The Off Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre ed. by Albert Poland, Bruce Mailman (review)

Books In Review The Off Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre. Edited by Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman. Bobbs-Merrill, 546 pp., $6.95 (paperback). Lanford Wilson Poland and Mailman, in the "Theatre Section" of their wonderful book, are mistaken in saying that it wasn't until I came to the Cino that it became a theatre. Tell it to Neil Flanagan. Tell it to Marshall Mason or Johnny Dodd or David Starkweather or Claris Nelson. Their book has a mass of data and can generally be relied on, but that wasn't the way I experienced it, Albert. The city at the time (Summer, 1962) was an exhausting joy! LONGSHOT: Three theatre buffs arrive at the old Greyhound station with six dollars (total) and no letters of introduction, no friends, only a driving ambition of which they are only dimly aware and an image of Broadway (i.e.Theatre: lights, descending curtains, standing audiences) which they have married to Eric Bentley translations, Crown anthologies , college lit. courses, Mv Life In Art and The Fervent Years. STOCK FOOTAGE MONTAGE: Marquees, lights, theatre crowds, Broadway! New York hustlers hang around the theatre district looking surprisingly tamer than Chicago hustlers; the queens here are less audacious. The traffic (granted) is a horror and the taxis (thank God) nearly kill you. ("Don't jay-walk in New York City, they'd as soon throw your ass in jail as look at you.") After a month or so you jay-walk with the rest of them. Everything except the yellow cabs is pale, really. Everything except Broadway. To get money to go to the shows the three theatre buffs take any job they can. They get money. They go to the shows. They wake up. The scene uptown then (after all it's only been fourteen years) was much as it is: amazingly pushy musicals with uncommitted performers "selling themselves." (The first one I saw I thought was a brilliant satire on Capitalism -halfway through the second act I began to realize they thought they were playing it straight). British dramas, yes, even then, as now, acted in a style of baseless bravado (praised in America as unattainable by native types) that can be described as spit-fire delivery of mind-stopping, affected elocution. And a smattering of indigenous 65 pseudo-sex comedies, now mostly moved to TV. As the audience lights began to dim my heart invariablyleapt to my throat. It was the only "theatrical" experience I found uptown. No point in carping; everyone knows the scene. CUT TO: Meeting friends (censored for clarity), talking theatre, meeting a composer: "Joe Cino wants a musical revue, could you write a revue?" Are you kidding, Chicago is the Second City. Michael Powell went to feel the place out. (I had rented a typewriter, was writing Home Free!and couldn't be bothered.) Michael reported I should check it out. The play that week was The Lesson (the poster in the window read, "Learning by Eye-n-esko" to avoid paying author royalties). It might have been Starkweather's So Who's Afraid of Edward Albee which went on the following week. A long narrow room with a stage against one wall and tables and chairs (nothing matched) wrapped around it. The stage was constructed of bunched-together, unsecured milk crates covered with carpeting. The crates rocked under the rug and were of uneven height. The actors had difficulty keeping a sure footing. The tables were so near the actors you could watch them sweat (it was January but it was hot). I was banked against a stranger at the table behind me. The table would not have held a regulation-size chess board; it also wobbled, spilling the cup of cappucino into my lap. The wire ice-cream chair was poking through my coat into my ribs, but I couldn't complain as it was clearly not done: the stranger who shared my table (without asking) was sitting on an up-ended coke-case. The show -for the first few seconds I couldn't take my eyes off the noisy, rocking floor. The actors coped like mountain goats but I worried for them. I...