The Plays of Ronald Tavel: A Survey

THE PLAYS OF RONALD TAVEL A Survey Bonnie Marranca Ronald Tavel is somewhat unique among his off-off Broadway contemporaries because he worked in films before he turned to the theatre. He wrote, and sometimes directed and acted in, numerous films for Andy Warhol in the period 1964-66. But Tavel is bestknown to most audiences as a founder of the Play-House of the Ridiculous, which presented sixof his plays from 1966 until its demise in 1967. In the last twelve years Tavel has written over twenty plays, but they fall generally into three categories. "Film as Theatre" (Early period), exemplified by The Life ofJuanitaCastro,Screen Test, Shower andKitchenette; "Camp Follies" (Middle period), which describes The Life ofLady Godiva, GorillaQueen andArenas ofLutetia (withsome overlapping in recent years with Queen of Greece and The Ovens of Anita Orangejuice);"Mythic or symbolic dramas" (Late period), which includes Boy on the Straight-Back Chair, Bigfoot, The Last Days of British Honduras and Gazelle Boy. Though Tavel's styles have divided themselves into these chronological patterns, many of his artistic and thematic concerns have remained constant throughout his career. Perhaps the most characteristic Tavellian device is his anarchic use of language which is suigeneris in American drama. Tavel is a master punster and spinner of the multiple entendre (in Gorilla Queen and Arenas of Lutetia, especially); healso revels in sexual word play(most often generating homosexual imagery), spoonerisms, obscenities, literary conceit, distorted references to Shakespeare, allusions to grade-B movies, popular songs and advertising slogans. A highly self-conscious dramatist, he devises a glorious 55 alchemy of words to undercut all literary, political, psychological, cultural and sexual categories. In Tavel's dramatic world "play's the thing." Theatre is shown as theatrein -the-making (in virtually every one of his plays); the director even appears on stage in his early pieces. In the Camp genre especially, the plays require extravagant costumes and sets and a broad acting style to draw out the performance-oriented texts. Tavel's Ridiculous aesthetic-the best example of Pop Art in the theatre-is a highly visual one in which verbal allusions frequently accompany visual puns; camp must be seen rather than heard. The actors are called upon to exhibit an exuberant, to say the least, flair for tacky glamour and schlock imagery culled from the icons and images of Western society and its entertainments. The Ridiculous reflects the modernist-particularly Dadaist-pre-occupation with pop culture. It is consciously "bad" art raised to the level of an aesthetic category. (It's so bad it's good.) The Ridiculous is an exaggerated politics of consciousness whose narcissistic stance could only have been taken by artists who felt themselves manipulated by, yet at the same time outside, and critical of, the American cultural mainstream. Tavel's characters quote literary allusions and dialogue from movies, they re-create familiar poses which parody classical drama, melodrama, burlesque , vaudeville and musical comedy forms as well. He resurrects the past in order to create a dialogue with it. His is quotation art, drawn from the "high" and "low" forms of Western culture -both are equal in the Ridiculous . It is iconographic montage built on the inversion of romantic and heroic images fed to us by Western culture-myth demythologized. This layer upon layer of distorted mirrors-inverting images two and three times over-is characteristic of Tavel's plays whose dominant theme is identity. The plays move continuously toward structures of unmasking or stripping away (Shower, Screen Test, The Life of Lady Godiva, Bigfoot, GazelleBoy), their characters fragmented, uncertain personalities in aworld which has no temporal, spatial orhuman logic. As suchTavel's theatre is antiauthoritarian , anti-intellectual, anti-family, anti-religion. It posits a utopian, pansexual society peopled by pre-socialized beings. The Ridiculous is alovehate affair with women, exhibiting an infatuation with their seductive power, but it is artists making fun of what they are afraid of. So there is a certain sense of uptightness about women in the Ridiculous theatre over the last dozen years. Conversely, when the Ridiculous began recently to move into television, rock music, and the world of fashion, it was able to doso in a more liberating...