Stage works of Paul Goodman
Goodman's plays include Stop-Light, a collection of verse drama adaptations of the Japanese Noh art form; Childish Jokes: Crying Backstage, a short farce; Faustina, telling the story of Faustina the Younger with Reichian themes; The Young Disciple, a free interpretation of the Gospel of Mark; The Cave at Machpelah, a verse drama based on Abraham's biblical sacrifice of Isaac; Jonah, a comedy based on biblical Jonah's life after escaping from the whale, with Jewish cultural jokes; and a collection of "Cubist plays" with abstracted plot elements, meant to demonstrate his theory of literary structure.
[6][7] This dissatisfaction from lack of audience in the 1950s is what drew him to social criticism in the 1960s, where he found success, leaving behind his literary ambitions for the limelight.
[10] In his adaptation, he portrayed the three Noh characters—the Waki, the Shite, and the Chorus—respectively as a traveler (the "Audience"), a spirit (the idea of the poem or "Object of Awareness"), and the chorus (the "Mind of the Poet Himself" interpreting between the other two characters).
In a closing monologue, Faustina breaks the fourth wall to chastize the audience for not having risen onto the stage to prevent Galba's murder,[22] or to express any other spontaneous thought of the actor.
[23] Written in 1948,[24][25] Jackson Mac Low and members of the Resistance group first produced Faustina with no stage to a full house in Robert Motherwell's New York City East Village loft in June 1949.
[30] The Living Theatre's production was hurt by its actors lack of faith in its ending, in which Julie Bovasso, who played Faustina, struggled to give the closing, spontaneous monologue.
Similar calls to direct action would feature in the troupe's performances by the end of the 1960s, but Beck himself later came to consider this specific monologue prompt insulting to the audience.
[36] The play explores blocked psychological development and the natural human capacity to act freely, as Goodman later expressed in his book on Gestalt therapy.
[38] By mid-year, Beck began to cast and stage the play with choreography by Merce Cunningham[39] and music by Ned Rorem.
[41] The play itself, as the writer John Tytell put it, was a "fulfillment of Goodman's own Socratic fantasy ... that he could advise youth on how to live in a disintegrating universe".
In this play, this manifested as emotional outbursts, crawling on the ground while "making night noises, strange husky grating and chirping sounds", heavy breathing, vomiting, dancing, and trembling.
In the week before the show's opening, New York police questioned cast members and inferred that the play's content could be deemed obscene.
[37] Staged in an Upper West Side loft,[28] the production came during an artistic period of the Living Theatre in which they did not advertise, charge admission, or invite critics.
[24] For two decades, beginning in 1935, Goodman worked on The Cave at Machpelah, a verse drama based on Abraham's biblical sacrifice of Isaac.
[42] Goodman used the play to explore the combined origins of Arab and Jewish peoples,[43] man's relationship with God, and the issue of "faith" as discussed in Kierkegaard's philosophical work Fear and Trembling.
[43] Its New York Daily News reviewer found it hard to follow, apart from its love triangle between Abraham, his wife Sarah, and her handmaiden slave Hagar.
[50] Composer Jack Beeson worked the play into a three-act opera libretto during his Rome Prize years (1948–1950),[52] which went unpublished[53] and unproduced.
The American Place Theatre produced the play in February 1966[50] as a two-act musical with vaudeville stylings of his contemporaneous Jewish culture in New York City.
It was directed by Lawrence Kornfeld, scored by Meyer Kupferman, with scenic design and choreography by Remy Charlip and lighting by Roger Morgan.
[6] Jonah is played as a stereotypical Jewish elder "philosopher-schlemiel", a pragmatic yet rebellious servant both defying God and ironically yielding to him.
As one reviewer put it, Jonah has "the dilemma of the modern moralist who finds his message diluted by ready and uncritical acceptance and whose act of rebellion is rendered impotent by a public which embraces novelty in any form", making the rebel into a kind of clown.
[60] The New Yorker's Edith Oliver described an "untheatrical ... slovenly bore"[61] and Stanley Kauffmann of The New York Times considered the play inconsistent, showing short-lived charm and imagination.
[58] Critics compared Jonah's approach with other modern takes on Old Testament themes, such as The Flowering Peach[51] and The Green Pastures.
The fourth play, Little Hero, after Molière, follows tragic nobility, referencing the 17th-century French satirist, though a review said it had more in common with farce like Ubu Roi.
[65] Poet Macha Rosenthal, in his Poetry magazine review, praised the originality of the Cubist plays as "modern lyric-contemplative poems in dramatic guise" and said that their emotional saturation and immediacy belied their intellectual pretext.
