Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...staging of the crucifixion provides another prime example of Mr. Mayer's stagecraft of restoration. The use of a grand, reflective aluminum cruxifix--totally unrustic and aggressively mechanical--renews one's sense of horror in an etiolated atrocity. No measure of guignol, no matter how richly sanguinary, no matter how grande could accomplish this alone...
Underwater Prophet. Brooklyn-born Paul Thek, 35, was an early member of the Grand Guignol club. He showed exquisitely molded wax sculptures of raw gobbets of flesh ;n 1964 and 1965. In 1967 he expanded his repertory to display a full-sized cast of himself at Manhattan's Stable Gallery dressed -as a dead hippie and laid out full length inside a pink ziggurat-shaped tomb. The cadaver was a huge success; it toured to London and the Kassel Documenta. For his show at the Stable this spring, he chose a far subtler and less sensational idea: a latex...
...Bennett), whose idea of a big time is to masquerade as merely retarded. Martin spots an attractive bird named Susan (Hayley Mills) and hatches a plot that eventually gets Dad done in, Susan-ravaged, and Susan's mom cut up like so much kindling. This exercise in Petit Guignol, called Twisted Nerve, has all the suspense of a marshmallow roast, and struggles to make itself more plausible by adding some genetic gibberish about chromosomal damage. The film even suggests that Mongolism and criminal behavior are somehow connected, an unconscionable lapse of taste that has justly outraged the National Association...
...they have a way of engaging the reader with their perverse antics and comic, but horrific, deeds. Stewart's first novel, Orpheus on Top, marked him as a humorist of darkest hue. In this, his second, he has created an "entertainment" worthy of France's Grand Guignol theater...
Ginn has perhaps made a mistake in directing such a cold play in emotional high-style, emphasizing spectacle with aluminized mylar sheets mirroring the audience, incense burning-away, and bits and pieces of Artaud and Grand Guignol. The set, grotesque caryatids awesomely conceived and executed by Sebastian Melmoth, nonetheless serves little intrinsic function in Ginn's concept, appearing only as so much lavish decoration surrounding the playing area. The costumes and lighting, however, work better, and are superb as only the Loeb can make them...