The Theatre for Peace (1966-1972)

[For a long time, I’ve been trying to gather enough material to write an article on the Theatre for Peace, an anti-war organization that existed during the Vietnam era.  So far—and I’ve been searching on and off for information on the TFP since the mid- and late 1990s—I haven’t had a lot of success.  

[Part of the problem has been that the TFP was in operation long before there was an Internet—and so far, no one has posted a memoir or history of the organization.  It only seems to have existed for about six years and its press coverage included mostly reviews of the productions it supported and occasional announcements of its programs and workshops.

[Another difficulty with this research is that during the Vietnam-protest period, there were hundreds of groups with the same or analogous aims and agendas, many of which had higher profiles than the Theatre for Peace.

[There are, unfortunately, also dozens of modern-day organizations with names similar to the Theatre for Peace, most of them abroad.  When there’s a pertinent site that might provide facts about the TFP which I’m researching, it gets buried in the pile of like-named programs than can number in the hundreds.

[Nonetheless, I’m going to put down what I’ve learned.  Maybe some reader will have some pertinent facts or a lead I can follow.]

The Theatre for Peace was an anti-Vietnam war activist group that operated in New York City from about 1966 to the end of U.S. combat in Southeast Asia in 1972.  Comprised mostly of theater and performing artists, TFP produced plays and other theatrical events and participated in or organized other activities whose aim was to protest—by theatrical means—United States policy in Southeast Asia.

A project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, which was founded in 1965 by New York psychiatrist Oscar Sachs, who served as chairman, as a political and social action organization (it actively supported the 1968 candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68] for president as early as 1966—before the New York senator even declared), the TFP produced plays in and around the city and the Tri-State area, often in union halls and on university campuses.

The Committee of the Professions, as it was commonly known, ran many advertisements, usually signed statements, opposing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (and then President Richard M. Nixon’s) policies in Vietnam, most vociferously, the military involvement in the war that started under the French in 1940 (First Indochina War); the United States took over in 1955.

On 5 June 1966, for example, the Committee of the Professions co-sponsored a three-page ad in the New York Times at a cost of $20,880 (equivalent to just under $195,000 today).  There were 6,400 signatories to the ad from the faculties of such colleges and universities as Columbia, Harvard, City College of New York, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The organization also held rallies, “speak-outs,” and demonstrations.  By 1966, the Committee of the Professions had about 750 “affiliates,” according to the New York Times.

The founder of the Theatre for Peace was Gary Pogrow (1941-2010), a graduate of New York’s City College, a teacher of theater, a writer and publisher, and a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights Movement.  He served as artistic director of the TFP. 

Other founding members included such luminaries in the arts and letters as Swedish-American stage, film, and television actor Viveca Lindfors (1920-95); theater director, actor, playwright, and theater theoretician Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003); theater critic, playwright, editor, and translator Eric Bentley (1916-2020); and actor and director Alvin Epstein (1925-2018), among others. 

The TFP declared that its aim was to develop and stage theater pieces whose purpose was to end the Vietnam war.  (One of these productions was 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, the street musical co-created by Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde director about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater; see my post on 26 January 2010.)

The Theatre for Peace espoused a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”  In a casting notice in Back Stage, the theatrical trade paper in New York, the TPF explained that their productions were “a dramatic way that committed professional theatre people may express opposition to [the] Vietnam war.”

In addition to providing opportunities for artists dissenting from the war in Vietnam “through their own medium,” the TFP’s self-declared mission included reaching “new audiences by performing in churches, community centers, homes, parks, and on the streets,” seeking out, especially, “bookings in universities and in areas of cities which rarely see live theatre.”

Like Brother, You’re Next, which was composed by Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Chris Rohmann, and Robert Reiser based on Bertolt Brecht’s anti-military play Man Is Man, some of TRP’s offerings were presented in theaters or spaces like auditoriums and meeting halls and had a published schedule. 

Other shows were street theater, as Brother was outside its one indoor mounting, and were guerilla performances, popping up on sidewalks and in parks unannounced, playing for whoever stopped to watch or were attracted to the spectacle.

The scheduled theater performances catered to a paying audience who bought tickets, though the cost was minimal, and the street shows were free, though the performers probably passed a hat before departing for the next venue. 

A third form for TFP shows, as suggested above, was bookings by organizations, such as the schools mentioned or anti-war groups, for their members and those to whom they reached out.  For those performances, TFP charged a fee to cover the cost of transportation and room and board.

The Theatre for Peace (some publications spelled the troupe’s name “Theater for Peace” or called it “Theatre of Peace,” making it hard to locate all the coverage of TFP in databases) also participated in festivals relating to their philosophy.  In 1967, for instance, the theater was part of Angry Arts Week in New York City, 26 January to 5 February. 

The full, official title of the event was Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam (though some publications and archives referred to this event as the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam), and The Militant, an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party, labeled it “a unique antiwar project.”  The New York City-based paper described the event thus:

There will be protests against the war by members of all the arts—music, painting, theater, poetry, dance, film and combined forms.

The participating artists have slated a multitude of activity to express their revulsion for this war.  Among the programs scheduled are four evenings of theater, two dance concerts, a folk music concert and five film showings.

In addition, caravans of poets and musicians will present 20-minute performances on street corners throughout the city.  Other street protests will take the form of “play-ins” in lobbies of public buildings and dramatic presentations in supermarkets and laundromats.

The New York Times quoted Robert Reitz, a greeting-card designer who was chairman of the Angry Arts organization—which mounted similar events all around the Tri-State region and the Theatre for Peace appeared at many of them as well—that “many artists have wanted to voice their dissent nonviolently and nonpolitically against the war in Vietnam.”

