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| Marcia Jean Kurtz, Rae Allen, W.B. Brydon. |
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| Rae Allen, John Harkins. |
David Rabe had been highly successful with his first
two plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo
Hummel and Stick and Bones, both
intense examinations of problems related to American military involvement in
Vietnam. He completed his trilogy of Vietnam themes in The Orphan, a critical failure that was too obscure, symbolic, and
cerebral to make a meaningful impact. One needed to read a lengthy program note for the complex strands of symbolism to make any sort of sense.
The Orestes story of Greek myth and drama was intertwined
with anachronistic cross references to the Southeast Asian conflict and the My
Lai slaughter, the murders committed by members of the Charles Manson “Family,”
and American militarism and materialism. The drama's ultimate purpose was to examine
man’s bloody nature over the course of history, albeit viewed from a time-space
perspective in which the events occur simultaneously.
Staged with an imaginative panoply of bloody Grand Guignol
effects, The Orphan was nevertheless
unaffecting and seriously flawed. Its action was never made compellingly present
or clear and the events seemed shapeless and without urgency. Many of Rabe’s
concepts were disputed, but none so widely as his decision to depict the conflicting
elements in Clytemnestra’s nature—the characters bore the names of their Greek
originals—by casting two actresses, Marcia Jean Kurtz and Rae Allen, as Clytemnestra
1 and Clytemnestra 2, who represent warring facets of America itself.
Irrespective of the play’s occasionally interesting flashes
of theatricality, Walter Kerr noted, “The fact remains that Mr. Rabe has worked
out a purely intellectual exercise for his own quite private gratification.” “[H]is
dramatic ideas outrun his dramatic language,” added Clive Barnes, while John
Simon was shocked that so talented a playwright could produce such “a strained,
pretentious, muddled, clumsy and almost completely flavorless piece of
claptrap.”
Rabe later recalled, in Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp’s Free for All, that the play was flailing in rehearsal, that he considered it
unfinished, and that Jeff Bleckner was uncertain he could direct it, when CBS
decided to cancel its production of Rabe’s Sticks
and Bones. That decision to censor his work “mobilized us, made us rally
round the flag. We thought we were now obligated to slog on and do the play, to
stand up and continue to make this statement.” However, he admits, “I couldn’t solve
the writing, and we couldn’t get in any kind of sync about it.”
He also blames producer Joe Papp for rushing the process. And
when Papp asked him to write a note to insert in the program, explaining the
play, he felt he’d be blasted by the critics for not having fulfilled his
commentary. As he predicted, the notes were sharply criticized by some. Simon,
for example, that Rabe had been seduced by Papp into “spelling” out the play’s
meanings “in a program note more clotted in its prose than the play itself.”
Cliff De Young, who played Orestes, was never happy about
it, as he lacked the same confidence in the writing that Papp was expressing. At
one point in the play, he had to climb up high and deliver what Bleckner
describes in Free for All as a “free-flowing,
imagistic speech, sort of hallucinatory and stream of consciousness, and . . .
long.” When people began walking out at the same point in it every night, and
Rabe refused to cut the speech, De Young grew so frustrated at one performance,
he ad-libbed to the departing spectators, “Come on, gimme a break! I gotta stay
here and say it, you might as well stay here and listen.”
Cast members included Jeanne Hepple as The Speaker, Carol
Willard as Electra, Laurie Heineman as Iphegenia, W.B. Brydon as Agamemnon,
John Harkins as Aegisthus, Richard Lynch as Apollo, Tom Aldredge as Calchas, and,
among others, Peter Maloney as Pylades.