The theater is a garage near Greenwich Village. The playing floor is wall-to-wall carpeting, across which an occasional cockroach wends its nimble way. Wandering around the room or lying on the floor, the cast chants with deliberate monotony: "May I take you to your seat, sir? May I take you to your seat, sir?" But no one ever does.
Of course, there are no seats. Instead, spectators can perch on random, wooden-towered scaffoldings with platforms, unless they prefer to sit on the floor or lean against a wall. The cast is casually unclothed. The men are dressed, as it were, in black jockstraps. The women are braless beneath their shirts, and on some nights topless, if they are in a mood to improvise. The cast begins speaking in tongues, but English is the least of them. The program says that the play is "somewhat like Euripides' The Bacchae," but no one is likely to recognize it. Anyway, thought is the last thought in the mind of Director-Adapter Richard Schechner, who is also editor of the passionately avant-garde Drama Review. His production Dionysus in '69 belongs to the doin generation.
Since the god Dionysus is present, an orgy is mandatory. Sweaty, tangled heaps of men and women kiss and fondle each other from head to toe, all the while uttering erotic moans and groans. Though the audience holds no Equity cards, it is urged to join the act, in the name of "participatory, environmental theater." Sibilant seductive whispers invite the spectators to dance. Some playgoers are gin'gerly about it; others are the life of the orgy.
As an added startler, two or three members of the cast sidle up to a girl in the audience and begin speaking words of love in her ear. The girl may be induced to lie on the floor, where the actors rub against her and caress her. At such moments, playgoers may wonder whether Dionysus was the Greek god of wine or voyeurism.
Behind all this are the theories of French Actor-Director Antonin Artaud, who held that the modern theater ought to involve and provoke gut reactions from audiences. The result, however, is a drama that is shamelessly alive from the waist down and shamefully dead from the neck up. Eloquence of speech is abandoned for voodoo gibber. The play is reduced to a trampoline for directorial acrobatics. Condemned to extemporaneous self-expression, the actors display no sense that they have mastered their craft. The audience participation destroys illusion without enhancing reality.
Distraction is not distinction, and the theater's dead past is littered with new directions that were wrong directions.