Patty's friend Zachary came up with another beauty for your reading pleasure, this review of a Richard Schechner1971Greenwich Village play called "Commune."The nine players, remarkably at one, suggest American communal life from the Westward Trek on...
Various themes are suggested, but the main thrust of the work is an effort to connect Charles Manson and his group to the flow of American experience from the beginning...
Our theater is weak in historical images, in the possibility of suggesting the economic, industrial and large social forces. "The changes, the changes man, are what it's all about..."
The people dead in the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders are...the flowing, free-change able faces of money, fame, celebrity, excitement. The La Biancas, poor victims of a strange randomness, lived amidst their visible properties, properties not altogether grand and unimaginable but just of the comfortable sort even the laziest imagination could believe a spot of luck might bring...
The deaths were not robberies, which are in their distorted way purposeful, but the symbolic way of working out of the deep social yearnings and luxurious needs that now inhabit our psyches along with more primitive forces.
What Commune wishes to suggest, if I understand its images, is the continuity of history that ended in the California murders."
