'New directions'

never seen

By Bill Doll

Theater critic

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NEW YORK Consider this, a voyage to the nether regions of theater.

Not that the many theaters on the side streets of New York consider themselves in a forgotten land. But as far as we in Cleveland know about the new directions in contemporary theater, they do not exist.

Without waxing poetic, if you consider theater a rainbow, we in Cleveland are aware of not much more than the band of yellow with maybe an edge of red. Like most cities, Cleveland is a late recipient of the new truths.

Of the three new works I saw, Thomas Babe's "A Prayer for My Daughter" at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater, is closest in form and feel to traditional theater.

The setting is a grimy office in a New York police precinct.

At one of the scarred desks littered with unfiled forms, sits Kelly, a paunchy, baby-faced, calculatingly mean detective. He is interrogating an emaciated, ascetic homosexual about the murder of an old woman.

Like some exquisite Chinese torture, Kelly follows kicks with cajolery, psychologically pummeling his victim.

In another office, his partner, Jack, is questioning another suspect, a slight, frightened friend of the homosexual. The younger man is a drug addict.

This is a play of distorted bonds. Jack the policeman, it turns out, is on drugs, too, and gets a barely contained homosexual high from interrogating Jimmy.

The play oozes a rancid sexuality consisiting of Jack's barely concealed itch for the boy, the older homosexual's narcissistic exploitation of the younger man and Kelly's Gestapolike frenzy in asserting his dominance.

Outside this sweltering hole of humanity, Kelly's daughter is threatening suicide. The man who appears so in control isn't. One can't escape the mess of existence.

This is not a pretty play, but it is riveting. In form and theme it is familiar. Thomas Babe explores raw emotions, drawing them out to their far edges. His play is in the dissonant, anxious colors of a Van Gogh.

Like Van Gogh, he must com municate in bold face, almost distorting (but not quite) the sour shapes of unhappy lives.

Sam Shepard, in "The Curse of the Starving Class," takes the process one step further. He heightens through caricature.

here

Theater

"Curse of the Starving Class," by the way, is also at the Public Theater. It is one of seven plays simultaneously on the seven stages in the con-.. verted Astor Library in the East Village.

The scene is a farmhouse in California: The subject is the shattered state of the traditional family.

A teen-aged girl throws her 4-H posters on the floor and yells at her mother for eating the chicken she had cut up for the fair. Meanwhile, her brother, back to the audience, is urinating on the posters.

Dad, drunk, wearing a ragged overcoat, staggers in with a sack of artichokes that he stuffs into the re frigerator.

In Act II, the son is wearing the overcoat. He stumbles to the refrigerator (replenished by mom with a more balanced diet) and gorges himself, spewing tomatoes, raw bacon all over as he chomps.

That refrigerator is central. Everyone opens it as if there is to be found in it the lost harmony and coziness of home. But this is an inversion of everything that Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post ever stood for. Home and family have been turned into an existence out of "Waiting for Mr. Goodbar.”

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Frankly, I sense that he isn't saying much that's new. But he has taken the traditional family drama and ripped it out of shape to show us that starvation in America often has much less to do with food than with

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