Israel Horovitz: The Radical Play

Israel Horovitz, whose two plays, Rats and The Indian Wants the Bronx, opened at the Charles Playhouse on March 19, is in many ways the playwright of the moment. With one of his earliest literary efforts a novel at age 13, Horovitz also took to directing and acting in plays at Harvard and in the Boston area in the days just before the Leob Drama Center. From Harvard, he went on to write and act at Cafe La Mama in New York and first achieved recognition with his play Line in which he took an acting role at the last moment when the star went off to Hollywood. Other critical successes in New York were the productions of The Indian Wants the Bronx and Morning, part of the trilogy Morning, Noon, and Night, which he wrote with Terrence McNally and Leonard Melfi. In addition. he was playwright-in-residence with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been awarded two OBIE's. In an interview one afternoon last week he commented on all this.

"I'M REALLY into the irony of writing vaguely radical plays that instantly win huge establishment awards. It's really amusing," Horovitz said. It is as if the awards were some substitute for the kind of change he wants and thinks he can't bring about with his plays. "I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way."

Herovitz is very much interested in the relationship between his plays and the audience. "I wouldn't come up to Boston to see the play, The Indian Wants the Bronx, I want to look at the audience. I've seen the play 960 times now." Horovitz often takes the theatre off the street and puts it on a stage. Indian, for example, concerns an (Eastern) Indian who is stabbed by two juvenile delinquents while waiting for a bus in New York City, and Rats is primarily a conversation between two rats in a Harlem tenement. Accordingly, our conversation ranged from his comments on Morning, Noon, and Night, which he saw at the Loeb this Fall; his nervous militancy in politics; his not-so-halcyon undergraduate days at Harvard; and finally, his future plans, among which are the coming of The World's Greatest Plays (about the world's greatest hero) and his screenplay for The Strawberry Statement, the American entry to the Cannes Film Festival, adapted from James Kunen's articles.

"I think Morning was devised to offend, but not to insult, to play into the audience's embarrassments more than their sensibilities. The people who wandered in were seeing things for the first time in a college playhouse [the Loeb]. It's offending to kids who think they know where they're at." Among other things, Morning concerned a black family which wakes up one morning to find that they are white, a crazed white man who accuses the son of having slept with his daughter, and vomiting.

"The play says you think you're cool, but ... It was intended to be very sexual and very melodramatic. I think those plots are funny. I've written Indian and Rats already, and I wasn't satisfied with any of those in the sense of arriving at answers or even asking questions. When you make predictions [about the racial climate] you don't say, 'See, I told you so.' When I did Indian, I couldn't even get the thing produced because people didn't think it was 'real,' whatever that means. So I decided I wasn't going to do another play about racism without attacking it in a comedy be cause nobody was doing comedy. It's a dangerous play. I became very radical and made a lot of enemies. It was the basic bullshit of white man should not write black plays. Indian just did not go far enough, Rats was more specific in its analysis of a paternalistic attitude towards a black society.

"I don't think Morning, Noon, and Night was the dynamic success that everyone was looking for [at the Loeb], but it did seem like a success to me. At theatres like the Loeb, plays tend to become an 'intellectual experience,' but there was such a clash between the architecture and the substance on the stage. It seemed kind of funny to me. Little old ladies at the intermission were saying how nice it was, totally white-faced. terrified. We were doing something illicit by doing those plays on the mainstage, so automatically we won friends before the plays were even seen. The body of work [of Morning, Noon, and Night ] represents something the kids can identify with more than whatever the hell they were doing at the Loeb for the past eight years.

"Radical politics tend to be simple minded. When you're writing in that milieu, you make sure to stay simple-minded and to make sure your plot surprises are really hokey and funky and funny, just the opposite of what Melfi does. But you run the risk of creating an entertainment. A month later you realize those were white actors. White is black is white with whites playing blacks turning white. It's like an Amos and Andy show. The point of the play is that most people are so lethargic on the issue of racism. I generally write far more personal plays than that and deal with my own fantasies. (It's sexually not my milicu.) I try to attack the audience and say, 'Why are you laughing at this? That's racist!' Speeches come out on that subject, and we don't hear anything. We just sit there screaming Right on. Damn few people are willing to take the risk of doing a funny, funky show on that subject. It's disarming and glib; those are not good qualities for a writer to trade on except when absolutely necessary. I don't know, maybe it's just wish-ful-fillment on my part. Maybe all theatre is going to be irrelevant for all time."

