Toward a Third Stream Theatre: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Plays

Toward a Third Stream Theatre: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Plays MICHAEL SKAU ONE OF THE EARLY PRACTITIONERS of the "new theatre" was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose two volumes, Unfair Arguments with Existence and Routines, explore the dimensions and strategies of dramatic innovation . The influence of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene lonesco can be easily detected in many of his productions as he experiments with the forms and structures of drama. Ferlinghetti uses the expressive power of noise and silence, the disintegration of language, the integrity of production autonomy, and the involvement of the audience to disturb the conventional ambiance of the theatre, replacing the traditional with what he calls "Third Stream Theatre." Eschewing the professionalism and virtuosity of his acknowledged influences, Ferlinghetti provides effective and significant contributions to experimental theatre. In 1966, Robert Brustein called for a "Third Theatre," offering "artistic license" as an alternative to serious dramas and those with commercial appeal.' Two years earlier, Ferlinghetti had defined his own dramatic form as "a 'third stream' between oldstyle dramas & spontaneous Action or improvisation, between Well Made Plays (with their coherent pictures of coherent worlds which now turn out to be the falsest) and those free-form Happenings made of primitive perceptual chaos.'" Fcrlinghetti's plays in Unfair Arguments with Existence lean more toward the "oldstyle dramas" and his Routines more toward the fledgling Happenings, but in both cases the author takes consider29 30 MICHAEL SKAU able liberties with the model forms. Ferlingheui characterizes his "routines " as "nexuses of ordinary dramatics, nubs of normal plays" (R, 12 ), and at tirst glance many of these do seem to have been printed in the seed stage. They are essentially situations, episodes, notions, and momentary insights, whose distortion and lack of development give them the quality of political cartoons. Most of the plays in Routines disdain dialogue, relying instead on elemental auditory or visual effects. Non-verbal cries and screams and surrealistic images, like a woman's head carried on a stick or a naked woman whose body is painted to resemble a bearded lady, dominate these plays.' Low humor, farce, and slapstick are also employed to enhance the alogical pattern. In The Alligation, Shooky enacts the theme of frustration which characterizes all of the plays: he raises himself to look out the window, then "falls to floor, half raises self to window again, falls again, moves to another window, raises self slowly, falls back, half raises self again, falls back, half raises self again, falls back" (UA, 22). Because the possibility of effective oral communication is no more feasible than Shooky's attempt at purposeful action, dialogue is shunned in the plays. In the longest play in Routines, Servants of the People, four loudspeakers are mounted on podiums before an audience composed of actors and the general public, and these loudspeakers dominate the play, providing as much meaningful interchange as the separate channels of a radio. The play focuses on the breakdown of communication, beginning with an introductory mingling of various voices in the audience, yielding a fragmented and COlliding effect, much like the cut-up and fold-in techniques employed by William S. Burroughs (in fact, the play provides an epigraph from Burroughs). When the loudspeakers take over, their language is "garbled," tilled with empty political babbling and chauvinistic jargon. A woman in the audience is attacked by a perversion .of communication, the logical fallacy known as the complex question: she is asked by a loudspeaker, "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, when did you join the Communist Party, and when did you tinally irrevocably disassociate yourself from the Communist Party?" (R, 47). As the loudspeakers continue, a "graduate student" rises to confront the mindless politics, but he is shouted down by the audience, and the loudspeakers once again gain control. However, the dissenter evidently has had an effect, because the audience gradually becomes a "hum of confused voices." The loudspeakers merge into a meaningless babble, and tinally the controlling fascist forces reveal themselves, drowning out everything with their roars, whistles, and sirens. Typically, inarticulate and nonhuman sounds dominate the plays. In His Head, a man's reminiscences about his early love experiences are...