The Guilt Glut

Guilt is running nudity a close second at theater box offices. Flesh peddling is relatively honest, since it makes no particular pretense of moral grandeur. But when the clink of commerce purports to be the thunder of conscience, all sorts of hypocrisies begin masquerading as virtues.

In recent seasons, the guilt peddlers have brought the following wares to the dramatic market: The Deputy, The Investigation, Incident at Vichy, Soldiers, The Man in the Glass Booth, The Great White Hope, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and now Indians. These plays have much in common. While an occasional effort is made to specify some individual responsibility for crimes, oppressions, injustices, and atrocities, the dominating j'accuse is hurled at the audience. The audience is presumed to be collectively guilty of every misdeed in recorded history. This is patently absurd. By embracing the abstraction of collective guilt, the playwright performs the singularly irresponsible act of absolving the specifically guilty parties involved.

Lesson in Irony. The audience for such plays apparently has a neurotic appetite for masochistic self-abasement. It seems bent on atoning for sins it has not committed and receiving the bogus absolution of ex post facto justice dispensed with casuistry and comfort in the theater. No one can bring the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe back to life; no one can restore dead Indians to their buffalo hunting grounds; no one can dis-invent the atomic bomb.

What, then, does such a playwright think he is doing? His rationale is that he is providing a cautionary moral lesson drawn from history that will enable people to avoid past errors and evils. Unfortunately, the profoundly ironic lesson of history is that people do repeat the errors and evils of the past, over and over and over again. The reality these playwrights ignore is that man is a finite being, bound always to act and react within the limits of his nature, "a fallen creature" in religious terms. If the human character could be altered and improved by a play, it would have happened ages ago. All wars would have ended 2,000 years ago with The Trojan Women--the greatest and most moving antiwar play ever written.

Another rationale such playwrights resort to is that they are alerting the audience's conscience to contemporary evils. Far from it. These playwrights simply trade on the headlines of the day and gamble that the people they attract will come to the theater precisely because their consciences are on the alert. There is nothing easier than to preach to the already converted. For any but a guilt-collecting audience, most of these plays rate a big B for Boredom. There is no moral suasion in crude hack work that substitutes lapel-grabbing diatribes for scrupulous dramatic craftsmanship. A poor play does not become a good play simply because the playwright's heart is in the right place.

Image in Reverse. Arthur Kopit's heart is doubtless in the right place, and Indians is a poor play. Kopit has tried to mesh together segments of a vaudeville-style Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. As Kopit describes the despoliation and destruction of the Indian, he seems to subscribe to the proposition that might makes wrong--which is no truer than that might makes right. Granted that the Indian was treated with huge inequity, the Indian way of life was nonetheless an ossified form that could not have survived into the 20th century. If the Indian could have merged easily into U.S. society as it expanded westward, he probably would have lost even more of his identity than he has on the reservations. Since the Kopit script calls for only good redskins and prevailingly wicked white men, the play is almost an image in reverse of the corny melodramas of the past in which the only good Indians were dead ones.

The evening thrums to the beat of tom-toms, whirls through a savage sun dance, flickers and blazes with an entire symphony of lighting effects and ends with anthropological eeriness as a weird array of totemically masked figures stalk among the massacred Indians. These effects are attention getters that distract one from the incessant preachiness of the play. As Sitting Bull, a South Sea islander named Manu Tupou gives a powerful portrayal of wounded dignity and contained ferocity. Stacy Keach, 28, who is New York's most talked about young actor, plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance, charm, and a stage presence that radiates masculinity.

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