Among the artists and literati who appeared at Angry Arts’ first event were actor Alan Alda, actor Ruby Dee, storyteller and radio show host John Henry Faulk, cartoonist and author/playwright Jules Feiffer, actor Diana Sands, and Hungarian-born writer and theatre director George Tabori (husband of Viveca Lindfors).

At the time of Angry Arts Week, the Theatre for Peace was presenting Happy Hunting, a satirical musical by Academy Award-winning songwriter Lewis Allen about the effects of the Vietnam war and draft on family life.  It was the play TFP performed at the protest event (and several other incarnations of Angry Arts, such as one in Philadelphia in January 1968. 

“It is becoming more difficult to speak and more painful to be silent,” lamented actress Anne Allen (wife of Lewis Allen) at the opening of the play at a subsequent protest event at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, a performance on 19 August 1967.  As characterized by Robert A. Horwitz in the Hartford Courant, these lines

were said without any of the difficulty to which Mrs. Allen referred.  They were said with compassion, with conviction, with love, by experienced, highly professional New York actors who had volunteered an evening without pay to present the Hartford audience a message which they believe deeply: that war is wrong, that the present war is especially senseless, that the official statements which try to justify that war are empty, meaningless words, that man must strive with all his being to achieve peace.”

Horwitz described the performance:

The production which the Theatre for Peace actors staged is called “Happy Hunting.”  It consists of three parts: a dramatic reading of anti-war poetry compiled by the poet Walter Lowenfels [1897-1976; poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA]; a selection of witty nursery rhymes by Lewis All[e]n . . . called “Light Verse, Not to Be Taken Lightly”; and a short playlet with satirical songs, also by Lewis Allen, called “Happy Hunting: A Primer for Primates.”

The message the actors present is not a new one.  War has been decried by writers and artists for centuries; love has been celebrated since the beginning of time.  But the script and the acting is unusually touching in this production.  And the old message takes on a new vitality.

The anti-war poems which began the production are touching because they concern the people, the individual, suffering people involved in war, not merely the politics of it all.

There is the mother who pines for her son in the army: “When will my son return?  He was always a man of peace, and he played baseball in the sun.”

There is the little girl, seven years old, who speaks from her grave in Hiroshima: “I’m a little girl that’s dead.  I’m knocking at your door.  Please hear me and give me just one gift, that you won’t kill any more babies.”

The light verses, short and clever, offered some pithy comments on the current American scene: “The Grand Canyon on a political map/Would be renamed the credibility gap,” and a little ditty about poor old Humphrey Dumphrey [an allusion to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey] who fell all to pieces and couldn’t be put back together again, even by “all Johnson’s horses, all Johnson’s men.”

But it is the playlet “Happy Hunting” which really touches the soul, for here, in a few dramatic minutes, are presented all the ingredients of America suffering in war: the young boy who is drafted, the mother who doesn’t understand why he has to go and cries “Why, why, why” when his casket is later brought in, the “voice of authority” which rationalizes all the horror with rhetoric about the nation’s “commitment to a commitment to a commitment.”

Reporter and reviewer Horwitz remarked, “There are many anti-war plays which, for lack of subtlety, sophistication, or directness, simply fail to convey their intended message.  But ‘Happy Hunting’ . . . is a superior anti-war production.  Its message comes across with poignancy.”

Along with Happy Hunting, the earliest TFP production for which I found a record, the protest troupe produced Near the Wall of Lion Shadows, a “choreodrama” composed of slides, poems, and dances choreographed by Ann Wilson based on poems by Ruth Lisa Schechter; Brother, You’re Next; The Ballad of Joe Smith by Thomas Donlon and directed by Robert Kya-Hill, depicting several levels of army life; Brecht on War, directed by Lindfors; Lysistrata directed by Lenard Rosen, an ancient Greek anti-war comedy by Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BCE), originally performed in Athens in 411 BCE; and Childermas, a choreodrama based on the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents, with a book by Robert Summers and music by Harold Boatright, choreographed by Joan Kerr.

The TFP’s basic plan included “to create, prepare, and present theatrical works aimed at ending the war in Vietnam.”  It also held workshops (one weekly session was conducted by Joe Chaikin) and developed improvisational playlets on Vietnam, welfare, and racism.

One planned workshop, headed by Lindfors with Canadian-born actor Dino Narrizzano, Chaikin, stage director Gladys Vaughan, songwriter and theater director Jacques Levy, Eric Bentley, historian and teacher Stan Steiner, conceptual artist David Rothenberg, and Alvin Epstein, was intended to develop scripts for distribution to student and peace groups around the U.S. and to make films or tapes of well-known artists performing or otherwise demonstrating their feelings about the war in Southeast Asia.

The program was also intended to develop mobile troupes of performers to travel the country to play wherever there was a demand.  There were also plans for a writers’ workshop.    

The troupe’s overall aim, in addition to providing “an artistic forum for opposition to the war in Vietnam,” was to perform for people who ordinarily might not “come to grips with the issues” of the conflict by presenting their work in neighborhood spaces and open venues. 

Jane Speiser, the review-writer for West Side News, who attended the 1968 indoor production of Brother, You’re Next, asserted that TFP had carved out “a difficult job, [but] has attacked it with an uncompromising sense of what makes for dramatic excitement as well as what makes for political commitment.”

[When I first wrote about Brother. You’re Next, years before I created the ROT post of 2010, I saw it only as Leonardo Shapiro’s first public New York effort and the earliest step in the evolution of what would be his life’s principal endeavor, The Shaliko Company (1972-93).

