Coming and Going

Coming and Going is a production in the tradition of the Living Theatre, in which communication is partially derived from community. The Adams House Drama Workshop combines Come and Go by Samuel Beckett, Landscape by Harold Pinter, and excerpts from The Brig by Kenneth Brown and from the transcript of the trial of the Chicago 8 to form a piece in which the communal aura gradually expands.

The production begins with the nine actors arranged on the floor moaning in singsong. They slowly rise to form a ring, and suddenly they are touching their toes and doing jumping jacks. The lights are cut, and a dramatic transition is made from leaping confusion to Beckett's stark play. Come and Go is eventually repeated three times, giving each actor a chance to play one of the three characters, every repetition involving more members of the cast.

The actors wear jeans and old shirts or sweaters; the only props are a bench, a few chairs and one spotlight. The bareness is dictated in part by the scripts, but it is also integral to this kind of communal theatre. Coming and Going required very little money to stage and admission is free. Keeping the production as far removed from the money system as possible accentuates its populist spirit, and the worth of what the actors have themselves created.

Yet integrity cannot carry the show alone, and Coming and Going often straddles the line separating theatre of the absurd from people acting absurdly. The absurdity of reality is convincingly exposed only in the scene from the trial of the Chicago 8. The trial is truly ridiculous, and the Workshop's re-creation of it is hilarious and moving at the same time. Judge Julius Hoffmann screams an explanation of why he called William Kunstler "Billy": "I was trying to show you how absurd it sounds in a courtroom!" The irony hangs in the air as the lights go out for the next scene.

The Brig does not fare so well in its adaptation. Set in a prison for Marines, the play details the horror of prison life and should assault the viscera as well as the mind. Coming and Going uses only half of the play, and speeds up speech and action to an incomprehensible level. In the Workshop version of The Brig, the barricades dividing victims and executioners are just being exposed when they should also have been vehemently condemned.

The director, Charles Bernstein, terms Coming and Going a "communal collage." Various pieces are assembled as in a collage, but the fragments are never quite pasted on any one background. Coming and Going could be a powerfully integrated experience in the theatre; as it is it's a sandwich.