Just One Catch (47 page)

Each week, Joe rode the train from Manhattan to New Haven. He took seriously the classes he taught, and had a good time with the students. One day, walking down a gloomy hallway in the Drama School Annex, encountering a group of kids waiting to file into his classroom, he said, “Today's Rosh Hashanah, a religious holiday, right? No classes on Rosh Hashanah. So what're you doing here?” The students stared at him. He laughed and said, “All right, you convinced me. We'll have our class.” He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and plunged into Aristotle's
Poetics.

Unlike the kids he'd taught years ago at Penn State, these students wanted to be where they were and seemed generally well prepared. Joe liked hanging out with them, chatting. One day, he listened carefully to a student describe a talk given at the Law School by Jack Valenti. Valenti claimed to have killed ten thousand people in Italy during World War II by dropping bombs on them. He said, as a patriot, he was proud of his accomplishments. “If he said that, then he's a schmuck,” Joe said. “First, I would suspect he's a liar because no one can keep such accurate count, especially from the air, of how many people are killed when a bomb explodes. Second, if he had indeed killed that many people, he's really something for boasting about it.”

Joe felt most of the students, bright as they were, didn't know what they wanted in life. They only knew what they
didn't
want—to go to war.

In October, in the chilly old WNHC building on Chapel Street, drama students staged a reading of Joe's play. He was moved to tears by it. After that, rehearsals began in earnest for a full-scale production of the play, to open on December 4 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Larry Arrick, a veteran of Chicago's Second City, would direct. The actors included Stacy Keach, Ron Leibman, and Estelle Parsons. The pun in the title suggests the conceit on which the drama unfolds, erasing distinctions between the reality of wartime bombing and showbiz fears of staging a play that might fizzle. Joe knew he was running a risk, daring critics to call the play a bomb—but that was part of the unsettling strategy.

The play concerns actors who believe they are impersonating members of a bomb squadron during an unspecified war. Intermittently, they dutifully act their parts, then stop to discuss the script, complain about the size of their roles, express puzzlement over their characters, and remember productions they—the actual actors—have been in. The curtain does not rise properly, a large wall clock keeps real time, and the actors treat the stage props as trinkets, never allowing illusions of realism to grip the audience. In the first act, amid much horseplay, the script calls for a character to die offstage during a bombing mission. Afterward, one of the performers, playing the role of Sergeant Henderson, wonders where the actor went. He seems to have vanished, though his bloody clothes remain. In act 2, a pair of wealthy sportsmen, one wielding a golf club and the other a hunting rifle, murder Henderson onstage. Captain Starkey, a father figure to Henderson, watches the young man die and does nothing—just like the audience.

Ruth, a Red Cross girl, accuses the audience of guilty passivity. We accept war as entertainment, lies as truth, she says. Here lay the difference between
We Bombed in New Haven
and the avant-garde plays against which it was measured. In Beckett's
Endgame,
Clov asks, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm replies, “The dialogue.” The effect is a blurring of the psychological and metaphysical—a burst of alienation. Joe had no interest in this. He had been reading Beckett (“I'd rather read him than see him staged”), but Joe used similar techniques for a different aim: social cohesion, rather than estrangement.

With
We Bombed in New Haven,
Joe intended to startle audience members into accepting personal responsibility for a war organized like a game, reviewed like a show, and managed largely offstage to hide mass killings. When Starkey asks an army major, “[L]et me in on the biggest military secret of all. Who's really in charge and who's really responsible,” the answer is not some silent god in a meaningless universe; the answer is
us.

Naturally, Joe opened himself to charges of didacticism, propaganda, and ham-handedness. He said he was extending theatrical principles. In Greek theater, endings were always inevitable: Audiences knew the myths behind the plays, he said. He was making a larger connection, not only between drama and ancient myths but between popular entertainments and the myths of society—patriotism, heroism, “surgical strikes.” These myths allowed the killing of innocents, and let fellows like Jack Valenti sleep at night.

