NOTE: This is part of a longer articles in which Mr. Kerr reviews several other plays as well as Futz.

Some people have been scandalized by Futz because its hero marries a pig and the play proposes that it is the right match for him.  In am going to have to pass this one.  The pig - sow, I should say - does not appear in the play, and since I never got to see her I feel I am in no position to judge.  I am scandalized by Futz nonetheless.  I am scandalized that such slovenliness should be permitted to masquerade as new art.

In the process of welcoming experiment and ruthlessly breaking old habits of thought,  we should be just a bit careful not to lose our eyes and ears.  Indeed it is urgent that our eyes and ears be in better working order than ever.  The one thing we must do with a play that abandons an old-fashioned logical sequence for a poetry of discontinuity is listen to it.  How are we to tell whether the colliding fragments that bombard us really connect - connect in our viscera or in our brains - unless we can hear them?  The one thing we must do with a visual image that means to extend reality by contorting it - a man is hanged, say, and the entire stage erupts into a dance of jerked heads and clacked tongues - is see it, see it plainly and cleanly so that we can inhale its intention.

Director Tom O'Horgan will neither let us see nor hear the patterns he may have in mind for Rochelle Owens's Futz.  He is too busy boiling over, plunging onward, shouting abandon, loosing his actors toward a freedom that is only a freedom and almost never a firm design.  Probably Miss Owens's play is an unimportant one in any case.  When it can be detected through the blur of bodies and the whisper/whine of voices, it seems remarkably sentimental.  We are to feel instant compassion, once again, for the poor and terribly innocent "aberrant" chap who is hounded to death by the community for being different from the community - which the play is eager to point out he is not, the community being more pig like than his pig could possibly be.  But the issue is hypothetical, undramatized, ungraphic, without immediacy.  The play takes our sympathies for granted, it does not earn them, and unearned sympathies are are sentimental sympathies.  The plays language would seem unsure of its footing.  A backwoods cretin turns to Futz, who is very, very proud that his bride has 12 teats or exactly 10 more than any stupid woman has, and says of the community that "anyways they would like the full freedom to do what you done."  I don't think the "full freedom" is a cretins phrase.  I think it is Miss Owens's phrase, insensitively and tendentiously dropped in from the outside; it makes me disbelieve in her cretins.  The play's structure - if one may use such a conventional term in these outlands - is aimlessly disproportioned spending far more time on a mother's boy who has slaughtered his sweetheart than is ever helpful to our presumed concern for Futz.

But the play, and any shadowy possibilities it may have, must be put to one side because Mr. O'Horgan has elbowed it to one side.  "Elbowed" is more or less the proper term here.  For Mr. O'Horgan's interest in life would seem to be elbows, ankles, twitched shoulders, headstands, the soles of the feet pasted together, slack jaws, lolling tongues, random couplings (a girl upended over a man's head so that he can get a grip on her bare feet and his head under her skirt at the same time), floorward nosedives.

Now an interest in elbows, ankles, etc., etc. is perfectly all right, particularly in a play which begins with a short film directly juxtaposing the psychological aspects of insect mammaries, flesh in the underbrush.  Given the intentions of the play, these things become important to the play.  I think they become important enough to the play to ask for definition, for precision, for economy and clarity of arc and emphasis.  A dancer doing the material - or any one gesture inside the material - would discover a line for it.  He would then draw the line for you.

Mr. O'Horgan is not able - apparently - to draw lines of any sort.  He simply lets his people go.  When they take a 27th tumble to the floor, here or in Tom Paine, the tumble is only a tumble, a splatter.  You do not feel that the fall has ever been rehearsed, and you do feel that the girl falling will one night hurt herself.  (I was not in the least surprised to notice that one of the girls in Futz had a trussed up left knee.)  When an army of elbows shoots into the air, it is an uncoordinated army, a flailing assortment of random and independent quiverings that cancel one another instead of reinforcing one another.  The view is amorphous; the freedom is an amateur's freedom; the play calls for a certain style - possibly the kind of style Joseph Chaikin applied to the first third of "America Hurrah" - and what it gets is slapdash.

I have been searching for the word to describe Mr. O'Horgan's vocal techniques and i have found it.  Yelling.  Whether a player is confessing to a particularly blood-thirsty crime or a narrator is attempting to make himself heard through the grunts and mosquito-like drones of the night, he is not encouraged to inflect what he is saying.  He is simply encouraged to adopt a pitch - high and shrill, low and throw away, whatever trick will make him sound different from the moment - and stay with it until the next switch is due.  Overlaps and speeches that run headlong into one another are common in this sort of play; they are meant to make an unpredictable music.  In Futz they only tread upon one another, ultimately becoming a noise that defeats itself because the ear has tuned its sustained vibration out.

Mr. O'Horgan has been given considerable credit for Hair, and i think he deserves some, though it should be remembered that he had an engaging and fairly well formed base to work from in gerald Freeman's original staging of the musical downtown.  He has also created, in Tom Paine, one striking visual image: a circle of hooded inquisitors sharpening knives on whetstones while their potential victim shivers.  But the effects are occasional and rather surprising, considering the sheer clutter from which they emerge.  At the moment, and over-all, the director is by no means training performers to serve playwrights judiciously.

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