Portrait of the Reviewer

All thIs really begins some time ago, at a party at Norman Mailer’s house. Since Norman Mailer’s guest list is apt to make a mixed bag in any case (Allen Ginsberg, Tiger Jones, a Mafia overlord, C. Wright Mills, and a famous society beauty were present and accounted for at this particular soirée), I took no particular notice when a grubby little man ambled up, stickily confided that he had just written a play about me, and cut out. “Who’s the little creep,” I asked the lady at my left, decidedly not the society beauty. “Don’t you know?” she asked. “That’s Jack Gelber. He has a new play. The Apple.”

I remembered Gelber as the author of The Connection, the most dazzlingly original piece of theatre I had seen in a good many years. Drawn both by this and by the entrancing notion that someone had finally thought to immortalize me off-Broadway, I went down to the Living Theatre’s opening of The Apple with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. Howls of protest from that chorus of old aunties euphemistically known as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle notwithstanding, I loved The Apple, plan to see it again, and recommend it to anyone looking for the original, the spontaneous, and the unhackneyed.

NP

About the Author

Noel E. Parmentel Jr.

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New York City

All thIs really begins some time ago, at a party at Norman Mailer’s house. Since Norman Mailer’s guest list is apt to make a mixed bag in any case (Allen Ginsberg, Tiger Jones, a Mafia overlord, C. Wright Mills, and a famous society beauty were present and accounted for at this particular soirée), I took no particular notice when a grubby little man ambled up, stickily confided that he had just written a play about me, and cut out. “Who’s the little creep,” I asked the lady at my left, decidedly not the society beauty. “Don’t you know?” she asked. “That’s Jack Gelber. He has a new play. The Apple.”

I remembered Gelber as the author of The Connection, the most dazzlingly original piece of theatre I had seen in a good many years. Drawn both by this and by the entrancing notion that someone had finally thought to immortalize me off-Broadway, I went down to the Living Theatre’s opening of The Apple with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. Howls of protest from that chorus of old aunties euphemistically known as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle notwithstanding, I loved The Apple, plan to see it again, and recommend it to anyone looking for the original, the spontaneous, and the unhackneyed.