eye to eye
Arnold Weinstein Red Eye of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1962); revised ed. reprinted by
(Los Angeles: Sun Moon Press, 1997)
Jack Gelber Square in the Eye (New York: Grove Press, 1964)
It’s interesting to note that two of the most energetic and manic comedic plays of the early 1960s shared a titular connection with eyes. Gelber’s play, Square in the Eye, was first performed in 1965 off-Broadway at the Theater de Lys; but it first occurred in print in 1962, and was copyrighted by its publisher, Grove Press’s Evergreen books in 1964. Arnold Weinstein’s more gently satiric Red Eye of Love was performed in 1961 at The Living Theater, and was published, again by Grove Press, in 1962. Obviously, in the climate of the early 1960s these so-called “avant-garde” playwrights both saw love as something that—to borrow a phrase from the 1952 popular song “That’s Amore”—“hits your eye like a big pizza pie.”
Gelber’s play, the more emphatically absurd of the two, focuses on a would-be artist, Ed Stone, who is forced because of lack of artistic success to teach art in the New York schools. As he announces in the stand-up comedian-like prologue, he actually wanted to be a doctor, but instead has “the rare privilege of teaching art to delinquents in the New York public school system.” Accordingly, he suffers—“How I suffer,” and spends much of the play feeling sorry for himself while loathing his hilariously nasty children, Sarah and Bill, Jr.—the latter a son from his wife’s first marriage—and coveting his wife’s best friend Jane Jaffe, recently divorced from his successful artist friend, Al. Al has, evidently with far less talent than Ed, honed in on the art craze of the moment, and has filled his pockets with money, even though he has lost his wife. Ed’s nearly insane in-laws, meanwhile, are furious with him for pretending that he is Jewish, and see his admission of his lie as a betrayal of their faith. In a sense Ed’s resultant anger is aimed in too many directions to be effective; his verbal attacks—and Gelber’s play as well—are scatter-shot over too wide an area to hit any one target.
After what appears to be a typical night in the Stone home, a gathering of the players whose loathing of one another is barely hidden by witty social dialogue, Ed stomps out, whereupon his wife suddenly becomes ill and is hospitalized. By the time he is able to find her in the hospital, gathered with his grumbling in-laws in a waiting room, the doctor reports she has died of a brain hemorrhage. With lightning quickness Gelber has transformed his comedy of anger into a comedy of regret as Ed tries to sort things out and discover, despite the doctor’s utter confusion and refusals to explain, how his now beloved ex-wife could have so suddenly expired.
Inevitably, each survivor blames the others for the death and their lack of sympathy and love—for they have all been hit “square in the eye,” with the reality of their squalid lives full of petty bickering.
Yet even here, Gelber refuses to allow his characters much humanity, as they scurry to quickly perform the funeral in time for Ed’s remarriage, this time to a beautiful girl with “a lot of money.” Meanwhile, Ed’s student Luis, an innocent boy who has been forced to witness the horrors of Ed’s former family life, has run off with Jane Jaffe. So everything seems to have ended for the best.
Gelber’s dissection of love, fame, and fortune, however, is not yet over, as he returns us to Sandy’s hospital bed, just before her death, where she discusses her life with her sympathetic friend Jane—the doctors presuming the two are lesbians—and then is gradually put on trial, in retrospect, by her own children, mother, father, and husband. Sandy, accordingly, is forced to justify her life, even after death. But this time—despite her and her husband’s failures—the love the two had for one another is slowly revealed and somehow redeems their lives. That it ultimately means nothing given the fact that Ed will go on through life more successfully perhaps without her does not rob her of her dignity; indeed Sandy ultimately breaks through Gelber’s study of New York caricatures—figures described by Time magazine in 1965 as “talkocrats, the people who talk of writing novels and painting pictures, who interminably discuss the problems of home and headline,” and the various medical quacks, religious bigots, over-sexed and impotent beings Gelber’s play presents—to represent someone close to a real human being, a woman who, despite being trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, did her best to live, love, and survive.