We then began to speak about politics, something Horovitz feels about as passionately as he does his plays. Recently, he has been speaking at a great many rallies and high schools, particularly about racism. But he is as much scared as entranced by mass meetings. "If you say 'Give peace a chance' today at a solid SDS rally you're going to get punched in the mouth. All those kids screaming 'Right on!'. They could have been screaming 'Heil Hitler!' for all the difference it made." Horovitz had worked on the Kennedy campaign and was with Genet at his recent appearance at M.I.T. in support of the Panthers.

HOROVITZ sees the Chicago 7 trial as a kind of theatre, with its emphasis on role-playing, or at least he sees Jerry Rubin as an entertainter. "He is a smart guy when he says things like, 'Fuck is the only word we've got because no one will print it and no cop will say it in a courtroom.' But he's silly when he says the revolution is sex and music. If that's all it is, I've had that revolution and emerged victoriously. His sense of theatre is fantastic. He writes good material for himself. Jerry would like to think that all cours are exposed forever, but if he serves time, ultimately he's just served time. I'm not really into looking for a leader. Anybody we want is going to get shot in the head anyway. I don't think there's one political solution, it's much more human. That the voting age may be lowered to eighteen is a scary thing as well as a good thing. Eighteen-year-olds would be completely within the system. Once you cast your vote, that's an absolute statement that you believe in the voting system. wihch I don't."

While all his plays may simply be personal fantasies, Horovitz does not see how a play can be detached from current social issuess. even if it is an ineffectual way of dealing with them. This tremendous concern has led him to shoulder the burden of speaking at rallies, of being more direct in approach, of skipping the comedy, the dialogue and civilized ritual of a play for the head-on rhetoric of a speech. However, this role has not satisfied him either. "At the time I saw 2001, I found it so irrelevant that I couldn't get into it. Doris [his wife] and I had been at a rally that day and somebody got his head bashed in two inches away from me. We were trembling in the theatre." If this is a concern that drives him to speak, then the experience itself is something altogether different. "You can spend your whole life going from rally to rally screaming 'Right on.' Or, more frighteningly, you can be one of the people who speaks at the rally-and I've gone through that. I was a person standing on a stage, wondering whether I was going to get shot in the head, saying, 'Do something, do something.' Then I woke up one morning and wondered what the hell am I doing? You ought to let the rabble rouse themselves."

IN A SENSE, Horovitz relishes the anguish more than any solution. He claims he would burn a play he had written if it contained "the answers." He sees his role as pointing his audience in the right direction, of alarming them, of transforming their instinct into a desire to correct.

At Harvard, Horovitz had no great love of Cambridge audiences and did most of his shows at Emerson or elsewhere in Boston. "We burned down the Poet's Theatre on Palmer Street in the summer of 1960. I got into the Charles Playhouse [where Rats and Indian have just opened] and the Bradford Roof Theatre. My father went to the law school in his fifties, and I had to find a way to earn money at the time. It seemed logical to get aggressive and get jobs as propman and do my plays in addition to working." The only play he recalled having done at Harvard was The Comeback.

"It was a play a day. Theatre doesn't seem to be as relevant as it did then so there's not that much action now. I could write a play, there was a cast waiting, we went into rehearsal instantly, and opened and closed in seven days. I had no concept of 'career' or any of that shit. There were all very personal questions that I asked. My questions were so similar at age eighteen to everyone else's questions that there was a great deal of projection. My problems were less complex in those days. There was a lot of me trying to find myself as a writer-a terrible identity crisis. Most of the early plays were very dense and very terrible. But the ones before that were funnier yet."

