Mac Bird

There may be a special circle of hell, near Limbo but verging on the abode of party-bores and the wartime baseball players, appointed for writers who Articulate the Concerns of their Time, whose books are eventually parsed to death in intellectual history seminars and who are very thoroughly forgotten by everyone who neither pays nor is paid to read them. Such are Barbara Garson and her skitlet MacBird (I eschew the exclamation point!)--a document, a gadget, a pseudo-cerebral mummers' play in moral blackface. The fact that MacBird's concerns are nearly as unmemorable as its era may prove to be won't modify the play's appeal for future historians; nor can it extend MacBird's predictable stage life beyond eighteen months.

For the last year MacBird (we are told) has been circulating at anti-war rallies and publishers' luncheons, waiting for a cause to happen to it. None did, and the critics made their own. MacDonald, Brustein, Clureman and Robert Lowell declared the play a theatrical experience of sheer delight, even if its political argument was pernicious nonsense; Kerr and Lionel Abel took no delight at all in the politics, and found no other grounds for applause. MacBird's referents in real life are obvious and tangible: a jowly, gutter-mouthed Lyndon Johnson supported by assorted cronies and a megalomaniacal wife; a string of identical Kennedys whose misfortunes (the assassination, Bobby's exile and Ted's plane crash) are attributed to the Chief's ambition and insecurity; and a few foreshortened political standbys like Stevenson, Warren and Wayne Morse. The rhetoric is tired and tiring. J.F. Ken O'Dunc promises "A giant generation / geared for glory, seared in sacrifice"; his successor pledges the achievement of "the Smooth Society" which "has room for all; / for each, a house, a car, a family, / A private psychoanalyst, a dog, / And rows of gardens, neatly trimmed and hedged"; Bobby, after slaughtering the usurper and mounting the dias, announces his continuing to MacBird's ideals. MacBird is constitutionally immune to Negroes, Bobby to idealism; all show a ruthlessness and vulgarity that calls up all sorts of traditional cliches about politicians. MacBird's perspective on foreign policy is no more imaginative. The Pox Americana threatens to descend on all the world's wayward nations ("Our force shall only force them to be free"), while a mounting crisis in Vietland underscores the play's domestic spectacle. And the New Left (personified in the three witches, a New Negro, and old Wobbly and an audacious little coed) is damned along with the rest of the pack interested only in social disorder ("Bubble and bubble, toil and trouble, / Burn Baby Burn and caldron bubble").

By taking a good swipe at every available special interest group, MacBird avoids agitprop and falls somewhat heavily into the category of the Interesting. All hysterical remarks about the play's political truth aside, the best that can be said for it is that it provides a vaguely satisfying hour's reading; the worst, that it leaves the reader with a swelling sense of self-satisfaction. After all,

3rd Witch: O Wondrous scene!

1st Witch:

I found it low, pathetic and obscene.

3rd Witch:

How true. MacBird's too easy to attack.

By now he's scoffed and sneered at left and right.

He's so despised it's fash'nable in fact

To call him villain, tweak him by the nose

Break with his party and jeer him in the press.

And then there's Shakespeare, who must be regarded as an accessory to the production. Miss Garson told a Newsweek reporter, 'I was unhappy when I couldn't find a corresponding scene (in Shakespeare)--then I had to write the scene myself. I'm glad I used Shakespeare; it allowed me, an inexperienced playwright, to shape things in the play." Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Casear provide matrices for most of MacBird's episodes, and supply the better part of the linguistic embroidery. Miss Garson also draws on Othello for bits of martial brouhaha and on Richard II for the pervasive vegetable metaphor that crops up in MacBird's first press conference ("This land will be a garden carefully pruned; / We'll lop off any branch that looks too tall / That seems to grow too lofty or too fast") and in the spectacle of a mad Lady MacBird sweetening the land with bouquets and aerosol deodorant. To assert that MacBird rapes the old Swan with no intelligence and no compassion is evidently to miss the point, for Miss Garson makes no claims for her idiom or for her pentameters. "I worked for four months with Shakespeare in front of me," she reports, "so I know the difference between a clever propagandist and a great playright."

Thank God.

But the very intractibility of the material seems to have moved the Vintage Company and artistic director Michael Murray to a vigorous and commendable effort. Cautious pruning of the text (omitting a Beckettish spot where two cronies, stimulated by an innuendo from the Chief, march off to murder Bob and Ted, and a tedious dialogue on radical strategy from the witches) and a generous deployment of sound and properties, have tightened up an unwieldy piece of theatre. The mounting racket of loudspeakers and the only rarely excessive musical numbers create a rhythm which jars the principals past MacBird's remaining snags. John Seitzg, who stood in on Philip Hanson's MacBird last week, was purple with Texas affect and--but for an inexplicable and apparently deliberate resemblance to F.D.R.--vehemently convincing. William Lafe, Roger Davis and Kevin O'Neal provide three mail-order Ken O'Duncs who slip in and out of Kennedese; Jill Clayburgh, Roger Robinson and Louis Galterie are verveful witches. Lady McB. (Nancie Phillips) drives the Southern hostess persona to the breaking point, splitting each vowel into triads. Everyone, in short, is deft and galling; only Jake Dengel (The Egg of Head) and Gwyllum Evans (The Earl of Warren) manage to offer anything approaching straight comedy, but then the context is probably too weak to support much more of it.

So What? MacBird is hardly a visitant from the infernal backside of American political thought--"a genuine happening in which an underground author confronted the overworld, exposing dangerous private fantasies to public eyes and ears" (Brustein) or "a needed corrective, a purgative of our Stygian world" (Clureman). There is nothing cathartic in its grim charade, and this is not because reality has surpassed the imitation. It is because Miss Garson's satire renders her targets immune to further burlesque by grasping--just once, and fleetingly--all the obvious uglinesses of American politics without giving a sweet damn for what they point to. If her wry defloration of ideology is pale beside Brecht's, her portrayal of convention-hall mores does not begin to approach Mencken's Murray & Co. have slightly humanized a drastically inhumane play by virtue of taste and skillful joining, but the blood-spoor lingers on the air. MacBird begins with a ritual murder and then fails both to implicate and to absolve its audience; the result is an experience of bland and almost complete detachment, and a document in the history of this tired old polis where agent and activity, critic and establishment, medium and message, are pathlogically identical.