Weinstein’s “red eye” is less violent than Gelber’s direct hit, and his masterful play is tinged with a kind of nostalgia that might be an anathema to the former, but the satiric focus of these two works is quite similar. Although the central couple of this work, Wilmer and Selma, seem to be a perfect match and declare their love for one another several times throughout the play, they too are torn apart by fame, fortune and finances. Wilmer, a born dreamer seeking throughout his life to find “the key”—both a key to success and to spiritual fulfillment—attempts various occupations: accounting, doll-manufacturing, soldiering, and working as a butcher—all of which end in failure. One can’t blame Wilmer for not trying hard enough; indeed he takes up each profession with such zeal that he forgets his wife Selma—who like Gelber’s Sandy must endure an obnoxious son (Bez) from her previous marriage. She has no choice but to divorce Wilmer and marry the wealthy meat merchant, O. O. Martinas.
Like Gelber, Weinstein directs his satire against various professions and institutions: police (two policemen join forces, becoming life-time “partners”), the military (during numerous wars that occur throughout the play, enemy soldiers find more in common with each other than they do with men of their own units), business tycoons (from shoeshine boy to successful tycoon, O. O. Martinas gradually builds up an empire symbolized by a high-rise department store devoted to various meats, and wanders about the play declaring his pride in being illiterate while composing outrageously bad poetry), as well as the sort of lovers featured in Broadway musicals and operettas (Selma and Wilber again and again meet one another anew, describing themselves as “your former casual acquaintance and husband”), along with scattergun attacks on society, propriety, and even Santa Claus.
As Selma vacillates between her love and her desire for money, both Wilber and O. O. Martinas end up with the red eyes of love, and ultimately find it easier to satisfy Selma’s needs by moving in together, creating a kind of ridiculous ménage à trois, the horrible Bez becoming an Astro-butcher who is “lost in orbit.” Weinstein’s sympathies with the artist-dreamer Wilber, however, are apparent, as the three conclude the play with the determination of all to go and live with the Navahos, “a fine folk in the field of the rug and the pot.”
In both these plays we see the writers grappling with one of the major issues of the day, the failure of the so-called American Dream to link human desires such as love and spiritual fulfillment with the necessary finances to survive. Love, spirit, and money are represented in both these works as what a necessary for happiness—but in everyday life they seldom can be combined. The Masonic-like search for the holy trinity of (brotherly) love, relief, and truth, seems a nearly impossible achievement in the worlds so brilliantly satirized by these two gifted playwrights.
Los Angeles, April 15, 2003
About a month after I wrote this short essay, Jack Gelber died of
blood cancer on May 9th, 2003 at the age of 71. I never met him and
had not read his plays until I began work on From the Other Side of the
Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 in 1996, published by my
Sun & Moon Press. Co-editor Mac Wellman, who had gotten to know Gelber,
argued for the inclusion of Gelber’s play The Connection in
the volume; that play, however, which premiered in 1959, was one year outside
of the arbitrary dates which we’d assigned as the boundaries of our focus. I
now wish I’d included Square in the Eye in that anthology.
We did include
Weinstein’s play The Red Eye of Love—both of us agreeing that it was a
necessary work. Indeed, correspondence with Weinstein’s agent and, ultimately,
with the author himself led me to make an offer to reprint that play, which I
did, with a new introduction by John Guare, in 1997, one year before the larger
anthology appeared.
I
visited Weinstein in New York in February 1996, having lunch with him at the
Spanish restaurant, Don Quixote, attached to The Chelsea Hotel* where he lived.
I also visited his Chelsea Hotel suite, number 7-11—the first time I’d actually
seen the rooms of the hotel, which were like little rabbit warrens. Arnold was
a rather large man and I had a hard time imagining him writing in these
quarters, let alone sleeping in them.
Arnold
and I discussed his several early plays, including Dynamite Tonight,
his earlier collaborations with Paul Sills, founder of Second City Theater in
Chicago, his collaboration on the autobiography of Larry Rivers, What
Did I Do? (Arnold gave me a copy), his early career as a New York
School poet, and his various past and future operatic endeavors as librettist
for opera composer William Bolcom, including McTeague (1993)
and, two years after this first encounter, A View from the Bridge (1999).
I will never forget the enthusiasm he expressed about everything in his raspy,
slightly crackling voice.
A
couple of days later, Arnold attended the premiere performance of my (Kier
Peters’) play Still in Love, a theater-opera composed by Michael
Kowalski, at Roulette, based on my play Past, Present, Future Tense.
