PRESS
THE RECORD
Not for squeamish
By Emory Lewis
"The Architect and the Emperor of
Assyria" has at last been given its New York premiere
at the vast and prestigious La Mama Annex. This brilliant work
is the creation of Fernando Arrabal. Spain's leading playwright.
It is a major theatrical event.
This production is being presented by the Nelly Vivas Company.
Written in 1965, Arrabal's poetic allegory ha splayed all over
the world, including a version by Britain's National Theater in
1971.
Arrabal, a dedicated anti-fascist, has been living in exile in
Paris for a number of years. Among other things, his plays are
scathing indictment of brainwashing and dictatorship.
The great artist often deals in blood and the imagery of the bullfight.
I am frequently reminded of Goya's fierce etchings and Picasso's
paintings. There is more than the urge to shock in Arrabal's plays.
Underneath the cruelty is tenderness.
The dramatist has written a number of seminal scripts. "And
They Put Handcuffs on Flowers" is a scream of horror at prison
life. The title comes from the statement made by the poet Garcia
Lorca just before he was murdered by Franco's during the Spanish
Civil War.
"Picnic on the Battlefield" is perhaps
the most corrosive anti-war okay ever written. All the inflated
and sick rhetoric both sides indulge in is ruthlessly exposed.
However, "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria"
cuts more deeply than any of these earlier efforts. It is a rumination
on the nature of Man. This strange play is often reminiscent of
"Waiting for Godot," and there are elements of "Robinson
Crusoe."
This phantasmagoria almost defies description. It is elusive.
Just when you think you have a handle by which to grab it, off
it goes in another direction.
The entire action takes place on an island. A man who calls himself
the Emperor of Assyria descends from the sky. He is the sole survivor
of an airplane crash. He discovers a lone inhabitant, whom he
dabs the Architect.
The complex charade is a study in role playing. Arrabal seems
to be saying that there are people who need to rule and people
who build and create. At the end, there is a suggestion that both
characters are ever-changing reflections of one man.
At one point, the Emperor parades around the stage in high heels,
a bra, and a garter belt. In another scene, the Architect pretends
he is the Emperor's grieving mother.
One of the men devours the other on stage at the climax of this
strange surrealist fable. Blood is everywhere. The sequence is
beautifully faked. It is not a play for the fainthearted. You
are hereby forewarned.
Tom O'Horgan, who staged "Hair" and "Jesus Christ
Superstar" on Broadway, is responsible for the imaginative
staging. He also wrote the The two members of the cast are magnificent.
Lazaro Perez is wonderfully supple as the Architect, and he should
win all sorts of prizes for his magical acting. He made his Broadway
debut in "Docs A Tiger Wear a Necktie?".
Ronald Pearlman is equally effective in the role of the Emperor.
In a hilarious mock trial, he is called upon to impersonate several
people, including the Emperor's mother, wife, and brother. This
versatile performer has been a valued member of the CSC Repertory.
The sets by Bill Stabile consist of eight platforms several
covered with a loosely woven burlap. Placed on several levels,
the create the feeling of an enchanted island and the shimmering
water around it.
* * *
Drama: Arrabal's Men
The Architect and the Emperor' Sparkles
By CLIVE BARNES
Presumably, even critics develop. When I first
saw Fernando Arrabal's play "The Architect and the
Emperor of Assyria" at Britain's National Theater
in 1971 I was modestly somewhat unimpressed. I did not really
understand it perhaps simply because all critics are slightly
behind their times. It is not so much an occupational hazard as
an occupational disease, and should be recognized as such, and
treated kindly. We do our best.
On Friday night at the La Mama Annex on East Fourth Street, the
Nelly Vivas Company gave the Arrabal play its New York premiere,
and I was overwhelmed. It was a great theatrical experience. A
play about relationships that genuinely related.
Now the simple explanation in such circumstances is to say that
the second staging was so much better. But I suspect it wasn't.
The National Theater production was staged by the brilliant South
American director Victor Garcia, and it starred Jim Dale and Anthony
Hopkins. No care had been spared. But for me it didn't really
work I was Interested but totally puzzled.
Now at La Mama Torn O'Horgan has staged it it is the best
thing he has done in years in a very different fashion,
and I found it most beautiful, and interesting.
The play is concerned with two people living
together, and the games they play, the roles they assume, the
gestures they make. It has the fantasy of the poetically sane.
There are two people: One is the Architect and the other is the
Emperor it might be thought that they symbolize special
aspects of life. But that would not be quite true. Mr. Arrabal
is more subtle than that. Indeed, just as all dreams and all fantasies
that one has emerge from the single psyche, so indeed both of
these men, arguing, accusing, condemning, fighting, loving and
losing, could indeed be a representation of one person. Of one
all too human soul in conflict. But probably not. There does seem
to be a dialogue here, and a dialogue not between the contradictory
forces of human nature, but a dialogue between two people missing
out in love. They embrace, they devour, they die.
It is the texture of the play that is so fascinating
and important. It has layers to it. At one time you think you
are seeing this, at another time you are confident you are seeing
that. If the art of poetry is ambiguity raised to the level of
either dreams or nightmares and, by the way, it is
then this play is almost impossibly poetic.