Moreover, in the tradition of Yiddish theater—forms of which Joe had encountered all his life, from neighborhood jokes to Marx Brothers movies, from Catskills skits to Lenny Bruce routines—he was engaging, obliquely and gleefully, in social disruption, forcing the audience to laugh at itself, to question its language and values. Sigmund Mogulesco, America's first great Yiddish comic, never made a distinction between “art and trash,” according to Irving Howe. He'd do anything to get a reaction. Similarly, Mel Brooks said, “[I]f someone wants to call my movies art or crap, I don't mind.”

When an interviewer asked Joe what he hoped to accomplish with
We Bombed in New Haven,
he said, “What else, I wanted to make a million dollars.” “No, really,” the interviewer said. “All right,” Joe replied. “Right now I want to make every woman cry and every man feel guilty when he has to go home and face his sons.… You ask what did I mean to accomplish? I meant to write a very good play.”

The rehearsals at Yale—the actors improvising, questioning, improving one day, backsliding the next, Joe rethinking, rewriting, learning the nuances of stagecraft—frazzled the playwright. Lines he'd thought were funny dragged when he heard them aloud. Some of the actors ignored his stage directions. Others seemed not to get his jokes. Shredded orange toothpicks lay at his feet. In the evenings, he'd go to his room at the Midtown Motor Inn and, tossing and turning, relive the rehearsals in his head. One night, he thought he heard maniacs in the room next door banging the walls and playing their radios loudly. At 5:00
A.M.
, he discovered his
own
bedside radio, built into the night table, had been on.

Arrick told students who came to watch rehearsals to slip quietly in and out of the building without disturbing the actors. Joe said the students could make as much noise as they wanted. “For god's sake, speak up if you have any criticism,” he said. To streamline the first act, he cut Falstaff's speech on honor, as well as other Shakespearian echoes left over from the now defunct
Catch-22
adaptation. He increased Starkey's ineffectuality, and linked it more clearly to the audience's passivity. He added lines to the chorus of “idiots” who yammer behind the action (“They're not really idiots. They're no different from you or me, which is why they're idiots,” he explained).

He asked that a different actor play the army major; the first actor spoke with a southern accent reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson's—a too-specific link to Vietnam. Joe didn't want that. On the other hand, he left in a reference to bombing Minnesota, because Hubert Humphrey had been born there, and Humphrey “told lies … believ[ing] they were true.”

“I'm learning, I'm learning that I wrote a script, not a production,” Joe said. “In novels, the writer defines and limits his characters, but not in plays. If an actor has any talent and is working with a good director, he will fill out bare words in the script.” Still, the rehearsals racked his nerves. “It's not that I'm trying to dominate the director; it's just that I want the director to know what's in my mind and have the same thing in his mind so that he'll do what I want him to do without my trying to dominate him,” he said.

Joe's agony surprised the students; they had expected an easygoing, round-the-clock funnyman. Worried about him—and more experienced with the tedium of rehearsals—the actors suggested he stay away from the final run-throughs. He agreed. “Listen, who's nervous?” he joked. “I've learned to suffer excruciating torture without making a sound while [you] blow my play.”

“The real truth is that things have been going beautifully,” he told
New York Times
reporter Elenore Lester. “Larry Arrick … and the actors have been a revelation to me—the way they've gotten hold of this thing. After the first week they understood the play better than I did. They've seen things in it, psychological meanings I never thought of.… The only thing is I'm not happy. It's my nature to be suspicious. I just don't trust people. I know it's not right, but that's the way I am.… I'm concerned about my literary personality. I don't want Joseph Heller distorted.”

Uneasiness with the collaborative process signaled once and for all that Joe was a novelist, not a playwright. But he couldn't have been in better hands. Larry Arrick understood he was “close … to the Jewish sensibility of novelists like Mailer, Roth, Bellow, and Malamud who [had] a kind of self-loathing that [was] in itself a form of purification.” Arrick said the Yale group was “the best company I've ever worked with anywhere. And the play is marvelous—its subject is war, but its theme is not. War is a metaphor here for [the] game … [w]e are all playing … in this country today, you know. We go to the theater or we look at Picasso's
Guernica
in the Museum of Modern Art and we say, ‘Yes, war is terrible' and then we go and have some coffee. We aren't changed at all.”

