't much to look at, but still. It was a mess though, wasn't
it? What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one.
They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser
texture, like. Didn't she spread, eh? She didn't half spread. Kaw! But
I've been meaning to ask you.

BEN sits up and clenches his eyes.

Who clears up after we've gone?

It is perhaps these second thoughts, emanating from the horrible memory of the body obviously torn asunder by their gunshots, that threatens the end of his service. For what character and audience simultaneously discover in the final moments is that he is the victim this time around; as he goes out for a drink of water, he returns to find himself facing Ben with gun in hand.

Yet the dumb waiter is also an object with which the two men become hilariously involved when they began receiving orders for various dishes, including Macaroni Pastitsio and Ormitha Macarounada. The stove has no gas, and the men have little in the way of sustenance, except for Gus' biscuits, a bar of chocolate, a half pint of milk, and one Eccles cake, stale. Yet, despite his own hunger he gives up these precious objects as replacements for the foods they cannot provide. In short, in remains in service not only to his dreadful job of murdering unknown beings, but attempts to obey any demand they make of him. He is a born lackey, a man who was determined from birth to act out the demands of those in control, whether they be of some nefarious upper class or of the criminal underground. It hardly matters for Gus. And given the absurdity of the demands for the various dishes ordered up, he might as well have been murdered for his inability to live up to the demands.

At least he questions, wonders if those in charge are not toying with them, giving them matches, for example, when they know there is nothing to light. Ben, although more literate—he reads the newspaper over and over, commenting on the ordinary events it describes as if they were more horrendous than the murders he commits—but he does not ever challenge the authority of what he describes as the "organisation." For him it is a large system with "departments for everything."

Ben, in fact, although smarter than Gus, may be a sort of dumber waiter, about which the men's final staredown at the end of the play hints. This time he must kill Gus; but next time might it not be himself who is called upon to unknowingly pass through the doorway?

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Aram Saroyan | GERTRUDE AND LEW: A DOUBLE BILL

Gertrude Stein

Lew Welch

Aram Saroyan


Press on the link below to read Aram Saroyan's two plays, Gertrude Stein Lectures in America and
A Tender Mind: The Life and Times of Lew Welch, Beat Poet

http://www.greeninteger.com/pdfs/gertrude_lew.pdf

____
Copyright (c) 2010 by Aram Saroyan

Douglas Messerli "What America Abandons Abandons America" (on Mac Wellman's Two September)

WHAT AMERICA ABANDONS ABANDONS AMERICA

by Douglas Messerli

Mac Wellman Two September, New York, The Flea Theater / November 29-December 16, 2006 (The performance I saw was on December 7, 2006)

Over the years I have probably seen more plays by the noted American playwright Mac Wellman than any other writer. Beginning as early as 1986, I saw Mac’s play Cleveland performed as a BACA downtown production at, of all places, Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. In 1992, I attended the first of his famed Crowtet series, The Murder of Crows, at Primary Stages in New York. At the first production of the reconstructed Victory Theater on 42nd Street, I witnessed the 1994 En Garde Arts production of his Crowbar, which won two Obie Awards. The same year I saw both Swoop and Dracula at the Soho Repetory Theatre. The Los Angeles theater company, Bottom's Dream—with whom I co-produced a series of readings that included Mac’s Second-Hand Smoke, the third play in his Crowtet series—premiered the final play of that series, The Lesser Magoo, in Los Angeles in 1997. A year later I sat in on a reading of his Cats-Paw while visiting New York. I saw Terminal Hip performed in Los Angeles by Bottom's Dream in 2000, and witnessed his dance-drama Antigone in New York at the Big Dance Company/Classic Stage Company in 2001.

Beyond these numerous play productions, I published his plays The Professional Frenchman (1990) and Bad Penny (1990) on my Blue Corner Drama series (the precursor to my later publishing house, Green Integer), printed his influential anthology Theatre of Wonders: Six Contemporary Plays on my Sun & Moon Press in 1985, published the first two Crowtet plays as Two Plays in 1994 on Sun & Moon and reprinted those plays as Crowtet 1 on the Green Integer imprint in 2000, following up with Crowtet 2 in 2003. Wellman’s two Dracula plays, The Land Beyond the Forest: Dracula and Swoop (1994) appeared on my Sun & Moon Press, as did his novels The Fortuneteller (1991) and Annie Salem (1996) and his collection of poetry, A Shelf in Woop’s Clothing (1990). More recently, I published his novel Q’s Q: An Arboreal Narrative on my Green Integer press. Together we co-edited the significant anthology of American drama, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, which included 38 American plays since 1960, including Wellman’s own The Hyacinth Macaw.

