The connection movie

By Shirley Clarke
Summary

Eight drug addicts are gathered in a Greenwich Village loft

apartment belonging to Leach. They have accepted a fee from
Jim Dunn who is a self-righteous young documentarian and his
camera man J.J Burdon to film them. They are waiting for their
drug connection to arrive with heroin. While the four musicians
play jazz, Dunn asks the others to relate anecdotes about
themselves and their backgrounds. Even as he is ordering them
around the apartment, Dunn encourages the men to act normally;
to do whatever they would be doing any other day.
Finally the connection arrived. The
connection comes with a sister
salvation because the cops were
following him. The connection
Then gives all the junkies a fix in
the bathroom. Donn decides to try
the heroin and after shooting up,
he vomits. Before nodding off, he
tells Burden to take over the
filming. While Dunn is out, Cowboy
hands Leach another fix. Leach
shoots up and overdoses.
 Jim Dunn: Just act normally.
I’m not interested in
making a Hollywood movie.
The stuff you do everyday.

“Now what are you doing? You've all changed. Man, you aren't supposed to change. Just act
naturally. Is that all you know—destruction? I know better. Maybe it's the audience. It's that?
They're making you nervous. They’re making me nervous Maybe we should have tried it
without an audience the first few nights.”
JIM: Hello there! I'm Jim Dunn and I'm
producing The Connection. This is Jaybird, the . Gelber
author. Hardly a day goes by without the daily emphasizes the
papers having some item involving narcotics. spontaneity of the
Any number of recent movies, plays and books
have been concerned with the peculiar
situation by
problems of this anti-social habit. indicating in the
Unfortunately few of these have anything to do stage directions
with narcotics. Sometimes it is treated as that “perhaps”
exotica and often as erotica. Jaybird has spent there is a sign on
some months living among drug addicts. With
the help of [name of director] we have selected a
the wall, or
few addicts to improvise on Jaybird's themes. “perhaps” a
painting.
Gelber wants the audience to
be aware that they are
watching a play, and that they
should not take what happens
onstage to be literally true
throughout the play, one
character or another directs his
dialogue at the audience to
make sure that they do not
exercise a willing suspension
disbelief and accept the action
onstage as real, even
momentarily. Gelber does not
want his audience to become
absorbed in what is happening
The Characters (Junkies)
Leach
_Cynical, Brutal
_ High tolerance junkie , whiny
_Tries too hard to be ‘’hip’’
_Has a mean streak and bickers with
Ernie a lot they are physically violent with each other
_Has a boil on his neck which he covers it with a handkerchief
_acts like a queer (Sam)
Ernie
-psychopath
-frustrated musician

-had a hard childhood

-gives the long, sad “I’m so lonely’’
soliloquy
“I don’t trust one person here or in audience. Why are you here? Because
you want to see someone suffer? You want to laugh at me?
My old man made me work on his farm everyday until I was 17 and never
paid me. No body care about my music they only care about themselves.
Where’s cowboy? I want my money, where is my pay? Jaybird where’s my
pay? I’ll kill you.” He starts off stage Solly restrains him.
• Jim: Huh? Good people, do not be
intimidated by any of these boys
during the intermission. No
matter what they tell you they will
be turned on a scientifically
accurate amount of heroin in the
next act. And that is their
payment for the performance.
excluding the money made on the
movie. Also, we are selling some
Turkish delight in the lobby.
Now ... anyone in the audience
for a smoke?
Lights slowly fade.
 Solly
_An Intellectual, Well articulated

_ Gentle and understanding toward everybody

Ernie thinks he’s so different from

other junkies that he thinks he may
be an author (like jaybird) acting
as a junkie so he can go home and write about junkies in
his stories.
Solly: Besides you've changed into a monster. Why don't you
stay on stage with us? Jaybird: Never mind that,nosy.

“The
cameraman
must get
the freaks
not you!”
Sam
expert in folk lore “Don’t fire
until you see
careless the white of
their eyes.”

