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be as often irritated as amused by their humor. And to reject as often as to accept the grotesque fashion in which they convey their seriousness. There is mockery and deception but there is no cheating. In their new production, “Andy Warhol’s Last Love,” as in their earlier “Pig, Child, Fire,” the Squat Company is dealing with a young sense of chaos and futility that is perhaps more recognized in Europe, where it has helped to breed the Red Brigades, for exmple, than in America. Squat seeks to shock, and it shocks by trivolity, by outrageousness and by boredom. In immigrating, the company has perceived that boredom may be the most truly shocking thing reft to our urban and much-trodden sensibilities. “Andy Warhol’s Last Love” is three episodes constructed loosely around the notion of an encounter between Mr. Warhol and Ulrike Meinhoff, the German terrorist who died in prison last year in what was officially called a suicide. The phantasmagorical meeting, in other words, is between two wildly different conclusions to the premise of contemporary alienation. The first episode has a ghostly and comic discipline. In an upstairs loft, a woman in earphones sits twiddling radio dials. A man lies motionless on a couch. Two other men enter and soon all four are listening with intense and purposeless concentration to a voice on the airwaves. The voice announces itself as Miss Meinhoff. She was abducted at the moment of death, she reports, by a creature from an alien planet. Now she speaks as a member of the Intergalactic Revolutionary Tribunal and proceeds to give a series of confident and unintelligible orders. The people in the room do various things. One man manages to catch fire. Another nails the skrit of the woman’s bathrobe to the floor in order to hug her. She, in turn and has a lovely balance proceeds to sew him up inside the bathrobe. The scene shifts downstairs and, by a kind of undirected osmosis, so does the audience. It is one of Squat’s premises that the audience is to be

given no directions. A film shows a man gesticulating in front of a television store, while a voice announces the journey of a messenger from the Emperor. The Emperor is not identified but the messenger, who appears on screen riding a horse through Manhattan, bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Warhol. (It is, in fact, Istvân Balint, a very skillful member of the troupe.) Soon this image of Mr. Warhol leaves the screen and walks through the door onto the stage. He is accompanied by a woman. She removes her cape, and is revealed as totally naked and so extraordinarily fat that she almost looks clothed. She proceeds to perform a long and tedious incantation, while Mr. Warhol watches and passers-by on 23d Street, drawn by the light, look through the storefront window. Later, they watch an interview between Mr. Warhol and the woman, and the climactic appearance of Miss Meinhoff. The involvement of passers-by is a characteristic of Squat’s method. Their noncommital looks as they watch various startling happenings there is an apparently bloody shooting, for example does contribute to the sense of grotesqueness. It makes them, somewhat fraudulently, look foolish. It makes us the audience facing them feel foolish; and it draws them, us and the odd action in between into one general absurdity. This can be effective. On the other hand, when the action becomes tedious or self-indulgent, as it often does, we no longer accept this three-part involvement. Instead, the feeling grows that even if the faces peering through the window look silly, it would be much nicer to be out among them on 23d Street than cooped up inside the intensions of Squat. Painfulness and exasperation. Yet, when it is over, a curious sense of charm remains. Squat takes symptoms from contemporary life and invents outlandish diseases to fit them. The effort is funny, wrong-headed, valuable and unreasonably accomplished. [Rickard Eder, The New York Times, 1. jul 1978]