New Plays: Gut Theater

“I want my audience to feel rather than think,” said Playwright Megan Terry about her Viet Rock, which ran for 62 Manhattan performances in 1966. Obviously, she has not changed her mind. The People vs. Ranchman, which opened off-Broadway last week, is equally devoid of intellectual content. Paradoxically, though, it is likely to leave a mature playgoer doing more thinking than feeling.

Not, however, thinking about the subject of the play, which is a simplistic attack on American blood lust. Ranchman, played with great simian gusto by William Devane, is an accused rapist in police custody. A howling mob, which seems largely composed of teenyboppers, demonstrates throughout—half for him and half against him. A ratty prosecuting attorney introduces highly clinical and irrelevant evidence against him; the alleged rape victims—two women, a young girl and a boy—seem to have enjoyed every minute of the experience.

Ranchman nevertheless pays the extreme penalty—extremely. He dies in the electric chair, in the gas chamber and by gunshot while being hanged. Each time, he is casually resurrected to go on talking, shouting and heckling with the rest of the cast, in the course of which none of them utters anything trenchant, or moving, or witty.

The absence of rational content is what is worth thinking about. It is not just that The People vs. Ranchman is a bad play. It is not out to be a good one, in terms of drama’s traditional concern with fate, foibles, language and ideas. Like the propaganda playlets of guerrilla theater (TIME, Oct. 18), this play is intended to be a felt experience for the audience—firsthand rather than projected. Yelling and chanting, the actors mingle with the playgoers on the way to their seats. No makeup is used, the lights are always up, there is no intermission, and the actors—usually within touching distance—frequently appeal to, or bark at, the audience.

The hungering for gut reaction instead of grace is a hallmark of the times. It is perhaps significant that the young who have made it so constitute the most intensively educated generation in U.S. history; the endocrine charge that goes with intemperate talk and action may be nature’s way of counterbalancing an overemphasis on cool rationality, much as a calcium-deficient child is moved to nibble plaster off the wall. Miss Terry’s style of gut theater fits in with this new act-it-out, confrontation mode. But the excitement of real life does not transfer to the stage like a decalcomania. The endocrine charge is missing from Ranchman, leaving only some pleasant kids making a lot of sound and fury. To what avail?