Two on and Island

The Annex of the La Mama Theater, a few doors down from their headquarters in the East Village, is a large rectangular space that has been used by Andrei Serban in quite different ways for his productions of Trilogy and The Good Woman of Setzuan. Now Tom O'Horgan uses it quite differently again for his production of Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Abyssinia [sic]. The audience files into two narrow tiers of seats, one above the other, that hug three of the walls. The entire floor space is filled with Bill Stabile's set, an irregular series of brown platforms of slightly different heights, the spaces between them filled with undulated "trampolines" of brown burlap. The immediate, correct impression is of footholds of rock in the sea, one barely distinguishable from the other.

The play, set on a desert island, has two characters, a native and a new arrival who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. This Crusoe-Friday relation is used for two long acts of symbolic sequences, including impersonations, maskings, transvestism, and eventual reversal of roles. It ends with the opening scene, only the actor who played the native now plays the new arrival and vice versa.

Apart from the substance of the play (more about this below), its methods are perfectly suited to the perfervid O'Horgan. I first saw his work in a bill of La Mama short plays in 1966 and was immediately struck by a theatrical talent--explicitly, a talent for theatricality. Soon afterward he did Rochelle Owens' Futz, about the love of a farmer for his sow, and handled it with just the right outrageous lyric wildness. His film of Futz was the first sign that the outrageousness was beginning to overgrow, and by the time he did the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar he had become America's most daringly chic theatrical window-dresser. But with Superstar, admittedly, he had to manufacture a dramatic occasion where none really existed. Now in The Architect he has at least found a work intended to live as a play and, what's even happier for him, a play that plumbs the fruitiest reaches of O'Horgan's rank, jungle-growth temperament; and that revels in the scatology and campy naughtiness that he loves.

The opening moment is sensational. Loud airplane crash noises frighten the native, and as he cowers, the Emperor arrives through a hole evidently made specially for this purpose in the Annex ceiling, floating down with an umbrella and a carpet-bag, wearing a stained white double-breasted suit and no shoes, while dozens of tiny lights twinkle under the far-flung burlap. From then on the extravagances never falter. With the aid of good lighting (Cheryl Thacker) and costumes (Joseph Aulisi) and masks (Barbara Sexton) O'Horgan gloats over every chance for visual explosion, inventing chances--especially ribald ones--even where they don't exist. But plenty exist. Visually it's all florid and entertaining. I had the feeling that, instead of a director finding exactly the right play for him to serve (as with Peter ...