After Innocence, What?

From time to time, the members of the cast line up, face the audience and flash shy, charming smiles. They march a lot too, keeping time by smacking sticks and shaking tambourines. They love to pretend they are being birds and animals. If necessary, they will speak. But they prefer to sing, dance or grunt as they mime their mysterious little charades -a kind of show-and-mostly-don't-tell.

Precocious moppets at a kindergarten assembly? Wrong. Joseph Chaikin's off-off-Broadway Open Theater. But that first impression may not be entirely mistaken. For the Open Theater plays a brilliant game of neo-innocence. It peels down actors to their childlike selves and doubles back to drama's origins: religious processionals, Dionysian revels.

Chaiki -a monkish-looking alumnus of the Living Theater -is also stripping the Tired Old Theatergoer to his pre-prop basics. Audiences bored with seeing curtains go up on living rooms that imitate their own will find themselves confronted by inner rather than outer realities. Chaikin says that he is striving toward "a theater of ritual dreams, phantoms, clowns, monsters." In other words, the pure joys, and terrors, of make-believe.

Beginning to Surface. Since 1963, the Open Theater has been testing theories and practices chiefly before semiprivate audiences in small New York theaters or at the anonymous distance of European stages. Chaikin is a fervid anti-publicist who has kept underground despite the Open Theater's operative role in two famous productions: Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah and Megan Terry's Viet Rock. Whether Chaikin wants it or not, his Open Theater troupe is beginning to surface as one of the best experimental companies in the U.S. -and certainly the most disciplined.

During a recent visit to Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, the Open Theater demonstrated its traditional expertise at oldfangled script-drama with a superbly subtle production of Endgame. Chaikin himself counterpointed Beckett's black doomsplay with a singsong, smiling-Buddha portrayal of blind, crippled Hamm. Beckett's line, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," might have served as production motto.

Ceremony of World Birth. But Cambridge audiences came to see the original works developed in ensemble by the Open Theater: Terminal and The Serpent. Death is the deliberative theme of Terminal, but as with Endgame, there was a paradoxical buoyancy to the brief evening (playing time: a little over an hour). In fact, the moments that pretended to morbidity were the moments that failed -most conspicuously, a deadpan lecture on the art of embalming and a rather derivative attempt to dramatize dying, American-style, as an induction center through which the imminent dead get processed like draftees.

On the other hand, a savage dance of chanted resistance to death -to say nothing of Viet Nam and polluted air -burst with demonic energy. For Terminal reverses the adage to read: In the midst of death, we are in life.

In The Serpent, loosely based on Genesis, all the lyricism latent in the Open Theater comes out. To begin their ceremony of world birth, barefoot members of the company squatted in the aisles of the antiseptically modern Loeb Theater. With a slow crescendo of whistles, tin-klings and click-clacks, they signaled to one another, and to the audience they had infiltrated like Indians, that the creation indeed was on.

A bare square outlined in red on the stage defined the Garden of Eden. There, a happy apple treeful of writhing serpents advised Eve to Do It, rather as if they were pushing pot. The discovery of sex gets staged as a sort of ballet of mass copulation. (Filmgoers can see the Open Theater perform roughly the same scene in Zabriskie Point.)

The invention of murder is even more ingenious: Cain learns how to kill Abel with the trial-and-error self-instruction of a man inventing the first wheel. All ends on a chorus of Moonlight Bay that seems to forecast with terrifying accuracy the sweetly ominous banality of millions of lives to come as sex and murder endlessly cycle.

The rhythms of life -sometimes sweet, more often jerking and spastic -are the raw material this remarkable company plays with. As for words, "Whatever I know, I know it without words," says The Serpent. Tactile and immediate, the Open Theater uncannily reflects the present-day audience -inarticulateness, frustration with words, an instinct to feel rather than explain, a deep nostalgia for a preverbal lost innocence.

But a theater of no-talk would omit almost as much life as a theater of nothing-but-talk. Besides, innocence is not really a final end, in art or in life. And so, like the rest of us, the Open Theater will have to face up to the new American question: After innocence, what? And part of the answer may be: words. More words -the punishment and the consolation of post-Adamites, fallen but not alone.

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