One of the audience paid him 5$ to

tell him a story
"The people who work every day,
the people who worry so much
about the next dollar, the next new
coat, the chlorophyll addicts, the
aspirin addicts, the vitamin addicts,
those people are hooked worse
than me. Worse than me. Hooked."
(p. 31) And a second "addict,"
Solly, agrees: "They are. Man, they
sure are. You happen to have a
vice that's illegal.”
 Play within a play
The Connection use a dramatic device, the play-within-a-play
or Meta theater which is a theater reflecting on itself. In
other words the playwright has written a play which is about
actors putting on a play.
The audience seems to participate
in the play; characters walk down the aisles; a man gets up
from the audience insisting that he paid one of the junkies
five dollars to tell a story; another man faints when Leach
gives himself a "fix"; and Sam even walks about during
intermission taking up a collection for his heroin fund. The
illusion created-very successfully-is that this is not theater but
real life.
Jim Dunn, insisting upon the unreality of the play a group of
drug addicts are about to improvise:
"I and this entire evening on stage are merely a fiction. What I
mean to say is that we are not actually using real heroin." Yet,
during the course of the play, one of the addicts Jim has hired
to "improvise“ seems to become critically ill from an overdose
of the "phony" drug. Is the drug real? Has Jim been lying? Or
has he told the truth? Is the addict merely acting? The addicts
exist on three levels of reality in the play's world; 1 The
characters are addicts in real life, who have been hired to
come to a theater to play in The play which includes
"improvised play" within its general scheme. They are, then,
addicts playing addicts (in The Connection) playing addicts (in
the "improvisation")
Jim and photographers in the play of
what the addicts term the world of the
"squares" exist on three levels in the
play. They, too, are actors playing roles,
the roles of the author, photographers.
They exist on a second
level at the beginning of the play each
one intrudes into the addicts's world,
either to instruct or photograph them.
But Jaybird and the 2nd photographer,
by nature of their connection with the
addicts, have a third level of existence;
when they take heroin, they enter into
the play-within-the-play and become
complete parts of that world.
The point of these entrances by the play's "squares" into
the world of the "addicts" and by the "addicts" into that of
the real "squares" (before, during, and after the play to
beg money from the audience), indeed, the whole
point of setting up two inter-relating worlds by a play-
within-a-play structure, is clear enough; by so doing Gelber
has established a "connection" between the two worlds.
He is, thus, able to point out that
man in both the world of the "addicts" and in that of the
"squares“ is addicted to something.
The only characters who are not addicted, in
either of the two ways, are the jazz musicians,
The musicians are not, like the "addicts,"
actors hired for a part. They are musicians
hired for a job, which is only incidentally a
play. The musicians are "heroes" and moral
centers in the play. They are spontaneous
individuals in a world addicted to sameness.
They're the true improvisers. Because jazz is
all about improvisation based on mood of the
musician like Charli Parker.
The musicians are the only natural, or
authentic, people in this microcosm of
society. The musicians are "real" because they
are spontaneous.
He uses the play-within-a-
play device to put
unauthentic, unspontaneous
characters that live in rituals
and addiction against
authentic and spontaneous
characters, who are
authentic because they are
spontaneous and they are
moral because they rebel
against the world of
inauthenticity, against the
"addicts."
Cowboy
_Good natured

_The connection

_ Gives the junkies heroin in the bathroom

I’m not high
enough!
THEATRICALIT
Y IN THE
AVANT-GARDE
DRAMA
Le sang d’un poete Meshes in the afternoon
• Avant-garde is a French term meaning “advance guard”.
• The part of army that goes ahead of the rest.
• Avant-garde means art that is innovatory, introducing or exploring
new forms
• Avant-garde theater opposes bourgeois theater and challenges the
status quo.
The Second Reform of the Theater and the American Avant-
Garde

The Second Reform of the Theater was a natural continuation of the Great
Reform. Having lasted approximately four decades, from the 1950s up to the
1990s, I will focus on the first phase of the Reform (1950–75), since during this
period improvisation as a technique of acting and means of creation was
central to the development of the new theater. The Living Theatre,
Happenings, Actions and Events, the emergence of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway
theaters and Schumanns’s Bread and Puppet Theater although diverse in styles
and methodologies, they had shared ideologies. They were open (towards both
fellow company members and audiences), rebellious (towards the status quo of
arts in general, and of theater opposing the ideals of a consumer society), anti-
war, political, socially engaged, and defiant of structure and tradition . The new
theater supported social equality, multiculturalism and the individual right to
freedom—of speech, actions and views.
• Away from the expensive Broadway, and the highly commercial
entertainment of the Great White Way, a new theater arose in the late
1940s. The Off- and Off-Off-Broadway movement first started in private
apartments and basements among the new generation of artists
predominantly influenced by the European avant-garde, yet, with the
American tradition already carved into this influence. It was a poor,
experimental avant-garde theater, small in size and budget, looking for
new means of expression, promoting new drama, too complex for the
popular stages of Broadway:
• The American stage provided fertile ground for these
changes.
• Lacking a centuries-long theater tradition while
possessing the necessary
• infrastructure and human resources, as well as the
burgeoning ideologies planted a few decades before.
• Political events: The Great Depression of the 1930s
that questioned existing values, the HUAC atmosphere
of fear and suspicion in the 1940s that intensified the
need for freedom and openness in the arts, the Korean
War in the 1950s, Drugs and the Vietnam War in the
1960s, which overturned so many perceptions that
America had about itself, engaged the theater
politically to an even greater extent.
The “new acting,” originated by Stanislavsky, was expanding. Acting was understood
as being, not pretending to be somebody else on stage. The prime idea was to find
the emotions inside and reveal them instead of playing them out. This was often
achieved through improvisation.

the performances used either few words, or the words were improvised
(either on the spot or during the rehearsal process). In order to escape the
artificiality of theater stages the performance space moved away not only
from Broadway to private apartments but also out of any buildings. The
actors performed in parks, railway stations and basements. By using a
real-life space open to actual passers-by, in contrast to performing in front
of a theater audience on artificial grounds. This improvised performance
manifested the notion of “people’s theater,” because of arbitrary,
accidental audience.
The Living Theater

• The Connection was first produced by the Living Theater in 1959.

