KENNETH REXROTH
Beckett and Ionesco
[March 6, 1960]
By now I guess everybody who planned to see Ionescos Jack and The
Chairs that the Actors Workshop has been giving at the Encore has done so.
The plays were held over by popular demand for several weekends. This last
sentence is usually used for super spectacles, light comedies and an occasional
mystery. That in San Francisco it should be applied to plays by Ionesco,
Beckett, Adamov, Genet, Arrabal, the whole new school of theater, never ceases
to astonish wandering highbrows from Manhattan and points transatlantic. Not
only that but Sam Becketts Endgame is coming next, returned by
popular demand. As far as local popular demand is concerned, the boys could
still be playing Waiting for Godot to full houses. It was threatening to
become San Franciscos unofficial City Anthem when the actors finally took it
off because they were tired of playing it. What sort of new and strange
popular demand is this?
Dont let anybody fool you, these playwrights may be the sensation of Paris
and London, but they dont draw any such audiences there.
They hardly draw audiences at all in Great Britain, where their plays are put on
before tiny clubs. In Paris, up until very recently, they played in tumble-down
converted nickelodeons, with really amateur casts, straight out of the American
Little Theater movement of the twenties, to indifferent audiences, largely of
foreigners, for very short runs. In New York, they
flopped, hard. There must be something to this notorious San
Francisco sophistication. Maybe we are creating the basic patterns of
mid-twentieth century culture here. Everybody says so —
the networks, the news services, the picture magazines, BBC, the European
weeklies. The news has even penetrated Hollywood; alas, as yet only on the Grade
B (or is it C, or possibly even X?) level.
I think the real difference is that the rest of the world has come to these
new plays with overly self-conscious attitudes. They are not all that
intellectual. The Theater of Anguish, Theater Cruel, Anti-Theater
balderdash. The first thing that comes to mind after the curtain comes down in
Jack is, what a vehicle for Buster Keaton and Zazu Pitts in their salad
days! And then, fine as the Actors Workshop people are, you realize how much
Buster Keaton and Zazu Pitts would have improved the play, tightened it up,
given insistent pace and, not least, meaningful contemporary reference.
Possibly in Bordeaux they still need to satirize the folkways of the French
lower middle classes of the middle of the last century. But there are far
greater evils and follies abroad in modern Paris, and San Francisco, too, for
that matter, and a satirical art which beats only dead dogs is, perhaps, not
Anti-Theater, but it is certainly anti-satire. It leaves the audience with
comfortable feelings of amused superiority. Likewise The Chairs. This is
potentially a fulminating cap of an idea: Properly hitched up, it could set off
a charge of TNT. But again, good as our actors, Symonds, Linenthal and Israel
are, and they are splendid, think of Laurel and Hardy and Ben Turpin. The upper
classes may just be discovering this theatrical medium, but it has been there
under their noses all the time, in the tent shows at village fairs and in the
low dives of the slums of Paris or Berlin. When we saw Waiting for Godot
in San Francisco we immediately recognized it for what it was, a deepened and
enriched burlesque routine, a wonderful chance for four broken-down, wino,
gravel-voiced, unemployed, burleycue clowns to put across what they really
thought about it all.
Beckett is a great dramatist. He touches all the hidden nerves that lie at
the sources of life and at the same time he is a perfect conjuror of all the
enthusiastic monkeyshines that are the pure essence of show business. Ionesco,
no. His plays are clockwork mechanisms of dramaturgy. They race and rattle
along, ominous ticks are heard in the air, bells ring, the cuckoo bird pops out
and says, “Angel Food” in deaf and dumb hand language — but the characters are
completely devoid of interiors. The objects of Ionesco’s satires are not
relevant. Everybody can have a relaxed time disapproving of the feudal
imbecilities and servilities of a bygone concierge of a ruined castle in
Graustark or of the stultifying lives of the petty bourgeois families of the
French provinces, three generations ago. This is entertainment, not drama, and
if its exoticism didn’t throw us, we’d recognize it as pretty commercialized
entertainment. Think on the other hand of the impact if the Old Man and Old
Woman of The Chairs were called Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima and the scene
was the closed mansion of a “progressive” millionairess, off seeking strange
gods in Haiti for the winter season. Think of the things wrong with the
contemporary American family or the contemporary French one (the same things, by
the way, and dont let any Francophiles tell you any different) that might have
given substance to the story of Jack.
No. This is not humour noir black humor of bitterness and
revolt — it is just plain theatrical merchandise light comedy with a few
gimmicks borrowed from the surrealists and existentialists. Its much vaunted
mystification is no more mysterious than the inexplicable goings on that
used to go on in the Marx Brothers or Olson and Johnson its just a little
more clumsy, and so seems highbrow to misguided Americans.
Right now in Paris there is an Ionesco on, all about how everybody in a
village gets a new disease, rhinocerositosis, and turns into rhinoceroses,
except one indomitable soul who says, No! Never! Not me! I am human and human
I shall remain. The parable is obvious. Too obvious. Too convenient. The
Communists can say, He means Fascism. The Fascists can say, He means
Communism. The chauvinists may say, He means Americanism. Theres
something in it for everybody. And who is it who accuses our mass media of never
treading on anybodys toes? After all, everybodys human, nobodys a rhinoceros,
yet.
Still, this whole new departure in drama is refreshing. It does mean new
style, new formulas, new kinds of plot, and the return of the theater to its
popular base in ancient, enduring folk forms, the circus clown, the burlesque
comic, the nightclub turn. Nobody anywhere does it any better
than the Actors Workshop. Furthermore, they say they want plays by local
writers, they want to build up our own kind of new departure in the theater.
(They, to hark back to last weeks column, do have sets by Bob La Vigne,
and even a show of Bruce Conner out in the hall!) Coming up soon is a new play
by James Schevill. I wish others hereabouts who think they can write would come
up with some plays. Whose medium is this anyway? I say, after watching the
rather aimless and trivial dilemmas of Jack, Buster Keaton belongs to
us! And besides, weve got some real dilemmas, absolute honeys.
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