'The Two-Headed Baby'

Paradoxically, off-Broadway theatre has never been able to survive more than a few blocks off Broadway; a few noble experiments have been made, but when the soil is not that of midtown Manhattan, the transplanted shoots just wither and die. Yet, as the current production of the Cohasset Music Circus suggests, this may be a good thing. Perhaps the restraining influence of the legitimate, conventional theatre is necessary to the health of a reasonable experimental theatre. In any case, "The Two-Headed Baby" - an "off-Broadway" experiment by Ellis Andrews - does nothing more than take a broad jump over the bounds of good taste.

Mr. Andrews evidently thinks he is being terribly clever in the manner of Ionesco when he makes the central character of his entertainment an idiot baby with two heads. When he has its distraught parents dance around it to the tune of "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" played on a xylophone, however, he is thought of as "terribly clever" only by those warped individuals who think that perversion treated as a slap-stick comedy is meaty intellectual fare.

The program notes describe Mr. Andrews' "dramatic purpose" in the play as "an expose of the ludicrous nature of theatrical conventions," but even in these terms "The Two-Headed Baby" is inexcusable. The dramatic conflict, it seems, is the parents' attempt to decide which head should be cut off to make their offspring normal. Granted this, is it then pardonable to have the unfortunate child bleed to death in rather gory detail once the decision is made? How, indeed, does Mr. Andrews "expose the ludicrous nature of theatrical conventions" by directing the actress playing the mother to toss the severed head into the audience as she says "Upsy-daisy" and the rhythm band breaks into "America, the Beautiful?"

All of this would be rather silly if it did not discredit serious experimental drama. Some of the work of Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee will almost certainly become established in the repertory of genuine comedy. Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," for example, is a thoroughly adept treatment of the theme Ellis Andrews has toyed with in "The Two-Headed Baby." The Ionesco work succeeds because it was written by a good writer; the Ellis Andrews "experiment" fails miserably because it was written by a bad writer. So we come to the essential fact: good drama is simply good writing, whether it is conventional or experimental.

The unfortunate weakness in experimental drama is the same flaw present in non-objective art - anyone can try his hand at it. It is too bad that we can not legislate on the arts and make it an offense for anyone but an established writer or painter to play with the experimental forms; as it is, we have chimpanzees riding tricycles over paint-smeared canvasses, and, alas, we have Ellis Andrews writing off-Broadway plays for the Cohasset Music Circus. The results are comparable in quality.

It is incredibly simple for an incompetent to write an experimental play these days, for one need only gather up the familiar themes and put them into a gaudy collage. The themes by now are well-established: crude irreverance for religion, farcical treatment of patriotism, glorification of the non-conformist, and above all, desecration of the rational, the normal, the commomplace. In "The Two-Headed Baby" Andrews doesn't miss a trick.

He has a Roman Catholic priest march around his monster, nearly drowning it in holy water, and assure the parents that the Blessed Virgin "will make it all right." He has a kindly old grandmother come on stage in the middle of an indecent episode between mother and child and screech at the top of her lungs: "My grandson is better because it has two heads, my grandson is better because it has two heads," and so forth. Finally, he gives us a huge funeral procession, in which the child's corpse is paraded around in an American flag.

The audience at Cohasset on opening night didn't quite know how to react to the shabby proceedings, and at the end of the play those who had stayed through it, applauded with less than warm enthusiasm. The Cohasset Music Circus proudly called "The Two-Headed Baby" its first world premiere. There is, then, the satisfaction that this play has not been produced anywhere else and probably never will be.

In fairness, the acting was quite good: Anne Hescock turned in a very fine performance as the helpless mother; and the whole production was very smoothly run. Malcolm Tarn's serts and special effects fulfilled Andrews' unusual specifications more than adequately; indeed, the two-headed baby, itself, was done with such grisly realism that one almost suspected it was an actual specimen taken from the Cohasset Home for Incapacitated Infants, which one must pass in order to get to the Music Circus from Route 3-A.

It is commendable that straw-hat theatres are investigating the possibilities of off-Broadway drama in real off-Broadway settings, but until they ignore such worthless items as "The Two-Headed Baby" and learn to discriminate wheat from chaff, they will only be doing great disservice to a medium they want to foster.