Theater: Air-Conditioned Blightmare

America Hurrah, by Jean-Claude van Itallie, is a three-playlet wedding between pop art and the theater of cruelty. It is an off-Broadway trip through an air-conditioned blightmare towards an icy emptiness at the core of American life, the land of the Deepfreeze and the home of the rave, of the neon smile and the plastic heart.

The first playlet pits four masked interviewers against four job applicants. Fretfully, slavishly, the applicants answer like students who have forgotten to do their homework. Eventually the counterpoint of questions and answers gets so wholly garbled that the dialogue sounds like one of those elementary conversation books for learning a foreign language. Then the play opens out into a kind of choreographic ritual of modern life, urban herds shuffling to and fro, the commuter’s lock step, a cocktail party. It is apparent that interviewers and applicants alike need help: instead of the bread of life, they are fed vacuous cliches by intellectual bubble-gum blowhards representing the church, state, politics and psychoanalysis. One of the self-frocked priests of the Freudian age opens his mouth to say: “Blah, blah, blah, blah—hostile. Blah, blah, blah, blah—penis. Blah, blah, blah, blah —mother. Blah, blah, blah, blah—money.”

Like pond lilies, the characters float on the surface of their own reality, fall apart and come together in ever-changing scenes and situations. At the cocktail party, it gradually becomes apparent that one girl is dead. She apologizes for coming late: “I’m dead. Excuse me. I’m dead. Excuse me.” But in this world of non-touch and non-feeling, death is both impermissible and incommunicable, as impossible as life.

Life’s 21-in. dwarf, TV, is parodied in the second playlet, and what might be merely predictable is so superbly done that it provides porcupine-quilled social comment. The third playlet is simple and startling. A huge papier-mache Mother Hubbard doll intones a litany of all the beauties of the motel room that she owns, conjuring up memories of the garish comic horrors of the journey through a Sahara of motels in Nabokov’s Lolita. Into this room tromp a man (Conrad Fowkes) and a woman (James Barbosa) looking like plaster casts with comic-strip blow-up heads. They proceed to demolish everything in he room, and at the height of the carnage they scrawl foot-high obscenities on the walls, some never before presented on the U.S. stage. It is an allegory on U.S. inner violence, a sign that Americans hate the world they have made.

Thanks to the driving tempo and inventive direction of Joseph Chaikin and Jacques Levy and the flawlessly integrated playing of a versatile cast, Playwright Van Itallie conveys an especially timely sensation, that of a world of fragmented experience so speeded up past human endurance that a man must either die laughing or go mad. America Hurrah is as lively as a sand tick. It is anguishingly funny, yet oddly poignant, and more than passing wise in the ways of today’s world.