[Later, when I researched Shapiro’s next out-of-school project, the New York Free Theater (1968-71; see my post on 4 April 2010), I saw it as an outgrowth of Brother and Shapiro’s next step toward Shaliko.

[Compiling this profile of the Theatre for Peace, I now see something that I may not have spotted because I hadn’t looked into the work of the TFP beyond the fact that it produced Brother—a one-off, discrete association with Shapiro and his Brother/NYFT colleagues and collaborators.

[Here’s the hypothesis: I think there’s a good chance that the TFP influenced the founders of NYFT when they came up with their agenda for the new street-theater troupe.  Here’s why I suspect this:

[First, look at what the TFP proclaimed as their mission and philosophy.  In addition to their central emphasis, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Theatre for Peace also focused their efforts on fighting racism, specifically, and, more generally, other societal ills, such as poverty.

[Next, the leaders of the organization made a point of performing their shows in accessible places, including the streets and parks of the cities where the TFP appeared, and bringing their performances to people who didn’t often (or ever) get to see live theater.

[The troupe offered workshops to teach others with similar agendas how to promote their ideas all across the country.  It also gave its performances and provided their developmental classes at minimal or no cost because the message and the information was more important than raising money.

[Now, Brother, You’re Next was already developed when Shapiro and his collaborators, who, except for Chris Rohmann, were all NYU undergrad theater students, came together with the Theatre for Peace and the Committee of the Professions.  But the fit was nearly perfect. 

[I think what happened was that once on board with the TFP, working with Lindfors, Tabori, Chaikin (with whom Shapiro was already acquainted from his pre-NYU teen experience with the Living Theatre—see “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2,” 19 April 2023)—et al., their nascent leanings and proclivities coalesced and gelled into mandates.

[Brother was adamantly anti-war, and the collaborators/creators of the street musical were committed to dissent and opposition.  That wasn’t especially unusual for college students in the mid- and late ’60s; I had the same tendencies down south in central Virginia.  But when those same young actors and directors morphed into the founders of the New York Free Theater, after the encounter with the TFP, ad hoc ideas that they’d applied to Brother, You’re Next evolved into a framework for an activist street troupe.

[Racism was at the top of NYFT’s list of targets, having formed the group because of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1968, but they soon spread out to treat other societal ills such as poverty and consumerism.

[Performance was the main medium for the troupe’s messaging, but they soon added community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” as additional ways to reach out to New Yorkers. 

[NYFT was conceived as a street theater, setting up on sidewalks and in parks, but a spokesperson for the troupe emphasized: “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” just as the TFP did.”

[The pattern of operation for the two organizations is nearly identical.  Now, I suppose that this kind of organizational model was fairly common in the ’60s, with the proliferation of street theaters in New York City and elsewhere, but the close contact between the team that created Brother, You’re Next and then went on to found the New York Free Theater and the artists who formed the Theatre for Peace, even for a short time—especially so close to the emergence of NYFT—leads me to suspect very strongly that there was cross-pollination.]

Short Takes IV

 

SEEING RED

22 April 2012

In a column in the New York Times, a reader wrote about fielding rude questions about her red hair.  It brought to mind something that happened to me when I was a junior in high school.  I, too, was a redhead back then. (I'm gray and thinning on top now.)  I was in English class, finishing something or other at the blackboard in front of the class when the teacher asked me, out of nowhere, “Do you dye your hair?”  Aside from the rudeness in and of itself, the fact that she asked me in front of my classmates was a combination of embarrassing and funny.  In a flash, I told the teacher, “Only my hairdresser knows for sure,” and returned to my seat.  (That TV commercial for Clairol hair coloring was running at the time.)  Of course, the class cracked up, and I came out the winner for the day.

That anecdote also makes me think of my aunt, also a redhead.  We each had a unique color of red; neither of us were carrot-tops, but neither of us ever met anyone with quite our shades of red.  Once when she was at the hair salon, a woman in a chair nearby was getting her hair colored.  The other woman couldn't decide on the shade of dye she wanted, and then she spotted my aunt.  “That's the color I want,” she told her stylist.  “I'm sorry, Ma’am,” the hairdresser replied.  “That color doesn't come in a bottle.”

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I WASN’T DOIN’ NOTHIN’

22 April 2012

When I was in grad school for my MFA in acting, I appeared in the thesis production of one of my MFA directing classmates.  I was playing the father in Jean Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette and in one scene, I withdrew to a side porch at stage right and sat smoking a cigar while the action went on center stage among the younger characters in the play.  All through rehearsals we did that scene with me in semi-darkness, sitting in a sort of lounge chair facing the right wing of the little studio theater, listening to music from a party at the big house up on the hill.  I didn’t do anything but listen and smoke.

After one of the first nights when we had an audience, the director came back to the dressing room with a note.  Several spectators, many of whom were other theater students whom we all knew in the undergrad or grad programs, had commented on how interesting I was being over on the porch, supposedly out of focus.  I started to apologize for stealing focus; I assured the director that I hadn’t done anything intentional to attract attention and couldn’t imagine what I’d been doing.  (I wasn’t doing anything fancy like blowing smoke rings or elaborately sniffing the cheroot or biting the end off.  I thought I was being as inactive and unobtrusive as possible.)  The director stopped me.  “It’s not your fault that you’re more interesting than the characters in the scene.  You’ve been doing just what I wanted.  They’re the ones who aren’t being interesting.  If they were fully engaged in what they were doing”—it was an argument—”you wouldn’t attract more attention.”

