THEATRE: 'Jeromy'
By BOB BUTLER
Kansan Arts and Reviews Editor
Anyone who avoids the production of "What's Happening to Jeromy, Jeromy, Jerromy?" simply because it is by a student author is making a mistake. True, young playwrights have uncomfortable ways of indulging in wordy soiloplies and deep, confusing, "poetic" dialogues, but "Jeromy" for the most part avoids these.
Author Larry Maness manages to present his vision of a "generation gap" in tight, fast-paced and sometimes humorous form. His play is allegorical, and as such its characters are not deeply drawn but representative of greater ideas. Yet they still manage to hold a certain amount of individuality.
In Act I we find a young man, Jeromy, trapped in his home by his mother, a domineering, warped woman who chains her son to an old wheelchair and convinces herself that he's paralyzed, using his "handicap" as an excuse for shirking her own responsibilities to the world. She has Jeromy read her fairy tales which reflect a status quo, such as Little Red Riding Hood, which ends: "... and so Little Red Riding Hood went home and after that she always did what her mother told her."
Act II finds Jeremy waiting in the woods for a girl friend. He is interrupted instead by a crazy old man named Ogden who refuses to recognize reality. Ogden, unlike the mother, is not vicious, merely stupid. Ogden doesn't worry about the future, doesn't project. He bothers nobody he says (although in fact he is very bothersome) and nothing bothers him. "I just don't bother," he says.
Act III opens with a youth committing suicide. Life, he says, is a confusing, meaningless mess. Two police detectives discover the corpse and in a macabre examination collect the dead man's relics and mark off the area while making inane smalltalk about their kids' bicycles. Another youth approaches unnoticed and complains of his meaningless existence. The cops are too busy drawing chalk lines around the body to notice him and the youth kills himself also. Finally Jeromy approaches, expresses the same sentiments as the other two and kills himself. The detectives finish their job and walk off chuckling over some corny joke.
One of the nice things about "Jeromy" is that it is open to many interpretations. The audience isn't told what to think, but stimulated to ponder the play and come to its own conclusions.
The players are competent and three of them, Terry Creach as Ogden and Dick Heatwole and Dennis Frye as Pat and Thomas, the detectives, do exceptionally well.
The sets by Darrell Keister are simple and functional and director Mike Fisher successfully keeps scenes from becoming stagnant on the U.C.C.F. building's small stage.
The play is not completely successful—the death speeches made by the three suicide-bent young men are too wordy and unrealistic, but Maness has packed a lot of meaning into as few words as possible, creating a show well worth seeing.
FILMS: It's haunting
By JOHN TIBBETTS
It's a classic pattern. First there's the arrival, then the Preliminary Encounters, and finally the Isolation. All masters of the genre have utilized this pattern, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Mr. R. James to Shirley Jackson.
I refer of course to the tale of haunting.
"Isabelle" is such a one, it follows the pattern scrupulously. And it's a dandy. Few films have carried the theme of haunting or obsession to the extent and effect that this one does.
"Isabelle" is also one of the nastiest films that I have ever seen. Little things such as a gas mask, dried apples, a decapitated chicken, old photographs, form here such a pattern of horror and implication that in the darkness of the theater it raises the hackles.
Bit by bit scraps of information are offered to the viewer. Isabelle has come home after the death of her mother to look after her uncle and the family farm. Her other relations, save a sister who is a nun, are also deceased. Her family, it seems, was a most extraordinary one ... Steadily a pattern becomes apparent; very nasty little details are brought out concerning her departed relatives; paintings of war, an accident at a mill, bits of gossip, the appearance of strangers, the bleak atmosphere, all contribute to such an eerie pattern of horror and perverse implication that the suspense mounts inexorably.
This is not to say that Isabelle is a simple horror story. There are very perverse hidden depths in it that culminate in a final scene so surpassingly incomprehensible that its significance depends on the viewer's prior attention to the mass of detail and his willingness to piece together what facts and hints have already been presented. Even so, one can never be sure just what has really happened.
Some will say that it all is too vague and complicated in its psychological and sexual motivations; that too much is only hinted at. Certainly Isabelle herself emerges as one of the most unsettling and questionable elements in the film. Is it fantasy or psychological projection, they will ask. The only answer is that it is deliberately incomplete, deliberately maddening. It must be so. The unsettling effect justifies it.
