"Who Said Snow?"

A New England prep-school English teacher, seeing a performance of Jack Gelber's The Connection (at off-Broadway's Living Theater), called the play "ferment in the armpit of society." The New York Times called it "a farrago of dirt." But Critic Henry Hewes of the Saturday Review decided that it is "the most original piece of new American playwriting in a long, long time." Playwright Lillian Hellman said it is "the only play I've been able to sit through for years."

The Connection is all about drug addicts, and it has a sporadic, hypodermic sort of distinction. The junkies sit in a pad impatiently waiting, but for nothing so vague as Godot: they wait for their "connection" and the heroin he will bring. They numb the hall with torpor, draw beads on the audience with four-letter words, pick their eyes, ears, nails and noses, and squeeze the "green stuff" out of a boil on one man's neck. They trade hip remarks: "I don't have any marijuana, but how quaint of you to ask." Says a Negro junky: "We live in a white society. Did you ever see black snow?" Another addict springs upstage smelling a fix. "Who said snow?" From time to time, a jazz combo breaks into sound, underscores the crying paralysis of the junkies' willing suspension of life.

Needle Stab. After the fashion of Pirandello, Author Gelber takes an ax to the footlights, tries to smash all barriers between the play and its audience. Two characters in The Connection are moviemakers doing an avant-garde film of the supposedly real junkies in their pad, and another is the "author," who loses control of his characters, gets a fix himself and falls in drugged stupor while the actors continue on their own. One actor gestures toward a couple in the audience, says that there are other addicts, "people who worry so much--aspirin addicts, chlorophyll addicts--hooked worse than me." From the audience, a voice murmurs over and over: "That's the way it is, man. That's the way it really is."

The play makes a needle stab at philosophy and theology. "If man is transparent," one hophead wonders, "like how do you account for his shadow?" Another junky sagely says that there isn't any Big Connection ("I am your man if you come to me. You are my man if I go to you"). And when the connection finally arrives, he is a Christlike Negro all in white, with empathy even for squares.

"Swing, Baby." Despite its first newspaper notices, The Connection has been running for six months and is going strong. The weekly reviewers helped save the play, but it actually owes its survival to the fact that it was staged by a determined repertory company known as the Living Theater, managed since 1951 by Julian Beck, 34, and his wife Judith Malina, 33. So far, Living Theater has produced some 18 plays, half new, half old, all experimental in their time--Strindberg's The Spook Sonata, Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise, which now alternates with Connection.

Playwright Jack Gelber, 27, who freely admits he has used every drug from heroin to peyote, is ultimately unsuccessful and self-conscious in his assault on theatrical illusion. But if The Connection and other Living Theater productions have perhaps earned more praise than they deserve, it is because critics with an eye on the future are recognizing that the group is hunting for new ways and forms. "I'm trying to sell an idea," says one character in The Connection. "What's so immoral about that?" Then he adds: "Swing, baby," and in its own odd way, Living Theater swings.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.