Accordingly, I presume that it will be understood as no disparagement of Wellman’s great talent to suggest that the newest play I witnessed, Two September, at The Flea Theater on
December 7, 2006, was not my favorite of his works. Basically a political statement, the play seemed without much of the linguistic energy of his other works, despite the interweaving of texts by American writer Josephine Herbst, from whom he quotes a long passage that might be read as a thematic entry into this work:

Today the point of gravity for responsibility has shifted from the small community to the relationship between things. Experiences have even made themselves independent of men… Over the air ways, in movies, experiences come to be dogmatized to certain kinds of experiences at the cost of all others… The world comes second hand—or fifth hand—to us and the illusion that it is fresh because it is shown as a picture of an actual place by some reporter divides man into incalculable parts of any true center. (from New Green World, 1954)

Although I have difficulty with what I perceive as a romanticized notion of “the center”—a harkening back to an order of small town America and the social priorities of another age—I think there may be no better direct statement of what I began to explore in the 2006 volume of My Year: the simulacrum we now seem to desire in place of the “real” because it remains, in its imitation of dangerous reality, at a safer distance than the actual events. But, of course, in that preference we often have no way of knowing whether what we are witnessing is something that has been manipulated to look like the real thing or an accurate image of it. Truth thus becomes so separated from reality, from what might have really happened, that we have no way of unweaving it from someone’s fabricated warp and weft. As Herbst has argued, coming as it has from one or perhaps six degrees of separation, the real becomes disconnected from us, and, accordingly, is indeterminable and often indecipherable.

Herbst’s statements seem even more prescient in the context of later wars in Vietnam, the first Iraq invasion (when even news reporters were kept at a distance from significant events) and our current occupation of Iraq. Only yesterday—through the simulacrum of my choice, a CNN television report—the young soldier, Staff Sgt. Roy Starbeck, interviewed from Baghdad, expressed precisely these issues: "It's just...really just aggravating," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "People saying that they don't support the war because they don't like the president or saying they don't support the war because they are Democrats or saying they support the war because they are Republicans. None of them are taking the time or energy to find out what is actually going on over here."

Obviously, with the rise of virtual realities in our computerized age, it becomes even more difficult to separate any notion of “real” from what is imagined or simulated.

Iowa writer Herbst, former friend to Ernest Hemingway and Robert MacAlmon, experienced these problems first hand when she was summarily dismissed from her position at the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization that helped to arm, train, and supply anti-German and anti-Japanese groups, including Mao Tse Tung’s Communist Forces in China and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement. Herbst was released from her position, evidently, on the basis of classified reports, thus allowing her no opportunity to even know the charges or defend herself from them.

Sound familiar? It is precisely what President Bush is advocating for individuals who today are arrested on terrorist charges, that such people—defined by the government as terrorists—should have no access to normal legal procedures, that because of the need for governmental secrecy they have no right to know all the charges against them, and, accordingly, no possibility of a knowledgeable defense. Herbst was later to discover that the source of information that named her as a political radical (in fact, her second marriage was to John Herrmann, the writer who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss, and Herbst did embrace various Marxist ideas of the time)—information that was filled with lies and exaggeration—had come from her supposed friend, Texas fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter. Although Herbst was later cleared of all charges, her reputation and career basically ended with her dismissal in the early 1940s.
Against this backdrop Wellman portrays larger world-wide political events, particularly those relating to the young Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in and traveled throughout the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, and was highly influenced in his own attempts to free Indochina from the French colonialist regimes by the American Declaration of Independence and other such documents. His September 2nd, 1945 declaration of Vietnamese Independence in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi began:

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….”