I don’t remember what he told the other actors to do to regain the focus in the scene; maybe I never heard.  But after another performance, I met one of my own acting students who’d come to see the play and he said something to me that may have been part of the explanation of what had happened.  My student said to me, “You looked so real—like you really knew how to smoke a cigar!”  Well, of course I did know—I’d been a cigar smoker and so had my father when I was growing up, so the procedure of cigar-smoking was natural to me, and since the cigar was real, it was really lit, and I was really smoking it, I was, in fact, actually smoking a cigar.  I wasn’t acting smoking a cigar.  I always think of this as a lesson in acting: a real action is always more interesting than a fake one, even if the real one is small and ordinary and the other one is noisy and big.  (Consider Uta Hagen’s advice about never appearing on stage with children or animals.)  That must have been what the director had meant—that I was really doing what I was directed to do, while my castmates were “acting.”  Even in the semi-darkness, I was more interesting than they were.

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SHOPPING WITH F. MURRAY ABRAHAM

4 January 2013

I had a fun little encounter a few days after Christmas 2012.  I was doing a little grocery shopping at the Food Emporium on 6th Avenue in my neighborhood, and as I went around the corner into the produce section, coming at me in the other direction was the actor F. Murray Abraham!  Now, I think he's one of the finest actors in the country these days, especially on the stage—I saw him do a rep of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant and Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in 2007 (he reprised the Shylock in 2011) which was terrific—and I told him so and asked, “May I shake your hand?”  “Well,” he said grinning, “I'm glad I got up this morning!”

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MY ADVENTURE

15 December 2005/17 January 2006

My family lived in West Germany from 1962, after my dad joined the Foreign Service, until 1967, and I joined them in ’63.  I knew at the time it was happening that I was having an adventure—though I never articulated this feeling until long afterwards.  I was old enough at 16 to understand while I was in it that this was a special experience.  Of course, everyone else I knew in Europe at the time was also having it—but I knew no one I left back home was.  I was very consciously getting as much out of the opportunity that I could.  I missed out on a few things in those years for one reason or another, but in general, I made a point of grabbing every opportunity I could, such as going shopping in Koblenz, the small city where we first lived; trying a new restaurant or dish; or going on a trip to some new place, whether far away, like Russia, or nearby, like the Rhine castles near our home.  I was like a gourmand at an elaborate party—I tried to get my fingers into every platter.  When I was about to graduate from high school in Geneva, I even tried to convince my parents to let me take a PG year there, but on the French side.  Not only did I want to improve my French, but I wanted to stay in Europe another year.  They didn’t buy it, though, so I came back and started college in in the States that fall. 

Years later, I was watching Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire on TV.  It’s about two angels who hang around Berlin and watch as the humans live their lives until one of them decides he wants to become human and experience life himself.  The movie was released in ’88 and meanders around odd parts of Berlin, including some sites near sections of the Wall.  I'm not sure I can make this make sense—I've never articulated it before—but at one point, one of the angels crosses a street and passes in front of a row of buildings that all looked as if they dated from the immediate post-war period—’50s and ’60s or thereabouts.  It was only a few seconds of film, and it wasn't in the least significant to the movie, but it made an odd connection for me.  For those few seconds, the scene could have been anywhere in West Germany where those kinds of buildings were ubiquitous in the early days of my family’s time there—just like the house we had in Koblenz and the apartment buildings in the U.S. embassy compound in Bonn-Bad Godesberg where we moved in 1965.  The buildings in the movie were just little shops—bakeries, groceries, tobacconists, and such; I don't even know what they were, but it could have been any street in any West German town where new buildings had been erected to replace older ones destroyed in World War II—they went up fast as Germany was recovering, and they all looked alike.  All of a sudden, and just for a second or two, I was right back there in ’63 in Koblenz in those first weeks and months when my brother and I moved there to join my folks.  It was the oddest kind of nostalgic sense—sort of Proustian, I guess. 

I re-experienced the feeling I remember having, but had never tried to describe or even, really, recognized until much, much later.  It was this absolutely certain sense that here I was, doing this extraordinary thing—living in a foreign country—that I knew was both unique and special and exciting.  Remember, I was just 16 and had never been anywhere off the east coast of the U.S. except one skiing trip to Quebec, and in Koblenz we were living not in an American enclave or a housing compound, but right among the Koblenzers, shopping in their stores—no PX or commissary—and so on.  And, this was 1963—how many American teenagers lived in Europe?  I never said this to myself in words before, but I knew I was on an adventure.  Now, I know I'd thought this before—especially when I went back to Germany in the Army, and most clearly when I went back to Koblenz ten years after I first arrived there—but I know I'd never tried to put this into words of any kind—not even in my head. 

As I said, I had this sense at the time, but it wasn't remotely verbal and I never recognized it except maybe subliminally until years later.  What 16-year-old is that introspective, I guess.  I'd be out in town for whatever reason—shopping, exploring, meeting Dad at his office, wandering with a friend—who more than likely would have been Marc Humilien, a French military brat I got to know there, which made it all the odder—and I'd take notice of the German shops with German signs, the German people on the streets, the German kids.  Everything was foreign—but fascinating.  And this feeling would come over me—I live here.  This is now my home.  I'm actually doing this.  None of those words occurred to me—I've put those in later—but the feeling was there.  This only happened in the first months or a year—after that I got very blasé about living in foreign parts, and later, when we moved to Bonn, we were in an embassy compound where all our neighbors were Americans and our surroundings were an approximation of an American suburb.  But those first months in Koblenz, the Germanness of it all, the newness, the strangeness, was actually palpable.  I was doing this really, really different thing—and I knew it.  All this came back to me in that brief piece of movie, just because the setting looked vaguely familiar.  (That feeling came back to me the first day I arrived in Berlin, as I said, and when I returned to Koblenz in 1972 when I was assigned to a German military school located in nearby Bad Ems.  Years later, when I took a vacation trip to Quebec City, I had a similar sense.  I hadn’t been in a French-speaking environment in decades by that time, and though I’d never been to Quebec City before, I instantly felt as if I’d returned to some place familiar—culturally familiar.  Many things I hadn’t thought about for years came back to me.)

