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| Maxine Herman, Rubber Duck, Gloria Maddox. |
This strange, wordless show, performed entirely in mime,
was first given at the Chelsea in Brooklyn and then revised for a commercial
Off-Broadway run at the old Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village. It was conceived by a mime who went by the name Rubber Duck in the
Brooklyn production but used his actual name, Joe McCord, for the second one.
Designed and executed as a sort of counterculture masque, it employed fantastic
characters suggested by the fortune-telling Tarot deck to create what Jack
Kroll called “an allegory of creation and travail that adumbrates in an often
touching manner the gnostic, necromantic religious yearnings that strive
inchoately in much of the new generation.”
Of its original staging, Clive Barnes wrote that it was
guilty of “pretentiousness,” and that it was produced “ill-advisedly,” although
the music was "moderately distinguished.” The fancifully costumed and made-up
characters cavorted in a show he termed “ludicrous. . . . , tedious, pompous,
ineffective and amateurish.”
Next up: The Tempest
