The Survivor and the Translator by Leeny Sack, and: Uncle Mario by Mario Prosperi (review)

hesitant step and slumped shoulders meant, "I just came from a Gertrude Stein reading." David Antin informed the would-be mugger in no uncertain terms that he, David Antin, was by no means a victim. The mugger, realizing his.error, turned and ran. Moral: one will not be victimized if one does not send out "victim" signals. Antin went on to talk about "mad discourse," the signals sent out by the senile, the psychotic, the neurotic. It is the exception in performance art when the performer can intimately deal with personal experience without making the audience feel as if they have been dumped into a bin full of someone else's dirty laundry. When Antin spoke of his attempts to soothe the paranoid delusions ("the bank is stealing my money, the super is stealing my ice trays") of his aging mother, one had more the feeling of something freshly laundered and hanging in the breeze to dry. "Follow discourse" was the subject of the final part of the talk poem, and hereAntin spoke of the Allard Lowenstien Murder Case. Dennis Sweeney, besides being a paranoid schizophrenic, was also a pathological follower. It was allright for Sweeney to hear Lowenstien's voice in his head during the sixties-a lot of people heard that same voice. In March of 1980, Sweeney went to kill Allard Lowenstien because he still heard that voice in his head. Had Allard Lowenstien said, David Antin mused, "Dennis you should not be hearing my voice because I stopped transmitting my message nearly ten years ago," rather than, "Dennis you are sick, let me help you," things may have happened differently . Allard Lowenstien's fatal mistake , said David Antin, was that he failed "to fit" Sweeney's "mad discourse." Nancy Jones Leeny Sack, The Survivor and the Translator. Directed by Chloe Wing and Stephen Borst. The Peforming Garage (May). Mario Prosperi, Uncle Mario. Theatre for the New City (May). Leeny Sack claims that "Child of Survivors and Performer (Artist) are my major means of self-identification." In The Survivor and the Translatorshe explored her indirect experience of the Holocaust-as the child of concentration camp survivors -through performance. The piece used excerpts from Anne Frank's diary and her grandmother's recipes as well as her parents' memories of life in the camps. Sack's performance in The Survivor and the Translatorwas extraordinary. Her rich vocal range and changes in facial expression hauntingly evoked her grandmother (especially when she spoke in Polish), a young Jewish girl (Anne Frank), and the emotionally distanced translator. An especially moving section was the "soup and fish" recitation when, from her bed, she recited her grandmother's recipe for gefilte fish in a horrified voice, then cooly translated the words into English. The juxtaposition of the terrified Polish words and the cool English ones invited comparison between the machine for grinding fish to the later discussion of camp apparatus in her parents' voices. The noise of the bedsprings as she ran in place on the iron bedstead, her questioning of the empty rocking chair that suggested all the dead, the irony and distance in her voice when she referred to Anne Frank's "sweet secret"-every detail reinforced the direction of the performance with both emotional and structural weight. The Survivor and the Translator (Sack) Uncle Mario, part of the Italian theatre festival that was to have included Dario Fo (the U.S. State Department denied him an entrance visa at the last minute), was a man's homage to his nephew's spontaneous creativity. The Mario of the title, a disgruntled, melancholic playwright whose master is Artaud, and who consults the theories of Piaget and Lacan before writing a line, becomes momentarily energized by his nephew's invasion of his work territory. Donning the costume of one hero after another (from Tarzan and Zorro to Napoleon), the nephew bullies his uncle into playing the necessary roles-a bungler swordsman, a gorilla, a horse. Following each exercise, the uncle speculated on the theoretical implications and tried to con- struct a clear concept of his play (using, for example, the "tadpole" development of children). The rhythm of delightful play juxtaposed with introspective pedantry...