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DODGING VIETNAM

15 December 2005

I was in ROTC in college and I started active duty at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, in December 1969.  I spent the next 18 months in one army school or another before being assigned to West Berlin.  I was a counterintel agent at Berlin Station, the Military Intelligence unit attached to the Berlin Brigade, from July 1971 to February 1974.  I had worked the system some to get sent to Germany (Berlin was a lagniappe) and at least delay being deployed to Vietnam.  (I wasn’t a supporter of the war, but I also didn’t want to shirk what I saw as my duty as a citizen.)  The one big question was what would happen after 18 months, which was the standard tour for an officer in Berlin when I arrived.  After that, it was home leave and shipment to Vietnam.  I was counting on making myself so indispensable in Berlin that they’d keep me there rather than waste me in Southeast Asia.  I never had to test that plan, though: the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973.  But if I hadn’t been in Berlin to begin with, I can bet on where I’d have ended up.

I firmly believe that my language studies and skills helped keep me out of combat in Southeast Asia.  First, language ability is one of the assets MI looked for, so it helped qualify me for my choice of branch assignment when I was commissioned.  Second, one of the electives I took because I had room in my college schedule—I’d gotten two years’ advanced placement on both German and French, my majors, eliminating a lot of prerequisites—was linguistics.  One of the things you learn in linguistics is how to piece together a language’s grammar from fragments of the spoken tongue.  We did this as exercises several times, and it was part of the mid-term and final exams.  When I got to Ft. Knox, one of the battery of tests we all had to take was the ALAT, the Army Language Aptitude Test.  Lo and behold, the test was exactly that: a language whose grammar we had to glean from sentences, phrases, and words provided.  I maxed the test—got the highest score possible.  That meant I could choose any language training I wanted (except French and German, since I already offered the army those) and I was assured of getting it.  But I had to select a language program.  If I hadn’t chosen one, the army, in its wisdom, was going to choose one for me.  (They weren’t going to ignore my test score!)  They would have put me in a Vietnamese course, and that led to only one assignment.  There was one slot available in a Russian course, and I grabbed it.  Near the end of the course, I took the language proficiency tests for German and French as well as Russian so they were all on my record.  

Now, the fact is that Russian language was an asset in Vietnam—particularly for an MI officer—because of the Soviet presence in the North.  And French was an asset because many older Vietnamese still spoke French as a second language rather than English because Indochina had been a French colony until 1954.  So German was the key.  There was only one obvious place where American troops were stationed where French, German, and Russian were all important skills: not just Germany, but Berlin.  Still under occupation from World War II, Berlin had troops from France in the West and Soviets in the East.  That was the third reason my language studies helped me: specifically my fluency in German.  Since I had also lived in Germany for several years in my teens and knew the culture as well as the language, the army wisely sent me to Berlin instead of Saigon (where the life expectancy of an MI lieutenant was estimated at five minutes after he gets off the plane).   I have no doubt that my acuity in French and German plus my study of Russian were the principal reasons I was in Berlin when the cease-fire went into effect.  (The common wisdom among GI’s was that 90% of all soldiers were malassigned.  Not me: I was just where I should have been!)

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INDEPENDENCE DAY WITH GERMANS

17 December 2005

 
While I was stationed in Berlin when I was in the army, I had been sent as one of two American guest-officers to the MAD-Schule, the Bundeswehr intelligence school, in the summer and fall of 1972.  (MAD was the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, the military counterintelligence service of the Bundeswehr, the German military forces.  It is now called the Amt für Sicherheit der Bundeswehr, the office for the security of the Bundeswehr.)  The course was a two-parter, and we went during the summer for the first stage.  We were there over Independence Day, so my American colleague and I decided that we had to throw a Fourth of July barbecue for our German classmates. 

Even by ’72, barbecuing the American way—over a grill outdoors then eating outside pretty much with your hands—was still un-German.  (My mom did a cook-out for her German friends when we lived in West Germany in the ’60s, and the ladies didn’t quite know what to make of it.  They ate hamburgers with knives and forks and then, because paper was still expensive in Europe, wanted to wash the paper plates.) 

Well, since my partner, who was married, went back to Munich for the weekends, I was tasked with doing the shopping.  I drove up to the commissaries in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden and stocked up on steaks, hot dogs, and burgers.  I got number-10 cans of baked beans and all the fixin’s for a traditional Independence Day cook-out.  We had a half day on Tuesday, the Fourth—a coincidence, as far as I know—and the morning was devoted to Sport.  We had done this before, and gone to a swimming pool for the afternoon, but this time we were going kegeling—German bowling.  (Wouldn’t you know it, most Kegelbahns were also bars!)  That morning was raining and gray, and it looked like the barbecue was going to be a wash-out.  But when we came out of the Kegelbahn, the rain had stopped and the sun was shining brightly.  One of the German officers cracked, “Is it Jesus Christ or the good Lord himself who loves America?”  (We weren’t universally hated yet.)  And off we went to our cook-out. 

