DIONYSUS IN '69 (1970)

I was quite happy to find this oddity from early in Brian DePalma's career, a film of a performance of an avant-garde play performed in New York City by an experimental troupe led by Richard Schechner. My impressionable 12-year-old self was fascinated with the press coverage of the avant-garde art scene in the 60s, and I have a vivid memory of reading about this play in magazines like Life. It looked less like a play and more like a "happening," one of those free-form art events, often including audience participation, that were all the rage in the hippie era. The play is performed more or less in the round, with the audience sitting on the floor and on scaffolding that surrounds the primary performance space. The text, such as it is, is drawn from The Bacchae by Euripides, and the best way to summarize what happens in this play is to go to the source. Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, has come to town and his female followers have whipped themselves into a frenzy of religious ecstasy, much to his pleasure. But the young king Pentheus is opposed to this worship (and religion in general) and wants to suppress it. The bulk of the dialogue is a debate between the god (William Finley) and the king (William Shephard), though most of the play's action consists of the undifferentiated cast members, dressed in skimpy clothes, writhing and spinning and chanting, and twice engaging in orgies in which clothes are taken off completely.

I don't mean to suggest that this comes off as an unplanned free-for-all; clearly, there is a script, though it often departs wildly from Euripides' text. Frequently, the actor playing Dionysus refers to himself by his real name, and also calls the actor playing Pentheus by his name.  The movement of the cast, while it sometimes looks—and might be—improvised, is clearly well-choreographed, though audience participation is encouraged now and then—I think a handful even join in on the orgies. Even though I read The Bacchae years ago, I got lost in this play's twisted narrative, but there's usually something interesting to watch. DePalma presents the entire play in split-screen, which in the beginning works well, as we see the same action from two different perspectives (and sometimes we see the audience reaction), but I grew tired of this style and longed to see what the show looked like to the audience, as we rarely get a full length shot of the entire performance space. There is some homoerotic content that may have seemed daring in the time—in addition to Dionysus kissing Pentheus, he also gives Pentheus instructions on how to give him a blowjob (ultimately done offstage). At about 90 minutes, it felt too long to me—the writhing of the cast and the speechifying by Dionysus get repetitious—but as a historical record, it's fascinating. The play was performed in 1968, but the title comes from the final scenes in which Dionysus posits running for office in '69. [YouTube]