Broadway

the unoriginals

To write a play, the dramatist once needed an idea plus the imagination, the knowledge of life and the craft to develop it.
Nowadays, more and more, all he needs is someone else's book.
To get started, he does not scan the world about him;
he and his prospective producer just read the bestseller lists.
So far this season, Broadway's premieres have included twice as many adaptations and imports as original American stage plays.
Best from abroad.

Of straight dramas, there are All The Way Home, which owes much of its poetic power to the James Agee novel, A Death In The Family;
The Wall, awkwardly based on the John Hersey novel;
Advise And Consent, lively but shallow theater drawn from the mountainously detailed bestseller;
Face Of A Hero (closed), based on a Pierre Boulle novel.
The only original works attempting to reach any stature: Tennessee Williams' disappointing domestic comedy, Period Of Adjustment, and Arthur Laurents' clever but empty Invitation To A March.
Clearly the most provocative plays are all imported originals -- A Taste Of Honey, by Britain's young (19 when she wrote it) Shelagh Delaney;
Becket, by France's Jean Anouilh;
The Hostage (closed), by Ireland's Brendan Behan.

Among the musicals, Camelot came from T. H. White's The Once And Future King, and novels were the sources of the less than momentous Tenderloin and Do Re Mi.
Wildcat and The Unsinkable Molly Brown were originals, but pretty bad, leaving top honors again to an import -- the jaunty and charmingly French Irma La Douce.
The only other works at least technically original were dreary farces -- Send Me No Flowers (closed), Under The Yum-Yum Tree, Critic's Choice.
In the forthcoming The Conquering Hero and Carnival, Broadway is not even adapting books, but reconverting old movies (Hail The Conquering Hero and Lili).
Dry of life.

Originals are not necessarily good and adaptations are not necessarily bad.
Some memorable plays have been drawn from books, notably Life With Father and Diary Of Anne Frank.
And particularly in the musical field, adaptations have long been the rule, from Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow to Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady.
As Critic Walter Kerr points out: "Adaptations, so long as they are good, still qualify as creative".
And other defenders invariably argue that, after all, Shakespeare and Moliere were adapters too.
The difference is that the masters took the bare frame of a plot and filled it with their own world;
most modern adapters totally accept the world of a book, squeeze it dry of life, and add only one contribution of their own: stage technique.

The most frequent excuse for the prevalence of unoriginals and tested imports is increasing production expense -- producers cannot afford to take chances.
But that explanation is only partly true.
Off-Broadway, where production is still comparatively cheap, is proving itself only slightly more original.
Laudably enough, it is offering classics and off-beat imports, but last week only one U.S. original was on the boards, Robert D. Hock's stunning Civil War work, Borak.
The real trouble seems to be the failing imagination of U.S. playwrights.

Nightclubs

the Cooch Terpers

He: "Come with me to the Casbah".
She: "By subway or cab"?

That exchange was not only possible but commonplace last week in Manhattan, as more and more New Yorkers were discovering 29th Street and Eighth Avenue, where half a dozen small nightclubs with names like Arabian Nights, Grecian Palace and Egyptian Gardens are the American inpost of belly dancing.
Several more will open soon.
Their burgeoning popularity may be a result of the closing of the 52nd Street burlesque joints, but curiously enough their atmosphere is almost always familial -- neighborhood saloons with a bit of epidermis.

The belly boites, with their papier-mache palm trees or hand-painted Ionic columns, heretofore existed mainly on the patronage of Greek and Turkish families.
Customers often bring their children;
between performances, enthusiastic young men from the audience will take the floor to demonstrate their own amateur graces.
Except for the odd uptown sex maniac or an overeager Greek sailor, the people watch in calm absorption.
Small, shirt-sleeved orchestras play in 2/4 or 4/4 time, using guitars, violins, and more alien instruments with names that would open Sesame: the oud, grandfather of the lute;
the darbuka, a small drum with the treelike shape of a roemer glass;
the def, a low-pitched tambourine.
The girls sit quietly with the musicians, wearing prim dresses or plain, secretarial shifts, until it is time to go off to a back room and reappear in the spare uniform of the harem.
Continuum of mankind.

If a dancer is good, she suggests purely and superbly the fundamental mechanics of ancestry and progeny -- the continuum of mankind.
But a great many of what Variety calls the "Cooch Terpers" are considerably less cosmic than that.
Each dancer follows the ancient Oriental pattern -- she glides sideways with shoulders motionless while her stomach migrates, and, through breathing and muscle control, she sends ripples across her body to the fingertips and away to the far end of the room.
This is done at varying speeds, ranging from the slow and fast Shifte Telli (a musical term meaning double strings) to the fastest, ecstatic Karshilama (meaning greetings or welcome).
The New York dancers are highly eclectic, varying the pattern with all kinds of personal improvisations, back bends or floor crawls.
But they do not strip.
The striptease is crass;
the belly dance leaves more to the imagination.

When a dancer does well, she provokes a quiet bombardment of dollar bills -- although the Manhattan clubs prohibit the more cosmopolitan practice of slipping the tips into the dancers' costumes.
With tips, the girls average between $150 and $200 a week, depending on basic salary.
Although they are forbidden to sit with the customers, the dancers are sometimes proffered drinks, and most of them can bolt one down in mid-shimmy.
The melting pot.