Wellman presents the man as having sympathetic allies on the American front in China and Vietnam in 1945, individuals who attempted to explain to American higher-ups that it was in our better interest to support the Vietnamese National Liberation. OSS chief, William J. Donovan—the same man who fired Herbst—finally notified the local American forces to have no more connections with Ho Chi Minh, and in 1946 the first Indochina War (the Franco-Vietnamese war) began, resulting in the division of South and North Vietnam, and, ultimately, in the American military involvement in that country.

The only actual link between Herbst and Ho Chi Minh is the figure of Donovan, and that fact, perhaps, is what weakens this play’s claim to our moral outrage. Donovan, moreover, later became assistant to the chief prosecutor, Telford Taylor, at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal and received the Distinguished Service Medal.*

What continues to haunt me, long after Wellman’s play, however, has less specifically to do with Donovan or his role in these two seemingly unconnected events, but relates to what might be perceived as the American inability to separate our fears from listening to the voices of people who, caring about our values and ideals, represent opposing viewpoints. And it is in this matrix of events—even more than our misunderstandings of Indochinese politics, it seems to me—that we reveal our ready acceptance of the simulacrum over truth. The same blindness that Wellman speaks of in the post-World War II politics were continued in the Nixon-era slogans such as “Love it or leave it,” declarations of hatred to anybody who even questioned American military decisions in the Vietnam War, perpetuating the absurd confusion that disagreeing with governmental policies and decisions necessarily means opposition to or hatred of our country or—to bring it into today’s context—represents terrorist attitudes. It is strange that in a country founded on individual freedoms—a country that was created by individuals speaking out against what was perceived as unfair governmental authority—is so fearful of embracing those who question and challenge political monotheism. In fact, by dismissing figures as radically different as Ho Chi Minh and Josephine Herbst we threaten our existence. Had we heard and followed the enthusiasms and admonitions of that Vietnamese leader, we might have saved ourselves from years of painful political turmoil and rescued the lives of thousands of American and Vietnamese men and women. Had we listened to a voice like Josephine Herbst, we might have recognized that the truths we believed we held were imitations of—indeed were false presentations of—the real thing. By abandoning figures such as Herbst and the hundreds of falsely accused liberals and even communist sympathizers within our own country, we forced them to abandon America; their insights and percipient warnings were no longer heard. That some of them remained to advocate alternative views speaks not to the greatness of our country but to their own unswerving beliefs in the truth.

___
*Of more interest, however, is the fact that Donovan was later the chairman of the American Committee on United Europe which, with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations—secretly supported by CIA monies channeled through the Fairchild Foundation—fought against what was perceived as the omnipresent Communist force by attempting to unify Europe, which, in turn, led not only to the establishment of America’s cold war policies, but helped to fuel the cauldron of Communist fears brewed by the Senate Committee for Un-American Activities investigations and those meetings by house member Joseph McCarthy (part of the larger series of events related to the experiences of Josephine Herbst)—and indirectly led to today’s European Union.

Los Angeles, January 11, 2007

Douglas Messerli "Tigers Got to Hunt" (on Reverend Billy and the After Shopping Gospel Choir)

TIGERS GOT TO HUNT

by Douglas Messerli

Bill Talen, Savitri D., and the Life After Shopping Choir Reverand Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir: The Earth-a-Llujah Earth-a-Llujah Revival! / October 21, 2010 at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex

There I was, dressed down and all hyped up, credit cards in pocket in preparation for the invocation that we rid ourselves of some, impatiently awaiting the start of the revival—in two performances back to back—of the Rev. Billy and his rabble-rousing "life after shopping" gospel choir. "Changealujah!" was surely in the air.

I'd read of this performance artist's transformation from Bill Talen over the last years into a monologue-ing, prayer-invoking, anti-capitalist-preaching, left-leaning version of Billy Graham-Jimmy Swaggart-and Ted Haggard all rolled into one Brechtian being. May the theater-walls of ritual realism come tumbling down upon our ears, I secretly prayed.

The chorus of eighteen marched forward robbed all in—what other color could it be?—green, singing up a storm about American consumption: "forgivealujah." How terrible, they proclaimed, "the supermarket is now our neighborhood!" "Monopoly is not democracy," etc. etc. "This town ain't no supermarket!" they announced.

