Show Business: The Cerebral Trip Is Over

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THEATRICAL tricks are the trademark of Tom O'Horgan, the Superstar director. He turned Futz, nominally a modest little play about bestiality, into a Dionysian celebration with actors writhing all over the stage in transports of pagan ecstasy. In Hair O'Horgan set a similar kind of group grope to a rock upbeat. In Lenny, a crowd of gigantic papier-mâché figures symbolizing his fantasies loom over the doomed comic Lenny Bruce. In Jesus Christ Superstar, O'Horgan has characters descend grandly from on high—now in a huge mysterious whalebone basket, now on a platform designed like a mammoth's skull. O'Horgan explains simply: "I like to fill the stage with lots of things to look at."

Subtler directors might be more concerned with quietly illuminating the inner meaning of a play or piece of music. O'Horgan is the great exteriorizer. "I conceive of theater that involves people more," he says. "The theater has just gone through the cerebral trip, and now the swing is back to the supernatural consciousness, where things have to be felt." Not everyone agrees, of course, that O'Horgan touches the feelings. To many, his plays are not so much moving as in perpetual motion —an amalgam of group therapy, Max Reinhardt and kindergarten recess.

O'Horgan's father, Foster, yearned after a singing career, but instead went into the family printing business in Chicago. Tom was an only child, and his nativity, on May 3, 1926, "was like the Second Coming," the director laughingly recalls. As a small child, he accompanied his father on theater excursions to Chicago. On his first day at school, Tom insisted on inspecting the stage and declared it "lacking." With his father's help, he installed footlights and a wind machine. At twelve he wrote the music and libretto of his first opera —entitled The Doom of the Earth. Soon after, he was laid up for a year with incipient TB, and he used the time to "structure my life." In high school he ran his own drama and choral groups, and at De Paul University he wrote another opera for his master's thesis.

Then the itinerant years began. O'Horgan formed a vocal group and made his living by touring his show. In New York City in the '60s, he staged some experimental pieces off-off-Broadway that used speech and sound "as a contrapuntal device rather than a literal communication form." In one play at the Cafe La Mama, Ellen Stewart's seminal theater of experiment, he dressed a young man playing Adam entirely in Reynolds Wrap. God, looking like W.C. Fields, appeared onstage from the midst of the audience and tore off the foil.

O'Horgan retains his penchant for elaborate scenic metamorphosis because "one object transformed into many different things is interesting." In Tom Paine he utilized a large blue cross that became, by turns, the sea, Marie Antoinette's gown and eventually a termite queen. "In Superstar," O'Horgan points out enthusiastically, "the altar is also the table for the Last Supper and the rock upon which Christ prays. Then it becomes a cart in which the soldiers push Jesus. That pushing around the stage creates energy."