About five minutes after an off-Broadway play called The Apple, by Jack Gelber, begins, a character picks up a spatula, slings blobs of paint at a transparent plastic canvas, and then kneads the goo together with a rolling pin. Peering around this cunningly messy parody of abstract art with a confiding leer, the actor announces to the playgoers: "I'll admit why I'm here—therapy."
In this far-out play, the therapeutic verges on the emetic. A homosexual dances with a spastic, coyly protests: "No, you can't take your clothes off. Absolutely not!" A man in a gaudy African headdress wheels on an outsize baby stroller containing an intricately entwined couple and shouts: "Doctor! Doctor! Two of my villagers are stuck together!" The critics were not amused ("nightmarish frenzy"; "vast perversity"), but the vigor of their responses suggests that 29-year-old Playwright Gelber has touched some exposed nerve ends of the contemporary scene as he did in his first play about dope addicts, The Connection. Gelber likes to break the neck off the bottle of experience and jab the audience with the jagged edges, including several unhousebroken words. The result may not be drama, but it is the season's liveliest theatrical conversation piece.
The Fall & the Fallout. The Apple is a sample, not the best, or the worst, of an avant-garde movement that has been called "the theater of the absurd." It is a school whose major defect stems from its chief virtue: it fashions hypnotic images of disorder to convey the sense of a disordered world. But the essence of dramatic art, as of all art, is to impose order on chaos. Flawed, shapeless, often inarticulate, the theater of the absurd nonetheless does generate excitement. In its surreal, evocative way, it tries to grapple with the way things are now, with the current condition of man, the creature of the Fall and the fallout.
It is an image of man seen in a distorting fun-house mirror, and from Paris to Tokyo, from Buenos Aires to Manhattan, the small, unconventional stages of the world are reflecting it. In these plays, the bizarre is the norm. There is a woman with three noses, a family whose every member is named Bobby Watson. Sometimes the absurdity is purely verbal: "The small of my back is too big, Doctor." More often it is physical, macabre and symbolic. Two men try to measure a corridor only to find that their measuring tapes are blank. A couple have a growing corpse in the next room, and its huge foot finally pops open the interconnecting door. Later, it becomes a balloon and floats away. A prancing prostitute wears a pony tail where a pony does, making her the first whorse in theatrical history. She is a relatively soothing vision compared with the whore seen through a keyhole who discards her clothes and then removes her cheeks, her eyes, and the rest of her body down to the skeleton.
Ubu Plus Godot. In view of its calculated mystifications, it may seem a trifle absurd to argue that this school of playwriting is seriously engaged in a radical criticism of the modern world and in a religious quest for the meaning of man. But in a provocative new book (The Theatre of the Absurd; Anchor Books; $1.45), Critic Martin Esslin argues just that and does it convincingly.