Rev. Billy strutted behind, gradually getting into the feel of things before he could come before us with the testimonial that, despite his previous messages, he had accepted the money from his recent award of the Herb Alpert Foundation connected to CalArts, as well as their invitation to perform in the Disney Hall. The Reverend had come down very hard in past sermons on Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Hypocrisy some might call it, but hardly something new when it comes to spiritual zealots of either the left or right.

The chorus rolled out another sprightly tune: "Push back—stop that Starbucks," or something to that effect—and another and another yet. The chorus gave each song a lot of energy, despite the fact that I could not always hear the lyrics, although I sat in the fourth row.

It was time for Rev. Billy's sermon. But tonight he seemed, well, I must admit, quite muted, quietly ruminating on his recent experiences with the people of the Appalachian Mountains where he and they had been working with environmental activists to stop coal mining. You know, he confided, as if this might be the very first time we had heard it, this "rip up and extract mentality," along with the destruction and sludge it reaps, brings "cancer to the promised land."

The earth is inarticulate, he explained. People must speak. And he spoke quite beautifully about the power of these poor Appalachian people, bound together by mountain after mountain for several generations. It was a very sweet sermon, if not so very original. Although different in tenor, he was similar to the tone of all the ministers I had heard in my youth. Which is why I stopped going to church.

There was a lot of "good feeling" in the room, as if we had found a congregation of one mind, and joined together just for this night only to celebrate the changes he and we together sought. Like most such ministers, he encouraged us to reach out and touch our neighbors: the couple who sat nearest me were from Torrence, having joined the congregation because her brother was in the chorus. I don't know, accordingly, whether they shared the same sensibility as most of the audience clearly did. For a few minutes even I forgot about the Tea Partyers, having left them behind in this temporary Left-leaning heaven. Thankalujah!

"Tigers got to hunt," sang the chorus. "Tigers got to eat. Birds got to fly. Humans try to understand."

I was confused. Were the tigers good in their necessities or simply dangerous? Or both? Perhaps that's what we humans couldn't understand. As Reverend Billy argued: "Nobody knows what to do."

That's certainly true. But when you go to theater you expect the performers at least to suggest a temporary answer or to more profoundly question you about things than he and his chorus had. This was, clearly, less a revival, a renewal of faith or belief, than it was a repetition of what I think we all had known for some time, a kind of celebration of our good aspirations. Entertaining enough surely, but something that left me, like the tigers, hungry for more.

Ex-porn star Annie Sprinkle and her "wife" Dr. Beth Stephens, sitting in the audience (Rev. Billy would officiate their "marrying the moon" a day later), were brought onto stage, where the chorus sang out in support of gay marriage as "A way to say I do."

As Mae West might have queried, "And what did you do?"


Los Angeles, October 23, 2010

Copyright (c) 2010 by Douglas Messerli

John Guare "On Red Eye of Love"

On Red Eye of Love
by John Guare

In the summer of 1958 a young lawyer named Sam Cohn, out in Easthampton for a weekend, went to a road-house on the Montauk Highway, the Summer Five Spot, the honestly named home of the great village jazz joint, The Five Spot. In 1958, Easthampton had not yet become The Hamptons but was still a sleepy Long Island town a hundred miles out of New York City with some big homes by the sea and a lot of small ones where artists found a haven. Jackson Pollock had deified the place by dying there in a car crash a few years before. Willem de Kooning was there. Franz Kline. Larry Rivers lived (and still does) over in Southampton in a house he bought for the enormous sum of $10,000 lent him by the poet James Merrill. Everybody hung out in the Summer Five Spot which featured poetry and jazz. A typical evening would be Mose Allison on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Larry Rivers, a young painter, on sax. The New York poets Frank O'Hara and Arnold Weinstein would read their work as the jazz played. The night that Sam went, the attraction was Arnold's first play: Red Eye of Love. Sam loved what he saw that night so much he decided to change his life. He would produce the play. But Arnold was not available to work on the play. Arnold was sail­ing off to Italy on a double Fulbright. Two years in Flo­rence. I asked Arnold recently: "To study what?" Arnold: "There are two arts. There's art and then there's great art, the kind of art that makes your hair stand on end. What's the difference? I thought I could find out."

