Experimental Theatre

Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1920-vintage, Pirandellesque "Aria da Capo" was presented last Saturday and Sunday at the Loeb Experimental Theater. The play was one-act, lasting a bit over twenty minutes. The audience at the first performance didn't in fact realize the play was over when it came to an end. They waited for more, not because they expected an explicit disentanglement of the sketch's nebulous events--probably they had already become familiar with the promising ambiguities of Pinter, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet--but because the classics of the theatre of the abstract have been long-winded. This one was rapid, lucid; and also banal.

The set, black and white emphasized by black flats with white crepe hangings and a checkered tablecloth, was one of austere, Satanic simplicity. The table and chairs were the only furniture. You expected the celebration of a Black Mass with sacramental absinthe on this Greenwich Village esplanade, but the dreamlike events unrolled rather harmlessly: a sportively dressed Pierrot appeared with his lovely Columbine. They talked dreamily, wittily, Pierrot, in the best tradition of talkers, saw himself as an artist, as a socialist who "loves mankind but hates human beings," as a critic who can really accept nothing. But we soon find that the couple are in reality only players who are ordered by their director to vacate the stage for another couple who must rehearse their roles of the shepard and shepherdess, Corydon and Thyrsus.

We thus have a play within a play. But there is more, Thyrsus and Corydon, dressed leotard-fashion as for a black ballet, begin a play within a play within a play. They build an imaginary wall between themselves. Shortly they have taken it so seriously that it is a real wall of hate and hostility leading Thyrsus to poison Corydon with contaminated water at the same time he strangles her with a supposed necklace of rich jewels. It all happens very fast. In reality it is alla gama. But Thyrsus and Corydon die. And even though it was only a game within a play, their bodies do not move but remain on the stage when Pierrot and Columbine return to rehearse from the beginning (da capo) their own skit. They decide to ignore the dead sheepherders in front of the table, for the director assures them that the audience won't necessarily object if the bodies are not removed. Pierrot and Columbine begin again the dialogue heard at the beginning. The play ends, having returned upon itself da capo. Life itself, the implication is, may be just such a cycle.

The Experimental Theater production, directed by Chris Assini and produced by Austin Laughlin, kept the play simple and salvaged its suggestiveness in spite of frequent lapses in enunciation by the cast. Mr. Laughlin also helped to give a bit more rounded portrait of Millay by introducing five minutes' worth of her lyrical poetry, read with widely varying effect by five readers before the stage was brightened for Aria da Capo.