Arnold Weinstein Red Eye of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1962); revised ed. reprinted by (Los Angeles: Sun Moon Press, 1997)
Jack Gelber Square in
the Eye (New York: Grove Press, 1964)
It’s interesting to note that two of the most energetic and
manic comedic plays of the early 1960s shared a titular connection with eyes.
Gelber’s play, Square in the Eye, was
first performed in 1965 off-Broadway at the Theater de Lys; but it first occurred
in print in 1962, and was copyrighted by its publisher, Grove Press’s Evergreen
books in 1964. Arnold Weinstein’s more gently satiric Red Eye of Love was performed in 1961 at The Living Theater, and
was published, again by Grove Press, in 1962. Obviously, in the climate of the
early 1960s these so-called “avant-garde” playwrights both saw love as
something that—to borrow a phrase from the 1952 popular song “That’s
Amore”—“hits your eye like a big pizza pie.”
Gelber’s play, the more emphatically
absurd of the two, focuses on a would-be artist, Ed Stone, who is forced
because of lack of artistic success to teach art in the New York schools. As he
announces in the stand-up comedian-like prologue, he actually wanted to be a
doctor, but instead has “the rare privilege of teaching art to delinquents in
the New York public school system.” Accordingly, he suffers—“How I suffer,” and
spends much of the play feeling sorry for himself while loathing his
hilariously nasty children, Sarah and Bill, Jr.—the latter a son from his
wife’s first marriage—and coveting his wife’s best friend Jane Jaffe, recently
divorced from his successful artist friend, Al. Al has, evidently with far less
talent than Ed, honed in on the art craze of the moment, and has filled his
pockets with money, even though he has lost his wife. Ed’s nearly insane
in-laws, meanwhile, are furious with him for pretending that he is Jewish, and
see his admission of his lie as a betrayal of their faith. In a sense Ed’s
resultant anger is aimed in too many directions to be effective; his verbal
attacks—and Gelber’s play as well—are scatter-shot over too wide an area to hit
any one target.
After what
appears to be a typical night in the Stone home, a gathering of the players
whose loathing of one another is barely hidden by witty social dialogue, Ed
stomps out, whereupon his wife suddenly becomes ill and is hospitalized. By the
time he is able to find her in the hospital, gathered with his grumbling
in-laws in a waiting room, the doctor reports she has died of a brain hemorrhage.
With lightning quickness Gelber has transformed his comedy of anger into a
comedy of regret as Ed tries to sort things out and discover, despite the
doctor’s utter confusion and refusals to explain, how his now beloved ex-wife
could have so suddenly expired.
Inevitably, each
survivor blames the others for the death and their lack of sympathy and
love—for they have all been hit “square in the eye,” with the reality of their
squalid lives full of petty bickering.
Yet even here,
Gelber refuses to allow his characters much humanity, as they scurry to quickly
perform the funeral in time for Ed’s remarriage, this time to a beautiful girl
with “a lot of money.” Meanwhile, Ed’s student Luis, an innocent boy who has
been forced to witness the horrors of Ed’s former family life, has run off with
Jane Jaffe. So everything seems to have ended for the best.
Gelber’s dissection of love, fame, and fortune, however, is not yet over, as he returns us to Sandy’s hospital bed, just before her death, where she discusses her life with her sympathetic friend Jane—the doctors presuming the two are lesbians—and then is gradually put on trial, in retrospect, by her own children, mother, father, and husband. Sandy, accordingly, is forced to justify her life, even after death. But this time—despite her and her husband’s failures—the love the two had for one another is slowly revealed and somehow redeems their lives. That it ultimately means nothing given the fact that Ed will go on through life more successfully perhaps without her does not rob her of her dignity; indeed Sandy ultimately breaks through Gelber’s study of New York caricatures—figures described by Time magazine in 1965 as “talkocrats, the people who talk of writing novels and painting pictures, who interminably discuss the problems of home and headline,” and the various medical quacks, religious bigots, over-sexed and impotent beings Gelber’s play presents—to represent someone close to a real human being, a woman who, despite being trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, did her best to live, love, and survive.
Like Gelber,
Weinstein directs his satire against various professions and institutions:
police (two policemen join forces, becoming life-time “partners”), the military
(during numerous wars that occur throughout the play, enemy soldiers find more
in common with each other than they do with men of their own units), business
tycoons (from shoeshine boy to successful tycoon, O. O. Martinas gradually
builds up an empire symbolized by a high-rise department store devoted to
various meats, and wanders about the play declaring his pride in being
illiterate while composing outrageously bad poetry), as well as the sort of
lovers featured in Broadway musicals and operettas (Selma and Wilber again and
again meet one another anew, describing themselves as “your former casual
acquaintance and husband”), along with scattergun attacks on society, propriety,
and even Santa Claus.
As Selma
vacillates between her love and her desire for money, both Wilber and O. O.
Martinas end up with the red eyes of love, and ultimately find it easier to
satisfy Selma’s needs by moving in together, creating a kind of ridiculous ménage à trois, the horrible Bez
becoming an Astro-butcher who is “lost in orbit.” Weinstein’s sympathies with
the artist-dreamer Wilber, however, are apparent, as the three conclude the
play with the determination of all to go and live with the Navahos, “a fine
folk in the field of the rug and the pot.”
In both these
plays we see the writers grappling with one of the major issues of the day, the
failure of the so-called American Dream to link human desires such as love and
spiritual fulfillment with the necessary finances to survive. Love, spirit, and
money are represented in both these works as what a necessary for happiness—but
in everyday life they seldom can be combined. The Masonic-like search for the holy
trinity of (brotherly) love, relief, and truth, seems a nearly impossible
achievement in the worlds so brilliantly satirized by these two gifted
playwrights.
Los Angeles,
April 15, 2003