The mess hall had come up with a grill somehow, and we set up everything outside—the Germans sprang for the beer—and the cook-out was a blazing success.  (All that beer didn’t hurt.)  What went over best, I was surprised to find, was the baked beans.  Man, those guys just loved that stuff.  I had over-bought a little, and they served the rest at mess until it ran out.  I think they even prevailed on me to get more from the commissary.  I fear I created a bunch of addicts!  But we paid those guys back for all their gemütlichkeit and stood America in good stead with a small group of Bundeswehr army and air force majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels, and navy lieutenant commanders, commanders, and captains. 

*  *  *  *

THINKING OUTSIDE THE (TV) BOX

8 February 2013

I had a thought one night recently that's occurred to me before.  I was watching an ordinary TV program and the plot seemed to have been wrapped up.  But I saw that it was still 15 minutes before the end of the hour, so I figured there was something yet to be revealed.  There was, and I even guessed what it was, but mostly because I knew there was a quarter of the program left to go.  In other words, I was getting clues not from the plot or the characters, but from the mechanics of TV—in this case the fact that TV shows have a definite schedule and time span and they have to fill out the time slot.

I've noticed this kind of thing before.  Another clue that comes from outside the script or the acting is from the casting. If a role is played by an actor I don't know from anywhere, I can figure the character isn't very important.  That may or may not end up being true, but if an apparently small part is played by an actor who does a lot of TV, may even be a second-tier star whose name I even know, I suspect the character is going to turn out to be more significant than we're supposed to think.  (This can happen in movies, too, unlike the timing thing, but it's less common.  I remember once watching an old Clint Eastwood movie on TV some years ago in which an apparently inconsequential character was played by an actor who usually played featured roles and even leads.)  

There's a variation on this casting clue syndrome when a character who we know is probably important is played by an actor commonly cast in a certain kind of role.  Even if the character's personality isn't revealed much in the early scenes, you can be pretty sure it'll turn out to be in line with the actor's usual role and you can make a pretty sure bet he'll be a villain or an innocent wrongly suspected or something like that.  (In films, directors and producers might fool you by casting an actor against her or his usual type—and sometimes habitual casting patterns change, sometimes suddenly.  Cuddly Ed Asner, discombobulated Walter Matthau, and comic Zero Mostel started out as "heavies."   So did dimwitted Leslie Nielsen—but no one seems to do that much on TV.)

All of these are clues that you wouldn't pick up except for the mechanics or business of TV—not the writing, acting, or directing.  They're non-artistic clues, external clues.  They seem to belong to TV more than any other form of story-telling, either because of the nature of TV as we do it here (the rigid TV schedule, which is not always followed in Europe, say) or because of the way the directors and producers practice their crafts (the casting thing).  They all keep something that might be a surprise, however small, from being as startling as it otherwise might be.

(There was another clue in that Eastwood film, Blood Work, that the character I noted was more significant than the script let on, but it was sort of from within the film.  The guy'd written his name—I think it might have been on a check, but that's irrelevant—and it was Jasper Noone.  Now, I used to teach writing, and a common spelling error I saw was writing “no one” as one word: noone.  Because of my writing-class experience, I guessed that in Blood Work, this might be a modern take on Ulysses calling himself Nemo—Latin for “nobody.”  It was too prominent—the camera came in close on the name—to be insignificant.  And that's another frequent clue: if the camera lingers on an object in a scene, you know it'll be important later.  It's setting up a McGuffin—but it's an internal clue, perhaps sloppily executed—by the director.)

'War Carnival'

[The mid-1960s were a turbulent time in the United States. The civil rights movement was getting heated, women and other disenfranchised Americans were becoming vocal and activist, the threat of nuclear war and destruction was increasing and, above all in those years, the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was a focus of the young Americans who were subject to the draft and their families and friends. Anti-war activism was becoming increasingly common all across the country and the war’s popularity was plummeting. The war and its images were being projected into the living rooms of America daily, and the war’s managers in Washington and its supporters around the country had become the villains of much of America’s youth. In 1967, New York University hired British playwright John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance) as a visiting lecturer in the undergraduate theater program at the brand-new School of the Arts and he taught a course on politics and theater.

[Out of this class came a remarkable performance project, conceived, at the behest of the students, by Arden, an artist long associated with leftist causes (including Irish independence); his wife, actress Margaretta D’Arcy; and NYU theater games instructor Omar Shapli, a onetime member of the improvisational troupe The Second City in Chicago. The students of acting, directing, and playwriting developed the project and events in New York City around the time of its conception bore on the theme of the project, presented beginning in the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May 1967, 43 years ago today. One of those directing students was a young Leonardo Shapiro, the future leader of The Shaliko Company about whom I’ve written in the past. Already a political radical and anti-war activist, Leo (whom Arden described as a “balding bearded-weirdy”) was drawn to Arden, whom one writer characterized as “a mix of English establishment and international bohemian.”

[On 30 December 1966, members of the Bread and Puppet Theater picketed St. Patrick’s Cathedral “wearing black cowls and carrying grotesque masks impaled on poles” to protest Francis Cardinal Spellman’s public support of the war in Vietnam. One marcher set a doll spattered with red paint on the cathedral steps; another carried a sign reading “I am Mary. My Baby was napalmed in Vietnam.” At the Spring Mobilization on 15 April 1967, between 100,000 and 400,000 people demonstrated against the war at the U.N., where Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to the rally and Pete Seeger sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Some demonstrators gathered in Central Park where one activist burned an American flag in protest to the war. The next day, Chuck Connors, the actor (The Rifleman), raised a flag that had flown over the Capitol on the spot of the flag-burning as if to expiate the “desecration.” Earlier on 13 May, the very day the NYU performance, which became known as War Carnival, a "Support our Boys in Vietnam” parade, partially organized by the Johnson administration, moved down Fifth Avenue. Some of the 70,000 marchers, who included uniformed police officers and firefighters, nuns in habits, and veterans’ groups, stopped along the way to assault spectators who carried anti-war signs; one bystander, who wasn’t involved in the opposition movement, was tarred and feathered because the marchers took exception to his long hair and sandals. For students already focused on the war, such incidents so close to them in both time and location were bound to affect their imaginations. In this atmosphere, War Carnival came to be.]