Make no mistake, there are severe demands on the viewer. If you make the effort, it will chill the daylights out of you.
A superb animated short, The Nose, precedes Isabelle. It's a rare example of the exceedingly difficult technique of "pinboard animation" by Alexander Alexieff, one of the world's master animators.
FILMS: Perversion plus
This oppultently ghastly motion picture is loaded with enough depravity and decay to satisfy even the most selective of window-peepers. Director Joseph Losey gives us a nasty, perverse little freak show that is, nevertheless, fascinating to watch because all moviegoers are essentially window-peepers.
Mia Farrow plays Cenci, a sexually repressed "child-woman," who has never been able to accept the death of her mother. Elizabeth Taylor plays a pudgy, earthy whore who, conveniently, has never been able to get over the death of her daughter.
By RICHARD GEARY
One morning, Cenci follows her and drags her home to an enormous, ridiculously elegant mansion. The aging tart accepts the situation, and all seemingly goes well until the appearance of Albert, Cenci's step-father, played embarrassingly by Robert Mitchum. It seems Albert has an unnatural lust for his step-daughter—she is both repelled and attracted by him, and Liz hates him. Eventually, Cinci fakes a rape, then pregnancy, then kills herself, and Liz kills Albert, then presumably goes mad and the cameras are turned off just before everything rots away out of perversion and unnaturalness.
The script is a model of pretentious inepititude, giving the characters no motivation to say anthing, and making them speak lines like, "Cat got your tongue?" and "Have a heart!" Joseph Losey, who has shown skill and perception in "The Servant" and "Accident" expertly glosses the production with sumptuous color, long shots of empty halluays, lots of mirror images, and luxuriantly smooth camera movement.
Probably the most interesting thing in the entire film is the beautiful house in which most of the action (if that's the proper word) takes place. It is a huge old Edwardian palace with stained glass windows, colored tile, carved marble, various Art Nouveau nick-nacks, but barren, empty, and full of echoes. One is struck by "Secret Ceremony" in the same way: fancy frosting, but nothing beneath.
RECORDS: Fever Tree
Fever Tree's first album, FEVER TREE, is my favorite album, beating out even SGT, PEPPER'S.
By WILL HARDESTY
FEVER TREE was very heavy electric rock on one side with non-electric orchestrated rock on the other. ANOTHER lets the group do an entirely new bag.
- And now the fantastic Fever Tree has its second album out—ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE on Uni—and this one may become my second favorite album.
ANOTHER lets Fever Tree show it can do jazz and blues as well as the five guys can do rock.
"Man Who Paints the Pictures" is a new arrangement of a song which appeared on their first album. This time, the group does Michael's hip revival song with lots of blues and jagg, a little rock and little electrification.
6 KANSAN Mar.14 1969
"Jokes Are for Sad People" is my favorite cut of the album. It is a seven-minute work which sounds like Dave Brubeck and Wes Montgomery playing together.
Why Fever Tree isn't one of the best-known groups in the country today is beyond me. Both their albums are fantastic. They have one of the best, if not the best, writer-musicians in rock music in America.
GRAVITT'S AUTOMATIC LAUNDRY Bring it in,
we'll do it for you 913 N H VI 3-6844
in America today in Rob Landes. He writes most of the group's songs as well as playing organ, flute, clavinette and piano on ANOTHER.
Fund established for and by blacks
A group of black KU students and Lawrence community members has set up a money reserve, "Freedom Fund," designed to provide money for blacks from KU or Lawrence needing funds to pay legal fees.
Jake Mumford, Lawrence freshman and chairman of the fund, said the group was spurred to build such a reserve by a case involving Mumford's brother Danny.
913 N.H. VI 3-6844
Danny Mumford was tried and convicted in February of striking a policeman with intent to inflict injury and is now at the Diagnostic Center in Topeka.
The group is planning various money-raising projects, said member, Mylene Rucker, Los Angeles sophomore, and donations should be sent to Jake Mumford, Box 621, Joseph R. Pearson Hall.
Casa De Taco
Deliciously Different Mexican Food 1105 Mass. VI 3-9880
The Gaslight
Tavern
Come in for a toast to the Irish Monday, March 17
Clover Green Beer
in pitchers or glasses
2 pitcher hours: 65c pitchers from
11:30-12:30
3:30-4:30
(Also remember: 65c pitcher hour Every Friday Afternoon 2:30-3:30)