Pickings From the Big Apple’s First Arts Fest

Everywhere you turned in the First New York Festival of the Arts’ inaugural week you could find connections to the Theater of the Absurd--from the post-Holocaustian evocations of Tadeusz Kantor’s newest work to the latest incarnation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which Mary Tyrone reminds us that “the past is the present, and the future too.”

Not too surprising since this festival focuses on the arts of the 20th Century and the 20th Century is absurdity par excellence.

Adjacent to this sense of paradox, is the activity concentrated on the festival itself. While media pundits knocked each other down in their rush to pronounce the festival good or bad, useful or superfluous, it looked to this survivor of two such Los Angeles events (the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and the 1987 Los Angeles Festival) par for the muddled and perilous course.

As statistics go, the ones surrounding this privately financed festival are largish, depending on how you look at it.

According to festival mastermind Martin E. Segal, it took $8.5 million to pull together more than 350 events and 4,000 artists in 1,000 performances at 63 New York City locations, from June 11 to July 11. That’s the cost of a very large musical or a very small movie. About $4 million went to the artists. That’s $1,000 per artist or $11,428.50 per event (though events are not all created equal or equally funded).

Segal’s main financing came from American Express ($3 million) and six other competitive corporations, causing one wag to call the whole thing not “an arts festival so much as a dueling ground for corporate sponsors.”

What do the numbers mean? Only that the choices are wide, the organization hectic and the bureaucracy complex. They tell us nothing about artistic quality (predictably mixed), point of view (the 20th Century is the festival’s only common denominator) or attendance (variable, according to publicity, word-of-mouth and the phases of the moon).

There has been considerable wailing in the local press about the fact that some festival events would have been happening anyhow, and about a general absence of focus. But festivals tend to function on a the-more-the-merrier theory (it’s what makes them festive) and they’re not about focus. They’re about Event--whether in New York, Avignon, Edinburgh, Spoleto, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Quantity never matters. Quality does. And except for the fact that this is a first experience for New York, nothing is as new here as New Yorkers would like to think.

Along with music, dance, film, video, multimedia and performance art, there were 33 theater events. Given this plethora, choosing what to go to could be chancy. With exceptions. Call them known quantities. You know, for instance, that director Jose Quintero and actors Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst are likely to deliver vintage O’Neill. You know that a symposium with Tom Stoppard, August Wilson, Arthur Miller and Athol Fugard, among others, should make a few sparks fly. And you know that Poland’s Cricot 2 and its founder, Tadeusz Kantor, will find some astonishing nonverbal way to get a strong message across.

This writer, with limited time and a wish for variety, took in six festival events and one non-festival one. The latter--Ingmar Bergman’s iconoclastic “Hamlet,” which closed June 16 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music--seemed too intriguing to be missed. The only reason it was not included in the festival was because “Hamlet” was not a 20th-Century play. It was, however, given a very 20th-Century production.

Imagine a Hamlet in punkish black and shades; a Horatio in a bowler hat and a school jacket that says “Wittenberg U.”; a naturalistic ghost of Hamlet’s father who must finally help Hamlet kill Claudius by holding on to him, and an academic Polonius less than devoted to his children.

It was also a starkly Scandinavian, rather savage “Hamlet” in which Claudius (Borje Ahlstedt) is a lecherous drunk and Gertrude (Gunnel Lindblom) his sexual slave. Bergman went beyond character adjustments to offer a scenery-chewing Hamlet (the passionate Peter Stormare, seen last fall in Los Angeles in “Miss Julie”) who gets at his mother by attacking her through Ophelia (Pernilla Ostergren).

It was all very Strindberghian in its rage and eroticism. The actors constantly hovered at the edges of the action giving the text fluidity and allowing us to see Ophelia crumble into madness as we never have seen her before: earthy, barefoot, stolid, her mind shattering more with each new shock--Hamlet’s attacks, her father’s assassination (here a conscious act of murder), Claudius’ decision to pack Hamlet off to England (at which she melted into tears).

Her mad scenes found her bawdy, aggressive, loud and passing out large nails instead of flowers. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” became a moving speech to the players. Claudius’ prayer was the raving of a drunken sot dragging around a clownish whore. But the production’s closing moments were its most scathing. Fortinbras burst onto the scene with masked and helmeted commandos wielding machine guns and a boom box. It was a hostile takeover, in which Horatio was speedily shot to death off stage, all bodies dumped into a communal grave and Fortinbras’ eulogy delivered into the lens of a video camera--the ultimate hypocritical act.

Not easy for festival events to top such flamboyance, and few did. Of the two institutional theater contributions from Los Angeles--there are other individual California artists participating--the Mark Taper Forum’s “Green Card” (reviewed earlier in these pages) cast only a pale shadow.

As the title suggests, this 1986 collage of scenes by JoAnne Akalaitis focuses on the immigrant experience with particular emphasis on the new Los Angeles melting pot. But it’s a superficial journey, taken through a series of sketches in search of artistic cohesion.

