PRESS

Two Visions From Arrabal's World

By ROSETTE C. LAMONT

The provocative Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal enjoys telling the story of a recent dinner with his fellow dramatist Eugene Ionesco : "lonesco looked at me piercingly, and uttered in his slow voice: 'Arrabal, you and I are considered the young theater vanguardists, but if you add our respective ages, it comes to 130.' " Ionesco's remark was not hyperbole. Arrabal has maintained his status as a perennial enfant terrible of the stage.
This week two plays that call attention to Arrabal's position on the cutting edge of modern drama will open in New York. Both have been chosen by companies associated with innovation to celebrate their anniversaries. As part of its silver jubilee season, La Mama is restaging beginning Wednesday one of its major artistic triumphs, the Tom O'Horgan production of Arrabal's "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria." At INTAR, Arrabal will himself direct the world premiere today of his "Red Madonna or a Damsel in Distress," a play commissioned to mark the troupe's 20th year.
"Architect," which has become something of a modern classic, was first staged in Paris, Arrabal's adopted home, and was subsequently performed lit English at Britain's National Theater in 1971. But it was Tom O'Horgan's explosive interpretation at La Mama five years later that came closest to Arrabal's imaginative leaps involving two great clowns, the Emperor and the Architect, who confront each other on a desert island in a dialectic of the creative spirit tilting with the coercive impulse.
Sole inhabitant of the island on which the Emperor's plane comes crashing down, the Architect will assume the servile role of Man Friday in order to acquire the rudiments of civilization. As the two companions assume a variety of personae, they play out multiple aspects of the masterslave relationship.
But gradually, the Architect becomes the Emperor's confessor, psychiatrist and judge. Finally, the Emperor begs his slave to commit cannibalism on his person so that they may become one. This done. the primitive loses his supernatural gifts. A blasphemous parody of the mass, the scene nevertheless retains the solemnity of religious ritual.
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"Myth fascinates me," Arrabal says. "I believe that primitive man's cyclical view of the cosmos is closer to fundamental reality." The structure of
"Architect" is cyclic since the characters are interchangeable ; both are aspects of the total man. The play and with the Emperor assuming the Architect's role. Another plane crashes and the new Emperor who comes striding in is the Architect.
Arrabal's best known play is just as relevant today as it was when first performed in 1967. The exploration of the collective unconscious dramatized in this play seeks, to keep modern man in touch with his roots and to protect him from a hostile, increasingly technological environment.
Arrabal considers "Architect" a supreme example of what he has dubbed "panic theater" his own contribution to modern drama. While this genre is meant, In part, to startle us out of our lethargy, at its heart It derives from the Greek word "pan" in the sense of allembracing as distinct from the association with hysterical fear. As Arrabal applies "panic" to his theater, it must reconcile opposites such as beauty and ugliness. In "Architect" Arrabal seeks the common thread of the artist's impulse to control nature and the ruler's impulse to control men. In doing so, he invokes another use of "panic" convulsing an audience with laughter. "Humor is basic to the birth of the notion of 'panic,"' he says, "as well as the desire to create a totally free art, to bring life whole to the stage."
Born and reared in Spain, Arrabal Is the heir of Seneca's violent dramaturgy as well as the magnificent excess of Calderon and Lope de Vega. "Although I left my country in 1954, 1 realize that I've remained a Spanish writer," he says. "Of course, being Spanish means you're an Arab and a Jew, a stranger in your own homeland and a perpetual wanderer, an amalgam of races and cultures.
Perhaps the most Spanish of all of Arrabal's plays is his latest, debuting at INTAR. "The Red Madonna." It is based a the true story of a wellborn early 20thcentury Spanish woman who decides to do an outrageous thing in terms of her culture: have a child out of wedlock. Her little girl turns Out to be a genius. By the age of I I the child has mastered many modern and ancient tongues. Her days and. nights are spent in the laboratory her mother equipped for her in their own home. However, the young scientist pursues a medieval occupation: alchemy. The search for the philosopher's stone, for pure gold to be extracted from base metals, is a poet's endeavor.
