KWSAN REVIEWS
THEATRE: A weekend for burlesque
By BOB BUTLER
Kansas Arts and Reviews Editor
It doesn't seem a whole lot like Moliere, but the University Theatre's production of "The Imaginary Invalid" is designed to delight audiences with a potent mixture of burlesque and "Laugh In."
The burlesque comes with Moliere's parody of doctors, a professional body he saw with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Director Robert Finlay has added to this by supplying his actors with enough stylized gestures to make a dozen American "mellerdramers," thereby parodying the characters themselves.
The "Laugh In" angle comes with some technical wizardry in the form of slides projected above the stage during the course of the performance. Thus, in an opening dream sequence, when Argan the hypochondriac dreams of being viviSED by a flock of quack doctors, slides of Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dr. Christian Barnard and Dr. W. Clarke Wescoe flash across the stage.
Die-hard purists may argue that Moliere needs no gimickry to help it along. Perhaps not, but in KU's "Imaginary Invalid" the effect updates the performance and sets a comic tone which is carried throughout the evening.
The play, Moliere's last, concerns Argan's attempt to marry his daughter off to an idiot doctor so that he can have free medical assistance for his imagined diseases. The daughter, of course, has a true love of her own . . . one the old man can't tolerate.
The acting is uniformly good. Roy Sorrels' Argan could have been a bit more cranky and aged during Act I, but he came back in Act II when the indiscretions of his unfaithful wife raised his temper enough to make him forget about his illness.
FILMS:
The "real religious girl" is played by Britt Ekland, who is also real pretty. She has run away from her Amish parents and come to New York to be a dancer (she does interpretations of Bible passages) and she ends up at Minsky's Burlesque House, in love with two comics, Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom.
Now it seems Minsky's is having problems with the inspector of vice, who thinks the thinly clad girls are shameful (today he'd be rating movies G, M, R or X). Robards and Wisdom trick the girl into dancing on stage, making sure the inspector will have the cops there for a raid only to see her do Bible passages. The inspector will be crushed, the cops will never listen to him again, and Burlesque will continue. Right?
Of course not. But who cares? "The Night They Raided Minsky's" is totally delightful. Robards, Wisdom and Miss Ekland turn in fine performances and the show is full of madcap antics, color and sound.
Perhaps the best thing about it is the revived Burlesque routines with their dummy girls and baggy-pants comics, complete with tassels, seltzer bottles and corny jokes. Everyone will know the punchlines before they are spoken, but that fact doesn't detract from them in the least. This film is the closest most of us will get to a real Burlesque show. Sit back and enjoy it.
There are many fine moments. Robards, playing a rat with an insatiable yen for women, tries to seduce Miss Ekland, only to find she will not cooperate until she is given a sign "from Him." In desperation he pounds on the wall, a murphy bed silently lowers itself to the floor and "the sign" is given. A bed where before there was no bed.
A special credit goes to Holmes Osborne, whose Thomas, Argan's choice for a son-in-law, is a drooling, ugly, horny cretin of a doctor who takes pulses at the armpit and then pronounces his patient dead. The stage brightened up
James Hawes settings and Chez Haehl's colorful costumes expertly reflect Moliere's time, in fact, they are about the only traditional things about his production. But when you're laughing you don't care.
A special credit goes to Holmes Osborne, whose Thomas, Argan's choice for a son-in-law, is a drooling, ugly, horny crein of a doctor who takes pulses at the armpit and then pronounces his patient dead. The stage brightened up even more when he made his speeches of introduction, reading from a wad of paper tucked in his pants front.
James Hawes settings and Chez Haehl's colorful costumes expertly reflect Moliere's time, in fact, they are about the only traditional things about this production. But when you're laughing you don't care.
BOOKS: Ed Howe By DONALD R. McCOY Professor of History
Ed Howe: Country Town Philosopher, by Calder M. Pickett (University Press of Kansas, $10)
KU's Calder Pickett calls his work "a kind of biography." And he is right. It is "a kind of biography," limited by the fragmentary evidence available about its subject. Do not let that put you off, however, for Professor Pickett has taken those fragments as well as gleanings from Edgar Watson Howe's voluminous writings and put them together with a glue of logical analysis and good writing to provide his readers with a sound and interesting story.
Pickett had good material to work with in Ed Howe, the pride and vexation of Atchison from the 1870s until his death in 1937. In recent years interest in Howe has been rekindled, largely thanks to the reprinting and reassessments of his outstanding novel, The Story of a Country Town. On that basis, Howe has found a niche in history as the pioneer of literary realism and a dour critic of small-town life.
Calder Pickett now comes along to show that Howe was both more and less than has been claimed for him. He was a waspish epigrammist, the author of such as "Don't slander the dead; if you do justice to the living, you will be kept busy" and "The average girl knows but two adjectives, and they are 'horrid' and 'cute,' which she uses on every occasion from describing Shakespeare to the appearance of a corpse."
He was a hard-working and inventive journalist, taking over the Atchison Globe when he was 24 and making it into a financial success against the opposition of two other newspapers. Later he became the editor of his own monthly magazine.
He was a prolific writer of books of fiction, thought, and travel, turning out 17 of widely varying quality during his lifetime. Howe was also a series of paradoxes. In his books, and newspaper and magazine writings, he was a critic of boosterism who was at the same time a booster; he was a critic of straitlaced religion who was also a somewhat narrow-minded moralist; he was a critic of agrarian and small-town America who was, however, convinced that man was at his best when he was close to nature; and he was a misogynist who fancied himself a true friend of women. Pickett carefully explains the paradoxes by showing Howe as a man who expected more out of men and women than he received and yet was appreciative of what he got.
There is no high drama in this book, no brigade charge, light or otherwise. There is only an erratic, waspish country editor, who emitted the smell of the best, and some of the worst, of a country town, of journalism with character. That should, however, keep any normal reader happy, especially as Professor Pickett defy applies his talents as a writer, critic, and a student of American studies and journalism to a complicated man. In short this is a book that will take its place as a readable and as close-to-possible definitive biography of an outstanding Kansan, an American original, Ed Howe.
Mekas says films' art is built by underground
Jonas Mekas, underground film critic and film-maker, explained last night to a Festival of the Arts audience that underground films deal with gross realities, gross emotions, and more subtle ideas.
Mekas was joined by Robert Kramer, a politically oriented film-maker, in a question and answer period after the films.
"Ten years ago cinema was a retarded art," Mekas said.
But the underground film has brought cinema up to date and up to the level of any other art, Mekas suggested, contrasting the underground with the Hollywood fantasies.
"Since you came here to see underground films, I take for granted that you expect this evening to be full of sex. I hope I will be able to provide some," the film-maker said.
The second part of the survey of underground films begins at 12:30 p.m. today in the Kansas Union Forum Room. No admission will be charged.
Kramer's works will be featured at 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Kansas Union Ballroom. He will speak more extensively then.
6 KANSAN Mar. 21 1969
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