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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2021
Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, encircle nascent ideas with stolid values, and annihilate experiments by marketing distorted replicas. The “news” is a deadly enemy of what is new, and premature identification may ruin for a lifetime authentic identity.
My first thoughts revealed that I was not very precise or concrete about politics. I turned up some hard prejudices against student radicals. I believed student leaders to be deeper into revolutionary rhetoric than radical action. I dismissed many actions on American campuses as either “escalated panty raids” or “senseless disruption.”
1 Erikson, Erik H. writes in Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: International Universities Press, 1959)Google Scholar that “the human environment must permit and safeguard a series of more or less discontinuous yet culturally and psychologically consistent steps, each extending further along the radius of expanding lire tasks.” To withhold these is to risk “identity diffusion”—a violent wrench back towards infantile behavior or, more commonly, a sense of being lost, adrift, bewildered. Is it rash to homologize Erikson's discussion of individual identity to patterns of group identity—and even to the growth of an idea? If the new idea is pushed or severely distorted it will not take hold. It will become “delinquent” and “diffuse.” Unfortunately, our society rarely provides enough time for an idea to develop its intrinsic possibilities. That's what artists mean when they complain, “We are not allowed to fail—how can we hope to succeed?”
2 Since the start, TPG has been a mixed bag politically. Some people were reading Marcuse while others were reading Ayn Rand. For months we spoke of having “political discussions” to find out who we were and where we wished to go. In April 1969 these talks began, and they are difficult.
3 Gazette-Telegraph (Colorado Springs), January 19, 1969, p. 1.
4 Michigan Daily (Ann Arbor), January 27, 1969, p. 1.
5 From June, 1968 (when Dionysus opened) until November, we performed the birth and death rituals with the women in the costumes they wore throughout the play—black panties and red kitons that reached to the thigh; and the men in black jock-straps. Jerzy Grotowski saw the play in November and said that the costumes and the men's stripping to jockstraps struck him as “striptease.” He urged us either to perform completely dressed or naked, but not to compromise the issue which was, after all, a psychic one. We tried performing both ways—and in situations where we feel we are the object of voyeurism we play dressed. By and large, however, we found that the birth and death rituals have a simplicity and purity when performed naked.
6 Michigan Daily, January 26, 1969, p. 10.
7 In Detroit we performed dressed. The theatre was cold, there were rats running on the floor, and the place was crawling with cops.
8 Detroit News, January 28, 1969, p. 13-A.
9 Much to our dismay we found that the publicity resulting from the tour had made us part of a “drool circuit” off off Broadway—where people thought there was “action.” When flooded with these sorts of spectators, we performed without nakedness. Ironically, long before there was any nakedness in Dionysus we had a scene called “the total caress.” (We no longer do this scene.) Here any kind of erotic contact between performers and audience was permitted. Of course, contact varied from night to night and probably never became very intense—though I do know of several cases where male spectators had orgasms. This scene in Dionysus never got much publicity. It was done in the dark, on a one-to-one or small group basis. The scene was very much part of the performance, but not part of the spectacle.
10 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), p. 110.
11 In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued against the revolution he had proposed a quarter of a century before. Civilization itself, he said, depended on the energies conserved and redistributed by repression. Accepting the Protestant Ethic whole (if not openly), Freud said that the price for material comfort—very different from pleasure—is pleasure. How many revolutions (including the one Marx proposed and Lenin achieved) have been built on variations of the Protestant Ethic! Sacrifice now for the sake of an undefined but fervently promised future—either on earth or in heaven. Or accept comfort in lieu of pleasure, the things of luxury instead of the dynamics of eroticism.
12 “The Fourth World Part III,” Partisan Review, Winter, 1969, p. 20.
13 Daniel, and Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, Obsolete Communism/The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 55, 111.Google Scholar
14 Ibid.
15 Mark Rudd, “Symbols of the Revolution,” in Up Against the Ivy Wall, written and edited by Jerry L. Avorn, Robert Friedman, and members of the Columbia Daily Spectator (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 293.
16 Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 86.Google Scholar
17 The New York Post (April 23, 1969), p. 76, reported that Actors’ Equity has ordered a study of nudity and theatrical sex. “Objections were voiced about stripping for auditions, roles which require stripping after the play is put in rehearsal and scripts which are not seen by the actor before he is assigned to a role.” Later in the Spring Equity set rules to govern auditions where nudity is required.
18 Up Against the Ivy Wall, p. 121.
19 Ibid., p. 119.
20 Ibid., p. 62.
21 Ibid, p. 229.
22 Ibid., p. 142. The words are those of psychology professor Eugene Galanter.
23 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 100-01.
24 Eros and Civilization, pp. 195-96.
25 Up Against the Ivy Wall, p. 118.
26 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 105.
27 Up Against the Ivy Wall, p. 32.
28 George Santayana, “The Comic Mask,” reprinted in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (Garden City: Anchor, 1964), p. 416.
29 Ludwig Jekels, “On the Psychology of Comedy” (1926), tr. I. Jarosy, reprinted in Theories of Comedy, p. 425.
30 Ibid., p.431.
31 Patrick McDermott pointed out this rich etymology to me. Unfortunately, the Oxford Etymological Dictionary does not support it—saying instead that “obscene” comes from a Latin root meaning “ill-omened.” I prefer McDermott's speculation (supported by Partridge)—it has the feel of rightness.
32 See, for example, Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), the chapter entitled “From Immodesty to Innocence,” pp. 100-127. Aries traces the long process by which sexual propriety (as we understand it) was brought into the educational process. It took centuries.
33 The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), pp. 231-32.
34 Ibid., p. 222.
35 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 88.
36 Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1939), pp. 160-164.
37 Eros and Civilization, p. 130.
38 Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 219-20.Google Scholar
39 Eroiand Civilization, p. 168.
40 Ibid., pp. 183-84.
41 See The French Student Revolt (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), pp. 37, 58. Cohn-Bendit says, “Some people have tried to force Marcuse on us as a mentor: that is a joke. None of us have read Marcuse.’
42 Eros and Civilization, p. 36.