All over the country, belly clubs have never been bigger, especially in Detroit, Boston and Chicago, and even in small towns;
one of the best dancers, a Turkish girl named Semra, works at a roadhouse outside Bristol, Conn.
The girls are kept booked and moving by several agents, notably voluble, black-bearded Murat Somay, a Manhattan Turk who is the Sol Hurok of the central abdomen.
He can offer nine Turkish girls, plans to import at least 15 more.
But a great many of the dancers are more or less native.
Sometimes they get their initial experience in church haflis, conducted by Lebanese and Syrians in the U.S., where they dance with just as few veils across their bodies as in nightclubs.

As the girls come to belly dancing from this and other origins, the melting pot has never bubbled more intriguingly.
Some Manhattan examples:

Jemela (surname: Gerby), 23, seems Hong Kong Oriental but has a Spanish father and an Indian mother, was born in America and educated at Holy Cross Academy and Textile High School, says she learned belly dancing at family picnics.

Serene (Mrs. Wilson), 23, was born in Budapest and raised in Manhattan.
Daughter of a gypsy mother who taught her to dance, she is one of the few really beautiful girls in the New York Casbah, with dark eyes and dark, waist-length hair, the face of an adolescent patrician and a lithe, glimmering body.
Many belly dancers are married, but Serene is one of the few who will admit it.

Marlene (surname: Adamo), 25, a Brazilian divorcee who learned the dance from Arabic friends in Paris, now lives on Manhattan's West Side, is about the best belly dancer working the Casbah, loves it so much that she dances on her day off.
She has the small, highly developed body of a prime athlete, and holds in contempt the "girls who just move sex".

Leila (Malia Phillips), 25, is a Greenwich Village painter of Persianesque miniatures who has red hair that cascades almost to her ankles.
A graduate of Hollywood High School, she likes to imagine herself, as she takes the floor, "a village girl coming in to a festival".

Gloria (surname: Ziraldo), circa 30, who was born in Italy and once did "chorus work" in Toronto, has been around longer than most of the others, wistfully remembers the old days when "we used to get the seamen from the ships, you know, with big turtleneck sweaters and handkerchiefs and all.
But the ships are very slow now, and we don't get so many sailors any more".
The uptown crowd has moved in, and what girl worth her seventh veil would trade a turtleneck sweater for a button-down collar?

A short, tormented span

Of the handful of painters that Austria has produced in the 20th century, only one, Oskar Kokoschka, is widely known in the U.S.
This state of unawareness may not last much longer.
For ten years a small group of European and U.S. critics has been calling attention to the half-forgotten Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, who died 42 years ago at the age of 28.
The critics' campaign finally inspired the first major U.S. exhibit of Schiele's works.
The show has been to Boston and Manhattan, will in time reach Pittsburgh and Minneapolis.
Last week it opened at the J. B. Speed Museum in Louisville, at the very moment that a second Schiele exhibit was being made ready at the Felix Landau gallery in Los Angeles.

Schiele's paintings are anything but pleasant.
His people (see color) are angular and knobby-knuckled, sometimes painfully stretched, sometimes grotesquely foreshortened.
His colors are dark and murky, and his landscapes and cityscapes seem swallowed in gloom.
But he painted some of the boldest and most original pictures of his time, and even after nearly half a century, the tense, tormented world he put on canvas has lost none of its fascination.
The devil himself.

The son of a railway stationmaster, Schiele lived most of his childhood in the drowsy Danubian town of Tulln, 14 miles northwest of Vienna.
He was an emotional, lonely boy who spent so much time turning out drawings that he did scarcely any schoolwork.
When he was 15, his parents finally allowed him to attend classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Even there he did not last for long.
Cried one professor after a few months of Student Schiele's tantrums and rebellion: "The devil himself must have defecated you into my classroom"!

For a while his work was influenced deeply by the French impressionists, and by the patterned, mosaic-like paintings of Gustav Klimt, then the dean of Austrian art.
Gradually Schiele evolved a somber style of his own -- and he had few inhibitions about his subject matter.
His pictures were roundly denounced as "the most disgusting things one has ever seen in Vienna".
He himself was once convicted of painting erotica and jailed for 24 days -- the first three of which he spent desperately trying to make paintings on the wall with his own spittle.
For years he wore hand-me-down suits and homemade paper collars, was even driven to scrounging for cigarette butts in Vienna's gutters.
Drafted into the Austrian army, he rebelliously rejected discipline, wangled a Vienna billet, went on painting.
It was not until the last year of his life that he had his first moneymaking show.
Melancholy obsession.

The unabashed sexuality of so many of his paintings was not the only thing that kept the public at bay: his view of the world was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, and it was too much even for morbid-minded Vienna.
He was obsessed by disease and poverty, by the melancholy of old age and the tyranny of lust.
The children he painted were almost always in rags, his portraits were often ruthless to the point of ugliness, and his nudes -- including several self-portraits -- were stringy, contorted and strangely pathetic.
The subject he liked most was the female body, which he painted in every state -- naked, half-dressed, muffled to the ears, sitting primly in a chair, lying tauntingly on a bed or locked in an embrace.