     He returned to New York in 1960 with no answers and called Sam and said he was ready. Sam brought Red Eye to a woman he had met named Julia Miles who ran a theater in St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn Heights. They would tryout the play. Julia, who later would be one of the founders of the American Place Theater and now runs the production company, Woman's Project, sent me a copy of the 1961 budget. Scenery: $37.57. Costumes: $31.00. Rental of lights: $36.57. Use of theater: $50.00. Author's royalty: $100. Actors' rehearsal & performance pay: $655.00. Stage Manager: $30.00. Box Office personnel: $5.00. Opening night party: $18.74. Unknown miscella­neous: $10.11. When all the expenses came in they totaled $1207.72. The play had a happy response.

     Among the people who came to Brooklyn to see Red Eye was a painter and playwright named John Wulp who wanted to produce it and design it. Wulp had made an avant-garde name for himself by photographing Judith Malina's and Julian Beck's fabled Living Theater pro­ductions such as Jack Gelber's The Connection and Ken­neth Brown's The Brig. Wulp held a day job as an editor at This Week magazine, the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune, in the days when New York had a lot of daily papers. Sam who by now had married Julia took Wulp along as a partner. Arnold had fallen in love with a wonderful actress named Jane Romano who at an early age had understudied Ethel Merman in Gypsy and was clearly lined up for a great future. Jane would play Selma. A young composer named William Bolcom would write his first theater music for the play. Red Eye seemed to be a play that changed people's lives.

     Realities set in. The budget for a first class Off-Broad­way production in 1961 skyrocketed the costs from $1200 in Brooklyn to an astronomical $7500. How would they raise the cash? Sam and John each called twenty-five friends, among them, Jerry Lieber (of rock 'n' roll's Lieber and Stoller), the young producer, Hal Prince (Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story) and the producer Roger Stevens (West Side Story), persuading them to in­vest $100. Arnold went to his buddies, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and Jane Frielicher. They had no cash so each gave Arnold a painting to sell. That con­glomerate produced Arnold's necessary $2,500 share.

     In June 1961, the Living Theater, off on a summer tour, leased their premises on the second floor at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue to the Red Eye Company. Wulp who had never directed before decided he would direct it as well as design it. The building inspector for the city came to look at the space. Forget it, the building isn't safe. The producers made the necessary changes to get to the open­ing. Opening night, in June, 1961, just before the performance began, the curtain locked. It had to be forced and then held open during the performance by Sam and John. It was a hot night. Heat is death to comedy. Wulp turned up the air conditioner. The owner of the pet store below ran up in a rage. The overactive air conditioning had sprung a leak, pouring water down on all the animals. "You're drowning my pets!" Wulp spent the rest of the opening night performance bailing water out of the pet shop while the show went on above. Since Arnold had never written a play, he didn't know how to read the reviews. They didn't say Red Eye was the greatest play ever written so that disappointed him. But Sam and John were happy. So what if the Times was so so. Walter Kerr in the Tribune was very good; the New York Post had a headline "Avant-garde with laughs" making Red Eye le­gitimate and bourgeois at the same time. Life magazine did an article on Red Eye: "The woes of Wulp [and Weinstein] produce a wow!"

     The show was perceived of as a hit, but did not make money. Was it the hot summer that kept people away? On Mondays, the show's dark night, Sam and John and Arnold showed avant-garde Stan Vanderbeek movies or Charlie Chaplin's silents to make the weekly rent. When the Living Theater wanted to come back home in the fall, Jane Romano in full costume and Sam and Julia and John and Bolcom and the musicians and Arnold formed a parade and led the cast across Greenwich Village to the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street where they set up shop. Yes! the theater where Eugene O'Neill had made his fame as a playwright more than a genera­tion before and where Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett's double bill of The Zoo Story and Krapp's Last Tape had made theater history only the year before. And now here was Red Eye. It was a new generation. The 6os were not yet the 6os, but the 6os had begun.

     In the September 1961 issue of Plays and Players, the London theater magazine, Saul Colin wrote that "Red Eye of Love became an immediate success with the crit­ics and the public because and 'becount' of many rea­sons—being original, witty, topical and general, anecdotic and episodic alike, alternately farcical, deeply moving and slapstick, poetical and prosaic. Furthermore, it is extremely healthy in our sick world... this play should be given in London as soon as possible. I just learned that Audrey Wood who is the agent of Tennessee Will­iams has just signed up Arnold Weinstein. Under her able guidance, he should go far for our exquisite plea­sure and for the good of theatre."