John Arden, calling himself a “Britnik” playwright, characterized War Carnival, conceived as a day-long “episodic show,” as an “unscripted under-rehearsed attempt at something new.” A protest against the Vietnam conflict in particular and the military in general, War Carnival was performed free at NYU’s School of the Arts’ Central Plaza Building at 111 Second Avenue in the East Village beginning at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, 13 May, until sometime after midnight the following morning.

Described as a “combination medieval passion play and modern day Play-In,” the piece came out of seminars Arden and D’Arcy conducted with playwriting and acting students. According to Arden’s recollection, it was principally D’Arcy who conceived the notion of the show. NYU had hired Arden as a lecturer for a course called Politics and the Theatre but then had asked him to lead some students in a performance project. D’Arcy was not formally on the payroll, but Arden agreed to conduct the workshop if his wife could officially direct the practical work, which Arden felt was more within her experience than his. In his preface to The Workhouse Donkey (1963), Arden had proposed a day-long event, with spectators coming and going and “rival attractions” offered in the atmosphere of a “fairground or amusement park” with “all sorts of thematically-relevant interludes” intermingled. Arden conceived of “a kind of ‘promenade theater,’ with performances running in a desultory fashion all day long,” and the NYU students wondered if such an event could actually be realized. Furthermore, Arden and D’Arcy, like Brecht, believed that theater must make spectators—and participants—more cognizant of the day’s important questions and provoke action. “I have been challenged by my class of drama students at NYU to put this theory [of the promenade theater] to the test,” said Arden. According to one student, the classes had been contemplating theater that was relevant to its time and audience and which involved the spectators, and some students were already concerned about Vietnam. “Why do we never discuss serious matters?” he said the students complained. So D’Arcy challenged the students: “You want to act: So act against the War.”

Arden and D’Arcy engaged Shapli, who was teaching theater games and improvisation at NYU, and they developed some material around which the student playwrights and directors (one of the latter being Leo Shapiro) built 24 small plays which formed what Shapli, who served as MC at the event, described as “a running soap opera about a family whose grandmother is Vice-President of the United States.” The Grandma cycle was presented as an “allegory of US involvement in S.E. Asia,” Arden asserted. Making use, too, of Hovey Burgess’s circus classes, the performance included war gods on stilts and actual military recruiting speeches MC Shapli used to get the audience to participate, while U.S. Army training films were being shown on a tarp behind them. (To make sure the point was obvious, another training film of similar content was also screened—one from Nazi Germany.)

Declaring that a “play should come out of the crowd,” Arden intended War Carnival to evoke the atmosphere of a Happening, the audience free “to arrive when it wants and leave when it wants,” then moving at liberty among the events and demonstrations. All around the hall were skits, films, songs, and midway games of various kinds. The visiting playwright asserted that he’d concluded that “spontaneous ensemble improvisation is perhaps the only force to jerk the theatre forward from the successive ruts in which it sticks.” One of Arden and D’Arcy’s major focuses was the investigation of theater as communal expression.

At 2:00, spectators began to flow into the Central Plaza. Signs directed them to stairs or the elevator which took the spectators to an upper lobby where they found more signs, vendors, cotton candy, balloons, and a Coke machine. Admission was free so there were no ushers or ticket-takers at the door to the large, open studio with platforms with bleacher-like seats on opposite sides, a curtain across a third side, and a tarp stretched across the fourth wall. Before the planned performance started, the space presented the appearance of a fair, with carny games like a ring-toss or one where a player throws a ball into the navel of a life-sized painting of naked woman. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out between two students and quickly became a brawl. A young woman shouted, “My God he’s dead,” and flung herself on the motionless body of a classmate. The stilt-walking war gods appeared immediately and Arden made a funeral speech ending with a call for “Peace.” In the Orwellian parlance of the event, that meant war and the events of the occasion began.

The effort in War Carnival was to encourage the spectators to engage in the Game that was at the center of the event, filling the interstices between the student-created Grandma plays. This involved members of the audience, “recruited” into either the green army or the red, each “soldier” marked with a green or red dot of greasepaint. They all wore placards hung around their necks with arbitrary character traits (“Hysterical Jewish Philosopher”; “Talkative Holy Conservative”) written on envelopes stuck to the signboards. After the soldiers were “trained” (with the help of the films projected on the tarp) by two “sergeants,” Shapli called each soldier at random to engage in “combat” which the MC designated. This consisted of verbal contests (“Make up proverbs, first man to falter is dead”; “Construct a rhyming poem, alternate lines to each player, first man who drops meter or rhyme-scheme is dead”) or physical conflicts (a race between “One-Legged Dutch Sailor” and “Athletic Russian Interpreter”). Reminiscent of Brecht’s Man Is Man, and related in a way to such experiments as Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous exercise at Yale, the Game, Arden explained, was a demonstration of how easy it is for “unprincipled demagogues” to whip up people’s emotions.

