Love Play in Braille

The contemporary theater is undergoing both an identity crisis and a crisis of survival. It is trying to rediscover its pre-verbal origins, and it is trying to isolate what it is that theater can uniquely do that films and television cannot do. This has led in two directions, one sacred, the other profane, both of which, like diastolic and systolic pressures, have always been at the heart of theater. With Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theater, the emphasis is on the sacred, on a lacerating spiritual intensity, a stripping to the soul. With Hair and Oh! Calcutta! the emphasis is on the profane, on Dionysian revels, a stripping to the body. A reverse movement is also present, with Grotowski illuminating the profanation of the soul, and the nude shows illuminating the sacredness of the human body.

These ventures in dramatic exploration are also intimately related to an attempt to bridge the we-they gap in the actor-audience relationship--what is popularly called "participatory" theater. In the hands of the Living Theater, this has proved hostile and abrasive, a kind of tyrannical coercion toward brotherhood. An avant-garde group in Los Angeles called The Company is proving that a different approach can produce a loving sense of affinity and communal affection. They have done little-known plays by Ann Jellicoe, who authored The Knack, Megan Terry, who authored Viet Rock, and an adaptation of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, "A Coney Island of the Mind." They have now embarked on a "theater-of-touch" which they call the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre.

The audience does not file in to see a show but enters a room where a group of about 20 playgoers at a time is told what to do by a soft-spoken instructor. Everyone sits down in a circle, clasps hands and closes his or her eyes. The instructor sets a cycle of squeezed hands going, a kind of charged current binding the circle together. As one's left hand is squeezed, one presses the hand of one's right-hand neighbor. This flows around the circle with increasing rapidity.

Journey in a Maze. Loosening-up exercises follow. One raps one's own skull with fingers and knuckles, slaps one's own body and the bodies of others from chest to ankle. One sits cross-legged opposite a selected stranger, and with eyes again closed is told by the instructor to sculpt mentally the other person's face. One is told to run one's fingers over the eyebrows, eye sockets, nose, chin and cheekbones, along his or her lips, to feel the nape of the neck, the texture of the hair. The fact of being instructed to do these things is liberating in that it reduces inhibition, guilt and responsibility. When one opens one's eyes, it is as if one had known this person for months rather than minutes. For several minutes more, the entire group lies pressed together on its sides like the pleats of an accordion, and as if all the bodies had become one flesh.

After this, a shut-eyed journey through a maze begins. In the maze, a man or a woman, alternately, leads the playgoer by the hand. They whisper and murmur, making sounds that seem like endearments. There are caresses, lips brush one's cheeks and one responds in kind. One's hands are perfumed with honeysuckle. A piece of apple may be popped into one's mouth.

There is an acute sense that the whole world has gone tactile, a world of love play in Braille.

At the end of the maze, one is likely to feel tender, lighthearted, erotic and trusting--four of the basic attributes of love. Perhaps anything that follows would seem anticlimactic except the act of making love. The show proper is nothing that anyone would care to attend for and of itself. It is a kind of dance-in to hard rock music most charitably described as a shorn Hair.

Soil for the Future. Obviously, the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre has more the air of group therapy than it does of legitimate theater. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as some sort of peripheral fad. The true purpose of the avant-garde is to provide the soil in which future drama will grow. Aesthetic soil means shaping a mentality. For example, the Depression created the mentality of social consciousness, and out of that mentality sprang the social protest plays of the '30s and the Group Theater. The mentality of Freudian psychology prefigured Tennessee Williams and all the psychologically oriented plays of the '40s and '50s, together with the Actors Studio and Method acting. What Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and The Company imply and anticipate is a mentality of paganism, quite possibly the first such mentality ever to shape the course of the American theater. As yet, this mentality lacks a commanding playwright or an acting discipline, but it seems distinctly likely that these are lurking in the wings.

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