However, Horovitz very definitely has an expanding career now. One new experiment for him is film. In contrast to his intimate involvement with all his plays, his attitude towards the silver screen is somewhat more ambivalent. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing with film; I'm just in it." "Being in film" for Horovitz involves writing the screenplay for The Strawberry Statement for the Cames Film Festival and work in progress on a film called Speed is of the Essence about amphetamines. The story of how James Kunen got to the Cannes Film Festival via the CRIMSON and Horovitz is simply uncomplicated and improbable. "I was sought after to do movies. I saw Kunen's CRIMSON ar-ticle and got it to an agent to make it into a movie. The movie has little to do with the book. It's much more of an exraction of Kunen as himself as kind of Holden Caulfield, traveling to anarchy in a slow, logical way, It's not a film for kids. Crites will say it's a youth market film, but the movie is for parents. It shows the reasons why their kids are becoming slowly radical in a very nice and soft way, Neil Young and Buffy St. Marie did some tunes. It will be a good film."

BUT Horovitz's first love is still play-writing. "The new play I've done is called The World's Greatest Play. The lead character's name is Hero. There are 207 characters in the play. One actor plays Hero, and the other six play the 206 people who had an influence on his life. He is the Great American Hero and even goes into a contest to compete for the title of 'World's Greatest Man.' But it's only a play, like a sigh or a question. But if you could join all my plays together in a sort of beserk marathon you would get more of a sense of the man who's writing the play. The World's Greatest Play joins a play like Morning beautifully because they are both about leadership. For me, all my plays are happening right now in various little places.

"Formal considerations really bore me. It's such childishness to say 'Wow, I've found a new form!' I can only write about something that bothers me enough to go to a room and write all day, play with my kids, have trouble sleeping, get up, write, have trouble sleeping, and go on like that for three months to get a draft. I can't be concerned with a form; I can only be concerned with an issue. When you create the total enigma, you will then be the ultimate hero. You will have created a play which no one can understand completely at any given moment. Therefore it's totally brilliant. Within my work lies the possibility that everything I do is irrelevant except to me because it's what I do best. I mean that with all my heart. You only have revolution if you feel pleasure in what you create. Otherwise you're in the throes of a revolution. I'd like to get through all this and get some rest, but it looks like I won't live long enough-that all right.

"I never found my plays in the New York Times. I completely disapprove of impersonal, topical plays. Morning is as impersonal as I will ever, ever get. All I can do is put myself on the stage and say that this is my struggle, and if you identify with it, then take it, because it's killing me. I really have great respect for anybody-painters, architects-who is willing to be naked, to live. I've made money and lost money, but it's all funny money, like playing Monopoly. There seems to be some bizarre mechanism running my life making sure it has no order whatsoever."

The dare and satisfaction of "living naked," as Horovitz calls it, seems to be something stretching beyond his plays. He speaks of whatever he has done with great passion and amusement. "I was really a very flexible young man. I go back to me sitting in my bedroom, mixing beer, coffee, hot chocolate, and scotch, drinking it down, and throwing up all over the bedroom floor, thinking I'd really found something. And hearing about peyote-almost poisoning myself by chewing on something like the root of a tiger lily, running around pulling up weeds, and almost poisoning myself. And it all made sense because you were supposed to vomit after you took this magic Indian cure. I was once hospitalized for food poisoning, but it wasn't that, I had been eating weeds." On another much later occasion, Horovitz, in Italy, was watching a play in which he thought an actor was going to kill a cat. Horovitz become so agitated that he ran from his seat on to the stage and snatched the cat from the actor's hand. There was also an amusing aside to the story because the actor began swearing vehemently in Italian at the crazy American who had shattered the big moment-and the audience thought it was all planned.

As the interview drew to a close, David Boorstin, director of Morning, Noon, and Night, dropped by, and the three of us headed for Elsie's where Horovitz challenged his two companions to a game or two of Computer Quiz (he beat us both, but chose the field of Entertainment) and quite naturally making one of the transitions from his life to the theatre, left with Boorstin to see the technical rehearsal of his two plays, which were opening in three days the Charles Playhouse where he was once a propman.