He later wrote a blurb for the CD: “A beautifully constructed, sad, sexy, and
witty musical theatre piece. It’s quite a wonderful work.” Kowalski’s and my
piece, in both its structure and genre, was in many ways related to the
dramatic musical constructions which he and others (such as Maria Irene Fornes)
had attempted to formulate in the early 1960s.
When
Weinstein’s The Red Eye of Love was republished by Sun & Moon Press,
I held a party for Arnold at Applause drama bookstore on the West Side of New
York on December 7, 1997. Arnold and friends read scenes from the play. Many of
his old acquaintances were in attendance, including poet Kenneth Koch and Frank
O’Hara’s sister Marueen (with whom I’d long before had dinner in a New York
restaurant).
At
the performance, I sat with Maureen, Michael Vale (who played O. O. Martinas in
the original production) and Benjamin Hayeem (the enemy soldier of the original
cast).
After
the reading, I was re-introduced to Larry Rivers, accompanied by Jane
Freilicher. I asked Rivers for permission to reprint his painting of Frank
O’Hara in my planned Poet’s Daybook. “As long as you write a request and
pay me a lot of money!” he quipped.
Kenneth
Koch seemed distant, but when Charles Bernstein arrived, he came over to talk.
I asked him about his plays, to which he responded that he was very frustrated
by the lack of productions. It’s hard to develop a poetic theater, he argued,
in a culture that does not produce plays. “There’s no way to learn how to write
such a theater,” he pronounced.
“But,”
Charles countered, “you do perform a poetic theater every time you read a
poem.”
“You’re
talking nonsense,” he thundered. “It’s not at all the same thing!”
Charles
persisted, but I intervened, arguing that it’s important to distinguish between
a play with actors and a performance (call it a play if you want) for one
voice.
“It’s
the whole aspect of a collaboration,” Koch agreed. “You don’t know if it works
if it never gets performed.”
Charles,
more meekly, stuck to his point.
“You’re
just playing with the word performance,” Koch argued. “You’d think you
were a ‘Language’ poet—oh, I forgot, you are one!”**
Someone
pointed out Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, to me, and I went over
to introduce myself, asking him to sign my edition of Red Eye of Love since
Grove was the original publisher. He wrote: “To the publisher who is a more
than worthy successor to the first one. To publish this play again is great.” I
was touched, particularly since Rosset had been one of my literary heroes.
Arnold
said he couldn’t join me for dinner—he had a birthday party to attend—so I
prepared to eat alone at the nearby Café Luxemborg. But in the street Arnold
and his friend called out to me: they had changed their minds, and wanted to join
me.
Some
years later I had dinner with Arnold in Los Angeles upon the occasion of the
performances of Shlemiel the First, based on works by Isaac
Singer; Weinstein had composed the lyrics for music by Zalmen Mlotek.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the play.
Weinstein
died of cancer, at the age of 78, on September 11, 2005
*For younger readers who
may not know the history of that hotel, I’ll just list some of its long-time
inhabitants: besides Weinstein, it was home to writers Mark Twain, O. Henry,
Dylan Thomas, Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Arthur Miller,
Quentin Crisp, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac,
Brendan Behan, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and Thomas Wolfe; film
directors and actors such as Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Clarke (who directed
Gelber’s The Connection in its film version), Miloš Forman, Lillie
Langtry, Dennis Hopper, Uma Thurman, Jane Fonda and Gaby Hoffman; musicians
Patti Smith, Virgil Thomson, Dee Dee Ramone, Henri Chopin, Edith Piaf, Bob
Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Rufus Wainwright, not to forget Sid
Viscious who supposedly stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in its
rooms; along with visual artists Christo, Ralph Gibson, Robert Mapplethorpe,
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Henri
Cartier-Bresson and the whole Andy Warhol scene, including Viva, Ultra Violet,
Mary Woronov, Holly Woodlawn, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Paul America. When I
visited Arnold there, a friend, publisher, and editor, Raymond Foye, was also
living in the hotel.
**Interestingly enough,
Charles was asked to substitute for Kenneth Koch’s poetry reading class at
Columbia University when Koch grew ill just before his death.
Los Angeles, November
27, 2006 / May 2, 2007
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (August 2008).