Stages’ “Pavlovsky Marathon” an evening of three plays by Argentine actor/playwright/psychologist Eduardo Pavlovsky, fared better. Its back-to-back performances of “Slowmotion” (in English), “Potestad” (in Spanish) and a new English adaptation of “Pablo” by Stages’ artistic director Paul Verdier, are a long sit (7:30 p.m. to midnight) but a more prepossessing event.

“Slowmotion,” revived under Verdier’s direction by its Los Angeles cast (Tony Abatemarco, Hal Bokar and Grace Zabriskie) remains an immaculate requiem for a heavyweight rendered, if anything, more crushing on the distancing Cherry Lane stage.

Pavlovsky’s own performance in “Potestad” (“Power”), however, disappoints. To what had once been a clean and stirring personal/political monologue, the author has added embellishments that make his acting enervating and fussy.

This writer did not see the new “Pablo,” but in Los Angeles, where it was performed in Spanish, it had been a strong treatise on political exile and terror. Its favorable New York reports suggest that it has lost none of its power.

The final two festival events visited by this writer--”Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre and Cricot 2’s “I Shall Never Return” at the La Mama Annex--are stylistically far apart but united by their telescopic look at life.

Quintero’s pairing of Dewhurst and Robards as the ill-matched Mary and James Tyrone produces a much tougher and more uncompromising version of this play.

Dewhurst’s drug-ravaged Mary is at once fragile ghost-mother and killer shark, her Freudian accusations at husband and sons as loaded as hand grenades. The depth of her deception, fury, self-contempt and dread are barely contained. This is an aging Lady Macbeth.

Robards’ commanding Tyrone catches real fire only in the final act when, stung by his son Edmund’s recriminations about his avarice, he reacts in a speech so full of his torment and shame that it touches grandeur. We see the Robards of “The Iceman Cometh.”

This production, however, is driven by the entire cast, including Jamey Sheridan as the rancorous older son Jamie and--especially--Campbell Scott as the consumptive Edmund, the child born too late and too little wanted. He is the butt of this family’s dysfunction and, in a performance as delicate as it is stern, in this drab house by the sea (Ben Edwards is as much the definitive O’Neill designer as Quintero is his director), also its sacrificial lamb.

What O’Neill conveys through familial deadlock, Poland’s Kantor conveys through a piece he appears to consider his swan song--epiphany or apotheosis of a multifaceted life in the theater.

You don’t have to understand Polish to understand “I Shall Never Return.” The title is your clue. Kantor, who started life as a scene designer and poet, invents his theater out of his nether realms. His visions carry such signature and such force that his plays tend to look alike. Certainly “The Dead Class” and “Wielopole, Wielopole,” seen as part of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, were painted in the same dusty blacks and grays and duns as “I Shall Never Return.”

This newest creation is also peopled by some of the characters found in his earlier work, but this time Kantor is not on the sidelines conducting the action. He is center stage--as a visitor to an unnatural inn where a mechanical innkeeper will become the angel of death, and where the buxom maid is a “barefoot slut” destined to grow into a symbol of hope. This is a re-creation of a personal and national past, linked to poet Stanislaw Wyspianski’s “The Return of Ulysses,” to Kantor’s own wartime work in the Clandestine Theater and born of his resistance, as an individual, to what he terms “official history.”

In and out of the frame flow props and characters from his life or plays--a hanged man and his gallows, a naked man on his own rack, a woman with her husband’s remains bulging from her suitcase, a priest and his cross, Hassidic Jews, a bathtub, an old-fashioned camera, an erotically clad woman in a rolling hen-house.

At the center is Kantor, dragging his own coffin, watching, confronting national guilt while ironic tangos, solemn liturgies, choral folk songs and haunting Jewish chants footnote what rolls by.

What does roll by? Goose-stepping soldiers in fascist uniforms playing violins. Sometimes a bewildered rabbi conducts them. Once two bishops in red cross the stage dancing in each other’s arms.

Better to submit to the cumulative power of Kantor’s spectral images, freshly dug up from some primordial grave, without reading too much into their hallucinatory compositions. Best to let them assault our subconscious as they come spilling out of his.

The deconstructions do what they need to do: Send a shudder through our own memories of Nazi invasions and other Holocausts. They are, in the end, a funereal rite of purification born of a poet’s torment.

The fascination in a festival of such wide-ranging scope is ultimately its free associations. Forget focus and point of view. Kantor had not seemed connected to O’Neill, or even Pavlovsky, until one saw their work in rapid succession. But Kantor is closest by far to yet another visitor, playwright Eugene Ionesco, who was invited to lecture the festival audience about an old and nagging question--”Who Needs Theater?”--and then supplied the answer: “I do. Everybody does.” Ionesco qualifies art as man’s most “useless and most indispensable activity.” This festival, others before it and festivals to come, would seem to back him up.