Gray soup and symbolism spice 'The Wicked Cooks'
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By NED VALENTINE
Gray soup, whatever that is, is in great demand, and five cooks are desperately trying to force the mysterious recipe from the "Count."
This plot and a great deal of symbolism for flavor, boiled together in an unreal setting, makes up the play "The Wicked Cooks," which will be served May 11-13 and May 16-20 in the Experimental Theater.
ACTORS WEARING half masks with the bottom part of their faces exposed, run back and forth across a roller-coaster type stage setting which alludes to the unreal world where the story takes place.
The play was written by Gunter Grass, a modern German dramatist, early in his career. It opened off-Broadway last January and has been shown very few times in the U.S.
"The struggle and frustrations which result from the five cooks trying to get the mysterious recipe for the popular grasp soup is the central message of the story," said Bob Farrell, assistant instructor in speech and drama and director of the play.
"The SOUP can symbolize anything that people want," he said. That is up to the members of the audience. Some say the
recipe is merely cabbage soup with gray ashes mixed in.
"When the cooks learn this they don't believe it because it is so simple. We are playing from the angle that the demand is the only real value the soup has. This demand causes frustrations which result in tragedy at the play's end."
Grass' symbolism is highly complex, Farrell said. It has meaning on several levels. If the audience comes trying to pinpoint the intellectual meaning of the play they will be confused, Farrell said. They must sit back and let the play happen, and then the insights will come.
Tickets are still available in the theater box office Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is 75 cents with the Student ID and $1.50 for others. Curtain is 8:20 each night.
China topic of lecture
China developed so rapidly economically and industrially between 750 A.D. and 1000 that West Europe didn't begin to catch up until the 16th century, when it underwent its preliminary Industrial Revolution.
Professor Robert Hartwell, from the University of Chicago and an authority on the growth of the socio and economic culture of China, thus distinguished between the time of parallel industrial events on the two continents in a lecture to a small group of East Asian experts yesterday in the Kansas Union Forum Room.
"The commercial situation of China remained static from the first until the eighth century," he said, "then monetary exchange started, urban centers grew and a national economy was created."
HE SAID THE introduction of income tax was the most important part of the commercial revolution and that reform of the salt monopoly during the Han dynasty in the 11th century stabilized the monetary situation.
HARTWELL OFFERED SOME comparisons saying that the Chinese salt mines produced in the year 1046 54,000 tons of salt, a total not nearly equalled by Great Britain in 1640.
"Owing to the lack of transportation, technology and markets in Europe, the growth of enterprize was not stimulated until after the middle of the 16th century.
Chinese copper mines yielded in 1067 only slightly less than those of Europe on the eve of World War I.
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Daily Kansan Wednesday, May 10, 1967
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