June 2, 1970: Café La Mama
The Royal Court
I saw Café La Mama last night at the Royal Court, a double bill of Cinque by Leonard Melfi and Arden of Faversham. I had already seen their Arden two weeks previous in a bill with Jarry’s Ubu and felt cheated that my booking didn’t result in a completely different program. As it turned out it was good fortune to see Arden again. I came away much more enthusiastic over the production than I was before.
Cinque is a satirical spoof of American society sub specie Western Americana. The scene is a ranch — a bare stage with painted sawhorses, the fourth wall being posited as a huge imaginary television set. The time is “then or now,” both, in fact. The characters have names like Tom Brown, Maude Smith, Horace White, and Abigail Pepper. The style is gross exaggeration, which struck me as being in the Laugh-In tradition. The theme grows out of the contrast between the euphoria artificially induced by a decadent society (imaged in the “beautiful picture” of the television set) and the disease and violence that are more the reality. There is some good fun in the sexual frankness of the characters, whose archetypes are the sinless heroes and heroines of the Western. For instance, Tom Brown, who is in love with Abigail Pepper, praises her qualities in a list that includes not only the eyes, hair, and teeth, but her breasts and her cunt. Similar satirical capital is made out of an explicitly incestuous relationship of “Mother Maude” and son Tom: her greatest pleasure in raising him has been to buy him new underwear, and Tom tells her what a beautiful and wonderful thing it is to have an erection. The climax of the play comes when the four central characters (above-named) fall inexplicable victims to sudden fits of coughing which apparently are fatal; but death is beautifully avoided when Sheriff Sunshine arrives on the scene and changes to another channel, where the two couples are married and a happy ending saves all. The significance of the title escapes me.
Arden of Faversham. I was surprised to realize that the previous performance, which had left me very unsure, had grown on me unawares. Almost from the first moment, I felt that this was a brilliant production, superbly conceived and faultlessly executed, and including some extremely fine individual performances, most notably Michelle Collison as Alice. What else is amazing is the way that the director, Andres Sherban, has taken complete liberty with the script and yet has managed to convey much the same spirit of extreme and unexplainable torment that domestic tragedy has always supposed to be inextricable from human love. All we are telling you is the truth, the simple truth, says the epilogue. The truth is in fact pure, simple, and terrifying. Domestic tragedy, from Arden to George Barnwell to Death of a Salesman, has always specialized in the naked reality, in the facts of the matter. Sherban is devotedly faithful to this long and honorable tradition, whethe