Kenneth Bernard and John Vaccaro: A Collaboration

A Collaboration: Kenneth Bernard and John Vaccaro Gerald Rabkin Since 1968, John Vaccaro has staged six of Kenneth Bernard's plays: two short plays-The Lovers and The Monkeys of the OrganGrinder-atthe New Theatre Workshop, and four major plays-The Moke-Eater, Night Club, The Magic Show of Dr. Ma-Gico, and The Sixty-Minute Queer Show-under the banner of the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Vaccaro was forced by illness to relinquish directing yet another, King Humpy. This fruitful collaboration has revealed the dark side of the Ridiculous comic vision. In contrast to Tavel's arch verbalism and Ludlam's distinctive blend of travesty and tradition, Bernard brought to the Ridiculous a nightmare imagination rooted in the grotesque. He did not reject the playfulness, the phallicism, the sexual ambiguity that had characterized early Ridiculous work. But he subordinated them and added a scream of pain. Bernard has been able to work successfully with a directorial auteur of strong theatrical will because of his own fascination with the metaphor of theatricality. His major playsare all structured on, or incorporate, the idea of the "show," with its segmented "acts" as opposed to conventional dramatic narrative. The Sixty-Minute Queer Show (1977) moves back an additional step to include the process of theatrical creation. In the play Bernard incorporates scenes of the Play-House of the Ridiculous in rehearsal. The "Director" is a thinly-veiled portrait of Vaccaro at work-not a naturalistic portrait, but one nevertheless instantly recognizable. 43 The rehearsal-in-a-play device is, of course, familiar to all viewers or readers of Pirandello and his followers. Bernard honors this tradition by consciously obliterating the boundary between artifice and reality; the manic farce in The QueerShow turns disturbingly real. On another level, Bernard uses the conceit, as he does various theatrical elements, as a means of aesthetic disorientation, a framing device which forces upon the viewer a disequilibrium of expectation. By incorporating into his play not a caricature of a director, but an essentially accurate portrait of Vaccaro atwork, played by himself, Bernard acknowledges the creative individuality of his major theatrical collaborator. The Director in The Queer Show plays much the same role that Masters of Ceremonies (in more ways than one) play in Bernard's other works. Alec in The Moke-Eater, Bubi in Night Club, and Dr. Ma-Gico in The MagicShow of Dr. Ma-Gicoare all "directors" of the various turns and vignettes that comprise the "shows" they present. On one level, Bernard's major plays are dissections of theatrical process and directorial power. Since the image of the director as tyrant-savior is central to Bernard's vision, it inevitably demands a real director of strength and authority to realize it. But is Vacarro the director to realize faithfully any playwright's vision? For over a decade he has had the reputation of imposing upon indifferent or terrible plays his idiosyncratic personal style. Some have maintained that his aesthetic is "the worse script the better." By cajoling, prodding, and sadistically whipping his minions into a frenzy, so received opinion goes, Vaccaro has created a theatre in which visual and aural imagery triumphs over language and meaning. It is about time this assessment was laid to rest. By his own admission, Vaccaro is "not one of those people who can work without words." He has never worked, a la Chaikin, Grotowski, the Becks, without a play as foundation . In many respects he is a "classical," traditional director. Improvisation in his theatre is always rooted in the specific dramatic context of a given play. The over-dramatized, seeming non-acting of hisperformers derives notfrom Schechnerian self-examination, but from the self-conscious parodic style demanded by the first playwright of the Ridiculous, Ronald Tavel, and by Vaccaro's search for the means to express it. The extremities of Ridiculous performance flow from the requirements of its "operatic" style, and from Vaccaro's insistence that his performers hold nothing back; they must go all the way, release everything buried in the character or situation they are enacting. Vaccaro's directorial "sadism" is itself a role, one which his actors-many of whom have worked with him...