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| Jack Rowe, Gar Campbell, Lance Larsen, Dennis Redfield, Michael Stefani. |
Brought to New York from Los Angeles by its original troupe, members of the Company Theatre, this would-be piece of experimental theatre was yawned off the stage in a week. With its author in the cast, The Hashish Club pictured five young men (Lance Larsen, Jack Rowe, Gar Campbell, Dennis Redfield, and Michael Stefani) assembled for a reenactment at their messy frat house of their old college drug-taking get-togethers. This time, they eat three times their normal dosage of hash, and then await the results, hoping they’ll be stimulated to produce imaginative insights.
The evening is largely devoted to the fanciful
hallucinations the men experience, these being enacted with slow motion, strobe
lights, and other devices designed to let the audience vicariously share their
high. Only at the end, when a loaded pistol appears and the men leave, one
carrying the gun, does any suspenseful tension appear. The hallucinations enacted
include a football game with a chicken and a flying carpet ride on a tabletop.
Performed in a style suggesting improvisational spontaneity,
the plotless play received decent notices for the slickness of its ensemble,
but its lack of dramatic substance couldn’t be avoided. Clive Barnes found most
of it boring, but admitted that its climax was exciting, while Douglas Watt labeled
it a “self-indulgent, idiotic spectacle” that proved “a depressant.” Martin
Gottfried encountered “sheer monotony” and Brendan Gill fidgeted at its “prolix
and fuzzy” craftsmanship.