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joy in the streets THE MARROW-CONQUERING cold and damp that accompanied sunset last Wednesday winnowed the size of an outdoor audience in Wilson Avenue Park, lured there by a preview performance of the Free Street Theater’s new “Lexicon.” If the crowd was small and hunched against the weather, it was nonetheless enthusiastic for an entertainment that has become—in three years under Patrick Henry’s guiding hand—a statewide institution. A company of 18, not including technicians, warmed up the onlookers. Taking a page from “Hair” (or where “Hair” took its page from), “Lexicon” begins with a quasi-improv. How long, or short, depends upon the environment of each performance; Wherever two trucks and a 40-foot mobile stage are set up. in the manner of itinerant minstrel and morality plays of European centuries past. FOUR MUSICIANS led by Luther Henderson 111 at the amplified keyboard, start a rhythm beat. Fourteen cast members have been milling in the crowd—vou can identify them by costumes. The girls wear applegreen blouses and wheatgreen ankle skirts: the boys, balloonsleeved white shirts and chocolate bells. Danny Beard takes a stance at a micro phone on their mobile stage and Initiates newcomers into the “Fox Club” (membership contingent upon how idiomatically you can pronounce “Bye bye, American pie” in a 63d Street and Cottage Grove dialect). An obligatory “Bah, bah” —as in “black sheep” —not only amuses the crowd by its doubleentendre, because the company is interracial, bat establishes the essence of audience participation. This is no indoor candybox with a fourthwall stage or arena encircled by seats. There’s only a thrust platform from the truck-stage, and dancing space in front of folding chairs for earlycomers and the incapacitated. Next Danny sings a bewitching original ballad, “Lady Yesterday,” and his colleagues invite the audience to dance with them. WEDNESDAY’S WARMUP included “Natural Woman,” honestly and lovingly sung by Lynnette Mason, with Danny, Carol Selmon and Bonnie Eisele as a chorus. The ensemble grouped onstage to sing “Love the One You’re With,” then a song about “Today” with a choreographic coda that llithely flowered into a production

number —but nothing overly structured, yet, to the casual eyu. Marvin Elkins replaced Danny at a stageright mike to introduce himself. He was followed in song by each member of the cast, and finally their four-man instrumental combo. A ciap-along chorus of “Yesterday” segued into the show itself, built around four "impressions and expressions” derived from the words Song, Dance, Story (with a member of the audience invited to Improvise a narrative, enacted by the cast) and Life. The structure and continuity of these focal ideas were developed collectively by the ensemble under Pat Henry’s artistic supervision, to which Wilbert Bradley contributed choreography. Some were happy, some wry, some purposefully naif, some disturbing, their climax sorrowing —over the dead bodies of young sons killed in war, any war. By some legerdemain, a “Life” scroll unrolled and those recumbent onstage returned to the ranks of the living—singing, dancing, praising "life ... life ... life.” THUS THE FORMAL entertainment ended, in an atmosphere of affirmation and exhilaration, sophisticated but so subtly managed not to seem slick or condescending or "educational” or those other things Art (with a capital A) is supposed by the uninitiated to be. That many of them fear it may be. Free Street Theater has been in existence since 1969, and it’s my own loss that I’ve not seen the product until this year—at that, only the first of two productions (a second, “Mind’s Eye,” is being created for the 1972 repertory). The base of funding in three previous years has broadened from the Illinois Arts Council, to which Goodman Theater originally brought the idea, to assorted contributors, including state and national agencies. It is not only a laudable idea, free theater in sreets and parks and shopping centers—wherever, in fact, the show can be set up—but substantial in content, ebuillient in execution. The performers, in addition to those lalready named, are Robin Alexader, John Lansing, Geraldine De Haas, Stephen Martin, Joseph Martinez, Barry Pearl, Syd Skipper, and Noreen Walker. HENDERSON’S SIDEMEN are Arthur Martinez, lead guitar: Bernard Murphy, bassguitar; and Kerby Bivans, drummer. Together they form a unity of personable, individually gifted, antic, adaptable, versatile young artists whose reach-out potential is vast and variegated. Black and white are brothers and sisters, friends, colleagues, fellow citizens, neighbors, collaborators, artists. They hope to take theater out of moth-

balls and away from traditional formulae, to share with everyone the pleasure and excitement of a live experience. Since Wednesday they’ve performed in Civic Center Plaza, the parking lot at Oak Lawn High School and Hyde Park Shopping Plaza. Today they appear in Lake Shore Park at Chicago Avenue and the Drive. The rest of their Illinois summer continues thru Aug. 23 with only Mondays off. After Illinois, four years of proselytizing in this state will be honored by an invitation to perform at the International Theater Festival in Belgrade next September. Perhaps, too, in Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Czechoslovakia, from which Invitations have come. See the Free Street Theater when it visits your neighborhood. The pleasure will be as much yours, I hope, as it was mine. ' (Roger Dettmer, Chicago today, 4. jun 1972)

theater group was *human ‘ THE YOUNG MAN finds himself with the basketball In a game after a struggle for a loose ball. He Is told to shoot. As he replies, “But you can get hurt bad," the rest of the men in the oast form a line of soldiers. The son, whose mother had told him to “fight your own battles,” then asks, “Whose battle Is this?" Machine gun fire is heard in the background, and the “g” drops Into view and songs hament the untimely loss of young men to war. Folowing a well-choreographed dance number depicting the word “dance”, two volunteers from the audience narrated a made-up fairy tale called “Jack and the Hempstaik,” while the cast acted out such parts as the giant, Jack, the seed and the hempstaik. All the parts were Improvised, Free Street, Theater Director Patrick Henry said, however, the two audience volunteers were contacted before the performance began. If the parts were truly improvised, the improvisation was professional iy done. (Daily Ledger, 28. jun 1972)

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