JAMES JOYCE MEMORIAL
LIQUID THEATRE [Musical Revue/Youth] CN/D: Steven Kent; M: Jack Rowe,
Robert Walker, Lance Larsen; S/L: Donald Harris;; P: Brooke Lappin and Bruce
Bassman i/a/w Michael Edlin; T: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (OB);
10/11/71-3/15/72 (189)
An army of young “performers” participated in this unusual “revue”
originated by the Company Theatre of Los Angeles and brought to New York
following its West Coast success. It played within the perfectly suitable
basement arena of the Guggenheim Museum.
This barely theatrical venture provided more of an evening
at a party than one at a play. Structured as a freeform assortment of
Happening-like games, sensory awareness, trust exercises, and dancing, the show
created an atmosphere faintly tinged with the aura of Eros. However, it rarely
ever got truly sexy. John Simon, disappointed by this anticlimactic turn of
events, snapped: “it all is so tepid, disinfected, [and] housebroken that it
does not arouse latent eroticism of any kind, even the healthiest.”
More than 90 percent of the program was of the audience
participation sort, though spectators were not disturbed if they chose to watch
quietly from the sidelines. The performers were gentle and appealing youths,
who guided the games and exercises and did them with the small groups into
which the audience—with couples separated—was divided. Throughout most of it, “folk,
pop, simulated Indian, and rock” music, as Edith Oliver enumerated the styles,
was played. The audience participated sans shoes, which were checked with other
belongings in the upstairs lobby.
The group therapy-like experience (“It is the best-natured
and cheapest psychotherapy in town,” noted Henry Hewes) was largely nonverbal.
There were two actual bits performed for the audience. One was a song sung by a
young woman; the other was a comic pantomime about the creation of man and
woman.
Lighting, music, sensitivity games, touching and groping,
tasting and smelling, did not add up to a satisfying theatre event for some critics.
“The phenomenon is of sociological rather than artistic interest,” wrote Harold
Clurman. But Martin Gottfried thought the company had created “one of its
special accomplishments . . . and only a grouch would not be reached by it.”