The language floats, jumps and sparkles. It has been translated
by Everard d'Harnoncourt and Adele Shank, and quite obviously
they have done a fine job. There is a dazzling madness of words
scattered across the sky like diamanté stars
The play is a confrontation. It takes place on an island. Two
people confined and in conflict and in love. The Architect and
the Emperor the two symbols, perhaps of the human condition on
its creative level. Or, perhaps, the way we all, all of us, are
the titles themselves carry their own message. But interestingly,
Mr. Arrabal permits the two of them these two aspects of
personality continually to switch roles. He is saying that
in all of us there is an Architect, someone who needs to build
and control, and an Emperor who needs to reign. The concept is
interesting, of course, but what makes it compelling is Mr. Arrabal's
brilliant use of it. The man dreams in the images of reality.
He reminds me of another Spanish artist, Goya and the Caprichos
sketches the "dream," as Goya put it, "of
reason produces monsters."
Mr. Arrabal is severely anticlerical his attacks
on the church are bloody and unbound but he may even be severely
antihuman. One has a sense a feel you have for another satirist
such as Jonathan Swift that he has looked at us carefully, perhaps,
at least hopefully, but too carefully, and found us disappointing.
The play does play God, but it plays it very convincingly. One
reason of course is Mr. O'Horgan's elegantly inventive production,
which stages the play with precisely the explosive exposition
that its statement demands, and also the acting. There are two
alternative casts. On the first night the roles were taken with
love and care by Lazaro Perez as the Architect and Ronald Perlman
as the Emperor. They were brilliant in an evening of dizzy revelation.
Mr. Arrabal, with his perceptions, absurdities, loves and understanding,
is a playwright to be honored, treasured and understood. In this
play he is saying something about the isolation, the solitariness
and the need of 20th-century man that, so far, as I can see, no
other playwright has quite gotten on stage before. A playwright
reveals himself when in the electric instant of the moment he
tells us the story of our lives. Mr. Arrabal does that with the
grace of the fantastic and the gaucheness of the real.
La Mama
74A EAST 4Théo STREET
NEW YORK , N.Y. 1000
RES.4757710
4757908
________________________________
The Cast
THE ARCHITECT AND THE EMPEROR
OF ASSYRIA, by Fernando Arrabal.
Directed by Tom O'Horgan; settings
by Bill Stabile; lighting by Cheryl
Tacker; costumes by Joseph Autisi.
Written in 1965, translated by Everard
d'Harmoncourt and Adele Shank. Produc-
tion coordinator, Nelly Vivas; produc-
tion stage managers, Marc Choen, Galan
McKinley. La Mama Annex presents the
Nelly Vivas company. At La Mama Annex,
66 East Fourth Street.
The Architect ........... Lazaro Perez
The Emperor ............ Ronald Pertman
__________________________________
* * *
NATION
THEATRE
HAROLD CLURMAN
Fernando Arrabal's The Architect and
the Emperor of Assyria is a "big" play (La Mama
Annex, 66 East 4th St.). I do not refer to its length in a cut
version it runs three hours but to its sweep. It is a vast "send
up" of modern civilization "Christian capitalism"
a play of gargantuan blasphemy.
It is not to be readily categorized. Arrabal himself has referred
to it as a panel in his "theatre of panic."
He and his audience are under a similar spell. He saves himself
and us from its brutal blows by a sort of hideous humor, his total
disgust is spewed out in raucously derisive laughter. It may be
called a sadomasochistic farce. But no conventional epithet quite
fits it. It is surely an original play, even if for pigeonhole
purposes we invoke the names of Ghelderode, Genet, Goya and Bunuel.
The influence of Spanish Catholic atmosphere and upbringing are
strong in Arrabal. "In Spain," he wrote, "children
are cruel . . . in my childhood, everything was sin and I wonder
to what degree the idea of sinfulness does not still haunt me."
It certainly does ! But added to this there is the actual experience
of the Franco years, during which his father disappeared from
jail never to be heard from again. Arrabal's investigation into
the condition of Franco's prisons and his brief incarceration
in one of them contributed to his education be horror.
Because his father had been a traitor to the regime, Arrabal's
mother abjured her husband. It was on a search for his father
that Arrabal set out for France, where he settled in 1960 and
began to write most of his plays in French. First produced in
Paris in 1967, when he was 35, The Architect and the Emperor was
not an easy play for me to grasp when I then saw it. Nor is it
now wholly transparent one may ask oneself why the "Architect,"
why "Assyria," etc.? but its mood, its sentiment,
its special eloquence and its basic thrust make it unmistakably'
powerful. Like it or not, it is one of the signal plays of our
time.
A "gentleman" failing to earth from an airplane accident,
lands on an unknown island of which the sole inhabitant is a savage.
In that isolation the man of the world teaches the native barbarian
the speech and facts of the outside world. The instruction is
a process of fun and games : the games of justice, war. religion,
love, marriage, filial attachment and duty. Our culture's representative
becomes the "Emperor" as the native is the "Architect,"
'the creature of work and constructive action or, if you will.
master and slave, And what does the Architect gather from the
Emperor's discourse? At first the Emperor speaks of the blessings
of the world which made him. "Ah philosophy ! Ah music! Ali
monuments !" he periodically exclaims. "Civilization?
What a wonder !" he goes