As opening night approached, the Drama School's publicist asked Joe if he could promote the play as a comedy in ads. Joe conceded that this might sell more tickets, but he didn't want the play hailed as a comedy. There were plenty of jokes. But at the beginning of the second act, a character announced, accurately, “There's nothing really funny about this, you know.”

Joe got word that Walter Kerr, Barbara Harris, Mike Nichols, and Paul Newman planned to attend the premiere. “I thought we were going to have a good time putting on a play at Yale, but this way … you have all the stresses of a Broadway opening without its actually being Broadway,” he groaned.

He lumbered to his classes in the shadow of Harkness Tower, feeling heavy and tired, carrying an overstuffed briefcase. To cheer himself up, he bought a sheepskin jacket. “It's not really very expensive and I hear they last forever,” he told anyone who stopped to admire it.

On campus, rumors spread that the Yale Draft Refusal Committee, a student group, had bought a block of seats and planned to disrupt the play. “Heller's ending”—in which Starkey allows his son to go to war—“signified to them an acceptance of induction,” Brustein said: a serious misreading of the drama. At the eleventh hour, Brustein dissuaded the protesters.

At the end of the first performance, the audience filed out of the theater, somber and quiet. “There's no remission at the end of my play,” Joe said. “I felt the audience didn't deserve any consolation. The poor are suffering, the colored are suffering, the people with sons of eighteen and nineteen are suffering. I'm convinced that, if we remain accomplices of evil, we are not only guilty but deserve to be victims as well.”

One student felt the performance had taught him the power of metaphor. “Most guys think they'll go into [the service], play the role of the soldier for two years, and then come back and pick up where they left off,” he said. “They don't think: go in, play soldier, and be killed.”

Generally, reviews were favorable. Roderick Nordell, writing in the
Christian Science Monitor,
said the play “cuts to the quick.” He felt that most of the time “Mr. Heller's … comedy serves the ultimate purpose of his tragedy.” And in
Newsweek,
Jack Kroll said that “the play is very likely the most powerful play about contemporary irrationality an American has written, with a natural cathartic jolt that comes from the genuineness of Heller as a moral comedian.… This is one of those rare productions that advance the whole notion of the theater.”

On the other hand, Walter Kerr objected to Joe's premise. “The evening posits war as a glamorous game in which no one really expects to be killed. It supposes that we regard war in this way; in effect, it accuses us of [doing so]. But who now thinks of war in this way?… The accusation … is off-target.” Heller, he said, “wants not to dramatize war in any way, shape or form, but to talk about it, shout about it, make proclamations about it—
now.
”

Tom F. Driver, writing in
The Saturday Review
two months before the play's New York opening, said the “imagination that created [
Catch-22
] is … totally verbal.… The humor of
Catch-22
depended on taking words with
absolute
seriousness, no bones about it, the same way you'd take the b.m. on the baby's diapers. I mean, there it is.” Heller, he said, had failed to find a theatrical equivalent of this experience. “What we're after in the theater is energy. Not theory, and not fashion.”

Sensitive to criticisms, Joe delayed the Broadway premiere by several months as he fine-tuned the play. “I have unlimited confidence in the stupidity of our government … I know that Congress and the President wouldn't let me down and do something intelligent like ending the war while I was revising,” he said.

*   *   *

THE YALE
PRODUCTION
closed on December 23. Just over a month later, on January 31, 1968, in what came to be known as the Tet Offensive, 67,000 Vietcong troops attacked more than one hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam. U.S. military leaders were astounded by the enemy's organization and daring. The American public's faith in Lyndon Johnson, already badly frayed, unraveled almost completely. Thus began an extraordinarily turbulent year. As Joe tinkered with his play, as he made notes for
Something Happened,
public concerns swamped him; journalists would not stop pestering him for statements. Reflecting the anxiety of the moment, his pronouncements became increasingly extreme. “The American government is making war on the American people—not on Ho [Chi Minh],” he said. He applauded boys who burned their draft cards: “This could end the war. They can't put everybody in jail.” He told the
New York Times,
“If it came to violence, I would not side with the Establishment, though my friendliest banker is there.… Reconciliation is not going to come from the Pope or Billy Graham or J. Edgar Hoover.… If it weren't for my basic optimism, I'd be packing up to leave the country. But I don't like packing.”