     Red Eye never reached London.

     The producers had one theater party scheduled for November and kept hanging on through the fall to make that date. Red Eye closed in New York in November 1961.

     Jane Romano died in 1962.

     Arnold wrote a musical in 1962 with the composer Francis Thorne called Fortuna based on a play of the great Italian playwright Eduardo de Fillippo. Sam Cohn and John Wulp produced it. It did not do well. Sam Cohn produced no more but went on to become the artists' rep whose name is now always preceded by the adjective "legendary." Flash forwards: Julia Miles would go on to found the American Place Theater with Wynn Handman and currently, The Woman's Project. Wulp would pro­duce Dracula with designs by Edward Corey, first at his theater on Nantucket and later on Broadway, starring Frank Langella. Today he lives on an island in Maine where he paints.

     But go back in time.

     In 1964, Arnold wrote an extraordinary opera called Dynamite Tonight with the Red Eye composer William Bolcom. The Actors' Studio production was directed by Paul Sills, Lee Strasberg, Arnold himself and Mike Nichols. Dynamite was the first play Mike Nichols ever directed. It starred the great Barbara Harris and Gene Wilder. It opened and closed not once, but in four sepa­rate incarnations in the next few years.

     At the end of the 6os, John Gruen published a book called Close Up in which he interviewed the august likes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Samuel Beckett and—Arnold Weinstein. Gruen interviewed Arnold on the eve of the opening of the fifth revival of Dynamite Tonight.

     In this book of fame, Arnold was present as the world's foremost expert on the art of failure. Among his credits, Arnold was president of ffof, that is, Foul Fumes of Failure, a worldwide subsidiary of itof, the Interna­tional Theater of Failure

     Did Arnold have any worries?

     "I should miss ffof and itof if the revival proves a hit. Failure fans have a hunger for immortality and they like to rub against other failures because that way they have a little contact against death and are as it were inoculated against it.

     "I suppose failure has gone to my head. You see, fail­ure excites me. It gets me hot. I like to roll in it. Tousle its hair. Pinch it out of shape. I like to kick it around the room for laughs. It helps me dress well. It makes me devilishly attractive. And, oh, the reading I get done—a) because I run out of money and b) because I have to teach, prepare and hang around in the company of Ben Jonson and other failures... think of the tedium, predict­ability and impersonality of reviving a success. Life is too short! Great failures never die! They won't even fade away."

     The fifth revival did not work.

     Except it was great.

     I had met Arnold in 1966 at Yale, that annus mirabile when Robert Brustein took over the Yale school of Drama. Brustein brought the likes of Irene Worth, Jonathan Miller, Robert Lowell, André Gregory, Linda Lavin, Ron Leibman, Kenneth Haigh to be in residence. I was a fellow along with Sam Shepard and Kenneth Brown (of the afore-mentioned Living Theater who wrote The Brig) and Barbara Garson who had just writ­ten the scandalous political bombshell MacBird. Arnold taught playwriting. He asked me one night to stop by for a drink at his rooms in one of the colleges. I climbed up the stone steps and opened the door to the smoky room. A remarkable hawk-nosed man stood on his head playing the saxophone. Was that Larry Rivers? A beauti­ful young woman seemed to be in a state of slumber on a pile of pillows. The poet Honor Moore. Someone played drums in the dark part of the room. I was finally here! This was Bohemia! Rent? La Boheme? Eat your heart out.

    I remember the dazzlement of sitting in one of Arnold's classes. Robert Lowell's adaptation of Prometheus was about to open. I loved the fact that Arnold had served in the Navy with the rank of Fireman, but I had forgot­ten the fact that Fireman Weinstein received his Harvard degree in the classics. That day at the Yale School of Drama, Arnold had the original Greek text strewn in front of him and Lowell seated beside him. Arnold spot-translated the two texts, comparing the Aeschylus to the Lowell and then having Lowell explain his choices. It was a thrilling lesson in the art of translation and the­ater. I can still see Arnold pounding out the Greek rhythms to Lowell's amazement and delight as they talked about Aeschylus as the original Marxist.

