Impresario Religiose

THE DEATH OF THE MIND, a

psychedelic celebration, presented by the League for Spiritual Discovery. At the Village Theater, Manhattan. $3 (No Smoking.)

THE CAST The Guide. . . .Dr. Timothy Leary

Harry Dr. Ralph Metzner

So says the program. As the show starts, guitars throb, drums thrump. On the screen, a bloated slide projection of Harry, the Imprisoned Intellectual, is suddenly swallowed into a great green greasy neon doughnut. "Can you float through the universe of your body?" wonders the Guide.

Obligingly, Harry slithers into a cauldron of bubbling body organs and coiling viscera. Now a gallery of all the women he has ever known flips on and oft, on and off, mid-screen. "All girls are yours!" the Guide exclaims. He points to one, saying: "See her stamen trembling for the electric penetration of pollen." Then Harry is rudely thrust back into a dizzying montage, "The Neurological Chess Game" of everyday life. Abruptly he is told: "It's time to play the game of death." Harry reaches for a girl--and compulsively strangles her. A hangman dangles a noose before him, and Harry vaporizes into "the galaxy of the senses." The music stops. The shadow play is over. The special-effects spotlights and the ten slide and movie projectors momentarily cool it.

Parental Wrath. The uninitiated in the nearly full house of 2,500 people are still a little dazed by it all. But the Guide explains. "What we have relived tonight," he says, "is one minute in an LSD session. Visionaries throughout history have made this voyage and come back to teach its truths to the waiting world."

The Guide ought to know. He is Dr. Timothy Leary, former Harvard professor whose experiments with psychedelic drugs aroused such parental wrath that he was dropped from the faculty (TIME, March 29, 1963). Since then, Leary has struck out on a one-man crusade aimed at making LSD and pot as American as apple pie. He is also trying to found a new religion. Death of the Mind is billed as the "first public worship service of America's first indigenous religious movement," the League for Spiritual Discovery. (The initials spell LSD, get it?)

As an off-Broadway potboiler, Leary's new show ought to be socko box office, as Variety might put it, although nabes in the sticks will be better off running Tarzan instead. For acid heads and the impressionable, however, Leary provides all the right production values: religiose gimmicks, weirdo music, sexo fantasy, all boffo. Following a run of twelve weekly performances in Manhattan, Leary will open his show in California, which manages to be boffo, religioso, weirdo and sexo with or without LSD. The turn may not make psychedelic drug-taking and its kicks comprehensible to the average ticket buyer, but it ought to attract enough attention to pay the nut. That's O.K. as far as Producer-Star Leary is concerned. "Any money that we make," he says, "will be plowed back into the religion."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.