celticblues5: How to adapt the I Ching into a play.

Playwright Jackson Maclow threw a lot of yarrow sticks to get the words he would use in the play. He mixed the words up and then assigned clumps of words to characters he named. I don't remember where he got the names though.

The director, Julian Beck, then read through the "script" looking for images suggested by the random falling of the words. He came up with a scenario of six scenes. Now it was time to stage this puppy.

Rehearsals were recorded on audiotape and they were also filmed on 16 mm silent B&W stock. The audiotape was cut up at random with non-magnetic scissors and the strips were reassembled in random order.

The main character was an actor named Henry, I think he was called "The Man in White" in the program. Throughout the production, he stood at a lectern up right on the stage, rolling dice. When he rolled a seven, he threw a switch. More about that later.

Between scenes a scrim was lowered in the front of the stage. For those who don't recognize the word, it is a gauze curtain with a wonderful characteristic: if you light something behind it, the scrim becomes transparent. If you project light onto the front of it, it acts as a screen, reflecting the light back towards the audience.

In this case, Julian had both done simultaneously. Henry was bathed in a greenish downlight behind the scrim house left. A movie projector played footage from the rehearsal footage, the actors in street clothes, working out the play, sometimes serious, sometimes laughing.

Now, back to the switch. WHen Henry threw a seven, he toggled the switch turning on a red light above the stage manager's station. That was my cue to play the tape or to shut it off. (This was the "Music by John Cage".) So, as the actors were saying disconnected lines like "Thunder water rolls morning yellow" The cut-up audio recording of the randomly associated words that had been reassembled even more randomly rang out with sentences such as "Young goats three boat". You could get a screaming headache trying to find patterns of meaning.

You would think this would have been enough to satisfy the I Ching's call to randomness but there was more. Jackson had prepared 1000 playing cards that were places in a large shoe, the sort you would see in a gampling casino. Each card had an action on it. "Jump", "Spin around three times", "Take seven running steps in whatever direction you are facing", "screech", rtc.. There was even one card, and I quote, "pick left nostril with right hand (any finger).

The play itself was a dazzling display of people shreiking unconnected words, running offstage and back, falling to the floor, jumping into the audience, doing contortions and other actions that Jackson had put together. Meanwhile that same audience was being bathed in the words and images from the I Ching.

This play was not a popular success.

On the other hand, it helped to establish the Living Theatre as one of the premiere avant-garde companies in the country. It was a hangut for beat poets, dancers like Merce Cunningham, abstract expressionist painters, but I have to tell you, that play would drive you mad.

Sourdough