     Brustein also revived Dynamite that year in New Ha­ven and I saw it 14 times. Its spirit seemed indestructible as it transferred to New York in its aforementioned fifth incarnation. It wilted in New York. What happened? Its indominable spirit had vanished. Was the theater that ephemeral that a small masterpiece could not weather a journey from New Haven to New York?

    What of Arnold since then? Remember the line in Red Eye: "Have you failed in your several chosen fields?" Hardly. Arnold has had and is having a glorious and typi­cal life in the theater. He did an adaptation of Brecht and Weill's Mahoganny which did not succeed commer­cially. David Merrick optioned a brilliant play of his called The Party which never got produced. Arnold wrote an opera called McTeague with Bolcom, now a composer of international renown, based on the Von Stroheim film Greed that was directed and co-authored by Robert Altman, produced at the Chicago Lyric Opera and has yet to be heard in New York. He and Bolcom have just finished their opera of Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge for Chicago Lyric. Arnold also has written a new joyous piece of magic called Shlemiel with traditional klezmer music which is about to have its third incarna­tion at Brustein's American Conservatory Theater at Harvard. When it appeared in 1995 at the Lincoln Cen­ter Theater's Serious Fun Festival, it received a rave in The New York Times and a four-page rave by John Lahr in the New Yorker. So why is Shlemiel still looking for a New York home? It's called life in the theater. You hang in there because it still contains the possibility of the most fun anywhere. And what about Red Eye? In 1996, it was read at Milan's great Piccolo Teatro by members of that august theater, translated into Italian as L'Occio Rosso d'Amore in a benefit to raise money for the rebuilding of the burnt La Fenice opera house in Venice. I asked Arnold, no insult, but why out of all the plays in the world, they picked this play? He said "Obviously some­one in Milan thought it was more famous than it was." La Fenice—Italian for phoenix. Talk about phoenixes.

     Red Eye of Love is back finally back in print for which we should be eternally grateful to Sun & Moon Press. Red Eye is no longer lost. The ink is still wet on it. It may not be on stage where it belongs but at least Red Eye is in print where it will bring people together who will fall in love with it all over again for the first time and each other and produce it all over again only this time—this time—everything will have a happy ending.

     Red Eye belongs to that timeless place, sometimes called Paris in the 20s or New York in the 50s or London in the 60s, that time and place where everyone is always young, the music is new, careers are being born in road­side bars and an eviction notice only means a parade. Read Red Eye and find its spirit. It'll be the best part of you.

Arnold Weinstein | RED EYE OF LOVE

RED EYE OF LOVE
by Arnold Weinstein

Red Eye of Love was presented at The Living Theatre in New York on June 12, 1961 by Sam Cohn, John Wulp, and Julia Miles. It was directed and designed by Mr. Wulp, with incidental score by William Bolcom, costumes by Willa Kim, and lighting by Nicola Cernovich. The cast was as follows:

WILMER FLANGE, George Latchford
a poor young fool
O.O. MARTINAS, Michael Vale
richer, older
SELMA CHARGESSE, Jane Romano
a loving young thing
FIRST POLICEMAN, Al Mancini
a music lover
SECOND POLICEMAN, Jim Gormley
a people hater
CAB DRIVER Barry Primus
VENDOR Jerry DeLuise
FRANCES K.C. Townsend
WAITRESS Julia Miles
YOUNG BEZ, six years sold Gregory Deutsch
SCRUB LADY Sarah Braveman
NIGHT WATCHMAN Robb Grace
TOUGH Barry Primus
BIG BEZ, twelve years old Benjamin Hayeem
(to be played by an adult)
ALUM Barry Primus
UNCLE SAM Jerry DeLuise
FIRST SOLDIER John Weston
SECOND SOLDIER Robb Grace
ENEMY SOLDIER Benjamin Hayeem
A BOY Gregory Deutsch
WOMAN, Sarah Braveman
his mother
THE MIMES Robert World and Martha Shaw
(HIGH HAT ROBBER and VICTIM)
MOURNERS, PASSERS-BY

Most of the minor roles are interchangeable.
The play takes place over a period of many years. Some of the characters age, some do not.

NOTE

The New York production was extremely simple, utilizing as few props and as little furniture as possible.