Cultural Vandalism

By T.E. Kalem

In a novel called The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the late Japanese writer Yukio Mishima told of a young man with such woefully abraded nerves that he feels asphyxiated by a sense of the past. He burns down a 14th century shrine because he cannot tolerate the weight of accumulated civilization. Cultural vandalism has not progressed that far in the West, but defacing and debasing the myths and masterpieces of the past are very much the vogue. The rules are simple: play it cute, play it camp, play it snide, but never, never play it straight. Recent examples include brilliant pranks like Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream and strident vulgarities like Tom O'Horgan's Jesus Christ Superstar. The latest merry-an-drew is Producer Joseph Papp, who has turned loose a dramatic demolition team on Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The play is apprentice work of the Bard's, but it does contain premonitory inklings of Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. However, the theme of young love is scarcely served by this dryly mocking adaptation. The musical resembles an animated jukebox and comes alive only in one sultry number, delivered by a one-woman heat wave named Jonelle Allen. The excuse for ventures of this sort is that they render the classics accessible. Actually, such shows are merely masked in the accessories of modernity -- rock music, randy deshabille, silly props and lofty panfraternal sentimentality. The resulting trivia are perfectly suited to an audience that in Eliot's phrase wishes to be "distracted from distraction by distraction." . T.E. Kalem

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