In the play, the girl's fame spreads through the intellectual circles of Europe. Freud, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis correspond with her, inviting her to come to London to study, and perhaps be studied. At the end of the drama,. in a moment of terrifying lucidity, the girl begs her mother to prevent her departure by shooting her., The one who created this astonishing life must now annihilate it. "Madonna" is Arrabal's undisguised mourning for his estrangement from his domineering mother and his country.
The highly charged, poetic production does not strive for realism. The characters wear Goyalike masks suggestive of witches' sabbaths, circus animals, village fairs. Yet the rowdiness of "panic theater" is gone. We feel a gentle wisdom at work, as though the author were able at last to come to terms with his past suffering and the pain he had to inflict by leaving his family and homeland.
Arrabal claims that writing is a form of sublimation. "We dramatists are all failures, but we write because we haven't had the adventures we dream of. I would have liked to be a conquistador, perhaps a Casanova, but Instead I sit home and write day and night. I started very early, as a lonely boy being brought up by my Maternal grandparents in the village of Ciudad Rodrigo. My father had disappeared, from my life, arrested for some obscure antiFranco agitation, and my mother's proFranco family never mentioned his name again. We don't know how he died.
"I felt closest to him when I was arrested myself on a trip back to Spain in 1967. I felt his presence in jail and it made me strangely happy. I might have disappeared like him had not a number of intellectuals written to the Spanish court on my behalf."
How did Arrabal begin writing plays? "My mother worked in Burgos, and when she'd come home to the village I told her stories of what took place in her absence. Later, at the age of 14. I wrote my first play, 'Picnic on the Battlefield.' It is an antiwar sketch and still the most frequently performed of all my plays."
Arrabal's first contact with artists and writers took place in Paris in the late 1950's when he made contact with André Breton and the Surrealist group, "I used to love attending the daily gettogethers of the Surrealists at their unofficial headquarters: the cafés La Promenade de Venus and Le Financier," he said. "I still don't know why I was admitted since Breton loathed theater, and I always expected to be cast out like Cocteau and Artaud. Breton would suddenly turn against someone and excommunicate him. These expulsions reminded me of Fascism.
"I and my closest friends the artist Roland Topor and the film maker Alexandro Jodorowsky did not wish to exclude anyone or anything ; quite the contrary. In 1963 we put on the very first "happening" at the American Center in Paris. We, called It an ephemeral Panic event. it was outrageous, violent, with a lot of nudity. There were live chickens hopping about a man in a Samurai costume, a naked girl In rubber hip boots armed with a whip. Today, no one would raise an eyebrow. But in 1963, It was new and bold."
After (he Surrealist phase, Arrabal turned briefly to a much more political kind of theater, although he claims that politics do not interest him. "Guernica," one of his best-known short plays, dramatizes the infamous bombing of the defenseless Basque village by German planes during the Spanish Civil War, a grim metaphor for total warfare against civilians immortalized by Picasso. "I wanted to make a play based on Picasso's painting," says Arrabal. "At It'll time the painting was still in New York at the Museum Of Modern Art now it is in Spain, at the Prado." The most poweful of Arrabal's political plays, "And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers," was written as a result of his jail experience In Franco Spain. It shows political prisoners, tortured and garroted. The imprisoned men dream of the past, of a possible future, in a deeply moving drama.
Arrabal also enjoys making films, which he writes and directs. "Viva la Muerte" parallels the theme of "Handcuffs." The pixielike Arrabal, who is deft at turning his humor on himself, tells with relish an anecdote about a recent encounter with Mickey Rooney, with whom he just completed a film he had directed In Canada. "Mickey Rooney said to me: 'I am so happy to be working with you.' I was flattered that Rooney knew my film work, until he added: 'This is the first time in my life I'm working with a humansized director."'