The Naked & the Damned

The Deer Park. Norman Mailer likes to play the judge-penitent. He is a man who castigates the flesh while enjoying the fleshpots, who hates himself the morning after for what he has done the night before. In Deer Park, Mailer's first full-scale dramatic effort, he uses Hollywood as his metaphor for hell. The stunning staleness of this image is equaled by an esthetic sloth that leads him to pilfer rather than plot. He picks over the bones of the Louis B. Mayer legend, among others, and the off-Broadway evening is spooned out in 88 scenes, each punctuated by a fight-ring gong. The theater lets out at 11:20 p.m., but it seems like dawn.

The flowers of evil that wilt during the long show include an ambisextrous pimp (Rip Torn); a cigar-chomping studio nepotist (Mickey Knox); a studio czar (Will Lee) complete with throne, who drools piety and drips venom; "the crudest gossip columnist in the country" (Margret O'Neill); and a blacklisted director (Hugh Marlowe) who strips himself of the last vestments of his integrity. There are also les girls --girls on marquees, girls on the make (Rosemary Tory), girls on call, all emotional waifs with bed-rheumy eyes.

The story is rudimentary when it is not ludicrous, and the lines are etched in plaster of Paris. "Where, in what cemetery of the heavens do the tender words of lovers rest when they love no more?" asks the director. What interest the play has lies in Mailer's refracted attitudes. Just as Hemingway fashioned unreal women of unearthly pliancy, Mailer fashions unreal women of unearthly depravity. He seems to crave a slut to slander, and for his porno-puritanical invective any woman will do.

In persistently arguing that sex is the only meaningful form of dialogue between a man and a woman, Mailer confuses nature's shiny erotic bait with the gleaming fish of life. While wistfully yearning for the harmony of the sexes, he willfully denies the coexistence of agape and Eros. The final pathos of his characters is that they feel next to nothing. In the friction of two skins. they vainly seek to warm their hearts. It is rather a pity that, having chosen to express his nausea at the moral ethos of today's inhuman being, Norman Mailer can counter with nothing more cogent than the sentiments of a Playboy philosopher.

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