Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

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My favorite theatrical event of recent months, though, did survive the jump from

semi-amateur production to off-Broadway; at least it was still surviving the last

time I saw it. Home Movies opened in March in the choir loft of the Judson

Memorial Church off Washington Square and eventually moved to the

Provincetown Playhouse. The scene is A Home. The characters are: a Margaret

Dumont mother; a super-athletic mustachioed father; a shrivelled whiny virgin

daughter; a girlish youth; a red-cheeked stuttering poet sporting a muffler; a pair of

bouncy clericals named Father Shenanigan and Sister Thalia; and an affable Negro

delivery man with a thick foot-long pencil. Certain gestures are made in the

direction of a plot. The father is believed dead, mother and daughter are lamenting

his absence, friends of the family and clergy are paying condolence calls, and in the

middle of it all father is delivered, alive and kicking, in a wardrobe. But it doesn’t

matter. In Home Movies, only the present exists—charming people coming and

going, reclining in various tableaux, and singing at each other. There is a fast and

witty script by Rosalyn Drexler, in which the oldest cliché and the fanciest fancy

are meant to be uttered with the same solemnity. “It’s the truth,” says one character.

“Yes,” answers another, “a terrible truth like a rash.” The gentleness and warmth of

Home Movies delighted me even more than its wit; and this seemed the work of the

adorable music composed by Al Carmines (who is assistant minister at the Judson

Memorial Church) and played by him on the piano. The best numbers are a tango

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sung and danced by Sister Thalia (Sheindi Tokayer) and Father Shenanigan (Al

Carmines), the winsome strip tease done by Peter (Freddy Herko) and the duets

between him and Mrs. Verdun (Gretel Cummings); and the song “Peanut Brittle”

belted out by the maid Violet (Barbara Ann Teer). Home Movies is great fun. The

people on the stage look happy to be doing what they are doing, too. One could

hardly ask for more in the theater—except for great plays, great actors, and great

spectacles. Lacking these, one hopes for vitality and joy; and these seem more

likely to turn up on out-of-the-way stages, like the Judson Memorial Church or the

Sierra Leone pavilion at the World’s Fair, than in midtown or even off-Broadway

theaters. It helps that neither Home Movies, nor The General or The Baptism, is,

strictly, a play. They are theatrical events of a use-and-throw-away kind—spoofs,

joyous and insouciant, full of irreverence for “the theater” and “the play.”

Something similar is taking place with the movies: there is more vitality and art in

the Maysles brothers’ film on the Beatles in America, What’s Happening, than in

all American story films made this year.

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