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The brainstorm is the David Merrick Foundation, which was set up in 1962. "I had an attack of destination sick ness," Merrick remembers. "I had achieved everything I had ever wanted to achieve, and there I was drowning in two feet of water." He was also sick of paying to the Government tax money that might usefully have been kept in the theater, so he decided to divert personal income from his hit shows to a nonprofit foundation. From this "captive angel" he can now draw cash whenever he finds a play he wants to produce. If the play loses money, no harm done; if it makes a profit, the profit can go back into the foundation and produce more plays, or it can be assigned to another beneficiary-such as Brandeis University, where Merrick's money has helped to build an experimental theater where he expects to present professional productions of new American plays.
Spilled Guts. "Suddenly," says Merrick, "I've got what amounts to a Government subsidy without Government control. Suddenly I'm free!"-free of the need to please both backers and critics, free to please himself. And to please himself he has started a greenroom revolution. "All over the world," he says, "a new kind of theater is happening. We're running like a dry creek around here. I want to blow up the dam and have a flood."
Merrick's flood began as a trickle. John Osborne's Luther, the first foundation play, was a hit but hardly an innovation; and Arturo Ui, a grotesque political farrago by Bertolt Brecht, was merely a memorable dropout. This season, however, the dam burst. In Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, Merrick presents a risky experiment in the drama of diatribe, a 130-minute tantrum that turns a soliloquy into a show and, in the performance of Nicol Williamson, offers the Broadway audience a grand and ghastly display of spilled guts. And in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a monstrous charade in which the in mates of an asylum perform a play within a play directed by the Marquis de Sade, all bedlam breaks loose on the stage and swarms over the audience like a great hairy psychosis that the spectator experiences as his own. It is a painting by George Grosz brought to life, a hideous Hellzapoppin. As a consequence of these successes, the Abominable Showman, to the exquisite revulsion of his colleagues, has been cast in the role of a culture hero.
Cock on a Dunghill. As S. N. Behrman once pointed out, Merrick looks rather more like a riverboat gambler. His London-tailored suits are a shade too natty, his nails a touch too neat. His mustache has a villainous smeariness, his skin a trace of prison pallor, his voice a con-mannerly suavity, his big soft eyes the expression of a slightly sneaky sheep. But inside the gambler there is a gamin, a child of almost traumatic charm. His ideas bubble, his wit darts about like a gay little gecko. "I love every minute of my life," he bursts out, "and I'm absolutely crazy about the theater!" He stands on what's left of it like a cock on a dunghill, crowing in ecstasy because he has found a place in the sun.