“Campaigns,” each comprised of several “combats,” occurred at intervals throughout the event; in between, the Grandma chronicle unfolded in “partially scripted, partially improvised scenes” with minimal props and costumes—including masks cut from cereal and cracker boxes—varying in style and approach but united by their focus on opposition to the Vietnam war. Forming a wildly complex tale, Grandma begins when an Air Force bomber accidentally drops a nuclear warhead on the Appalachian Valley, irradiating a family of share-croppers who “begin to glow in the dark.” In a political maneuver, Johnson (played by now-well-known actor Larry Pine) enlists Granny to run as his V.P. in the upcoming election and they win. Granny gets Johnson impeached on the grounds that the war in Vietnam is unconstitutional and she assumes the presidency. While President Granny’s on a mission of mass destruction to Vietnam, she finds that her conscientious-objector son, Obadiah, has started a revolution at home. Aided by the war gods, who’d been exhorting spectators and participants “to acts and thoughts of violence,” Granny and Obadiah confront one another.

Between episodes of Grandma and further combats, there were visiting groups such as Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre performing songs from Peter Brook’s 1966 documentary anti-Vietnam war protest play US; Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre. which at this time hadn’t moved from New York to Vermont yet; and the New York Knickerbocker Theatre, which performed scenes about civil rights. Musicians and singers, including the African-American Bethel Baptist Church choir and a rock-and-roll band, and speakers like political writer and Irish activist Conor Cruise O’Brien, poet Ned O’Gorman, and novelist John D. Caute (introduced by Arden as the British “minister of defense”) also performed. Enlisted by D’Arcy (whose idea it had been to have outside groups), the visitors presented “interludes” and multi-media displays as they came and went, demonstrating “the function of the arts in wartime.”

Following one of the frequent interludes, some planned, some spontaneous—and some of uncertain impetus, Granny, to punish her son for turning the people against her, and Obadiah, to preserve the country, kill one another and the war gods are stripped of their elaborate accouterments, revealing, like the wizard in Oz, that they were mere students. The end of the Grandma saga (which I have greatly simplified here!) was followed by a symbolic destruction of national symbols—that is, small paper flags—and Arden made as if he was about to burn an American flag that had been hanging on one of the nearby walls. “I won’t burn it because it belongs to the university,” the playwright explained, “but I would rather burn a piece of cloth than a piece of flesh.” He then spread the banner on the floor and trod on it.

War Carnival received very little coverage. Aside from a chapter in Arden’s own To Present the Pretence (1977) and a lengthy description and analysis from someone who was there (Victoria Manchester, “Let’s Do Some More Undressing: The ‘War Carnival’ at New York University,” Educational Theatre Journal 19.4 [December 1967]: 502-09), there was only one newspaper report and it came out before the event: Robert Pasolli, “John Arden’s Theatre: Rich Tibetan Nun vs. Mad Malaysian Dentist,” Village Voice, 11 May 1967: 25, 30. Not even the Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, reported War Carnival (though it did run a very short announcement on 8 May). There is surprising little about the project in the Tisch School (the successor to the School of the Arts) archives at NYU’s Bobst Library—a few memos and letters, mostly concerning logistics and equipment requests. According to Ted Hoffman, the director of the Theatre Program, journalists were present at the performance, but none of the papers published anything on it. Arden complained that the university didn’t publicize War Carnival conscientiously, but Hoffman asserts that the university sent out releases and publicity to all New York media and to other schools. The playwright himself designed the poster, which Hoffman described as a “gem of witty Sacred Cow self-depreciation.” (Hoffman may have meant ‘self-deprecation,’ but that’s not what was published! Indeed, the title of the program director’s “postscript” to Manchester’s article was rendered as "Reconniotering Arden's 'War.'") Whatever the state of the promotion, Hoffman reported that the audience reached the capacity for the room (250 people) and that “we had to hold people outside until others left.” Manchester recorded that by 11:30 Saturday night, “the audience had increased to overflowing, sitting and standing wherever they could.” (Forty-five minutes later, Manchester wrote, the audience went “through one of its periods of turnover” as some of those Hoffman wrote of waiting outside came in to replace spectators who had left.)

Arden had participated in the event as a sort of ringmaster-cum-commentator, helping War Carnival progress. At the same time, he revealed his own feelings about the place of NYU and its community in the show’s development. He blamed the “nearly impossible conditions” imposed on his group on “the structure and attitude of the University” and assailed the “‘subconscious’ attitude” of the NYU administration which “stifle[s] creativity,” disparaging not just Hoffman, but Dean Robert Corrigan of the School of the Arts (whom the playwright compared to Alger Hiss, accused of spying for the Soviet Union in 1948) and NYU President James M. Hester. Arden essentially called the university a shill for the federal government and the Johnson administration, suppressing dissent and independent thought. In fact, at one point in War Carnival, Arden announced that he was being paid by the CIA—explaining later, “We don’t really know where my money comes from,” and since the government subsidized schools like NYU, some of his salary could, indeed, come from the same coffers as CIA funding.

Though Hoffman disputed Arden’s interpretation of the facts regarding the university’s support, an April letter from the theater chairman to Arden and D’Arcy protested any elaborate scenography in the Central Plaza space due to cost and the availability of personnel. Hoffman told Arden that the space was committed to both rehearsals and performances during the time Arden planned War Carnival and many of the students were already involved in other performances for which they were currently in rehearsal. While Hoffman’s concerns as expressed in the letter may have been wholly legitimate and reasonable, the litany of obstacles reads as if the School of the Arts administrator was throwing roadblocks and impediments in the way of Arden’s project. Nonetheless, Hoffman described War Carnival in the end as “a remarkable experience.” Whether because of Arden or despite his efforts, it was almost certainly that.