• The Living Theatre, an experimental group founded by Julian Beck and
Judith Malina in New York. They held their first performances in the
Becks’ Upper West Side apartment. from the prisons of Brazil to the
gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and the slums of Palermo”.
• They used performing arts as a vessel to vent their dissatisfaction with
current social and political affairs.
The Living Theatre was as political in its art as it was experimental.
• The Becks felt they suffered from oppression from the authorities;
however, in their case the repression was cloaked in tax evasion
charges. The government shut the theater down for tax evasion. They
continued their theater in Europe.
The Living theater found the improvising aspect of The connection
liberating because:
• By juxtaposing two performance arts,theatre, which precludes
improvisation outside the rehearsal or preparation period,
• and jazz, in which ‘improvisation is established as a prerequisite for
performance’
• Gelber enabled The Becks to implement an idea that had been
apparently haunting them for several years: how to turn each
performance of the play into a unique,one-off event.
In their subsequent productions
, The Marrying Maiden (1960)
and Paradise Now (1968) The
Living Theatre continued
experimenting with
improvisation.

Addressing the audience and

demanding answers, and
inviting active participation of
the audiences are characteristic
of The Living Theater.
 THEATRICALITY
• AN ASSERTIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUS THEATRICALITY is an important aspect of
Jack Gelber's The Connection. From the start of the first act we see The
producer directly talking with the audience and introduces himself.
• From the start, we know that the playwright is not trying to makes us forget
that we are sitting in a theater, but on the contrary that, far from hiding the
theatricality of his medium, he is capitalizing upon it. We sense that we
• are dealing with the avant-garde theater.
this century theatricality seems to have acquired particularly urgent
meanings. I am concerned here with the notion of "role-playing,"
especially as it involves a discrepancy between act and reality: "play-
acting" as opposed to a hypothetical "real-life’’.
some of our major currents of thought have contributed
to the idea of theatricality: the Freudian vision of life as a kind of
play-acting of the ego thinly masking the powerful reality of the id;
and the existentialist vision of man paradoxically forced to act
purposefully in an absurd universe. Hollow personalities gesticulating
according to the dictates of a hollow society in a hollow universe: with
such a
vision, futile theatricality is likely to seem the only possible mode of
action.
• The avant-garde playwrights of the fifties and sixties are
concerned with the theatricality of life, and hence with the
theatricality of theater. This theme is almost always implicit in
the very eccentricity of their plays. The weird settings and
erratic plots puzzle audiences and make the plays seem
artificial, thus automatically drawing attention to the fact of
theatricality. No one can watch people popping out of
garbage cans without being continuously aware that this is
not a slice of life but a stage production. The meaningless,
circular, futile dialogues of a play like Waiting for Godot seem
unlifelike, but they do challenge us into considering whether
our normal, "lifelike" activities are much more meaningful.
 like Lucky's inchoate speech in Waiting for Godot, or Hamm's
senseless and witless short story in Endgame. These are all public
pronouncements, public gestures-like theater itself-but conveying
nothing except their own pretentious meaninglessness and
hollowness.
• Jean Genet exploit the theme of
theatricality more fully than any of his
avant-garde contemporaries. His
characters are constantly playing roles.
That is, the actors on his stage are
playing the roles of people playing
roles. In The Maids Solange plays the
role of Claire, and Claire plays the role
of the Mistress. one theme emerges
clearly: the hollowness of the roles
that people foist upon each other.
Genet's concern with masks, fronts,
postures, gestures, and impersonations
is certainly symptomatic of the avant-
garde stage. The Balcony in particular is
concerned from beginning to end with
theatricality. The play opens with a
sexual pervert impersonating a bishop
in a brothel and it closes with Irma, the
Madam, telling the audience that what
awaits them at home is as false as
anything in the brothel. By that ending,
Genet breaks the fiction of "reality“
and draws attention to the theatricality
of his plays.
In The Connection the function of
theatricality is almost the reverse
of what it is in The Balcony and in many
other avant-garde plays. These plays
represent in the theater the theatrical aspects
of life; they are concerned with how much of
life turns out to be mere playacting. The
Connection on the other hand, is concerned
with people who do not want to play any
roles whatsoever..
the junkies are uninterested in playing roles either on stage or in life.
They want first to obtain heroin and second to be left alone. It is only
because Jim, the producer, pays them in heroin that they can be
persuaded to engage in the minimal role playing necessary in order to
have theater at all. For that is the problem
Of theatricality in The Connection: how to get non-role players
to play roles. Instead of actors playing the role of junkies, we are
presented with junkies playing the role of actors. Unlike the characters
of The Balcony, whose facades are everything, the junkies in
The Connection have no facades at all except those agonizingly
forced upon them by their temporary situation as actors.
If Genet and other avant-garde playwrights are concerned
with the role-playing aspects of life, Gelber is concerned
with the question, what do we do in life when we don't play
roles? For the junkies it is the "flash" of narcotic
intoxication, The Connection is as concerned withrole-
playing as are other avant-garde plays, but in an opposite
manner, Consequently, the notion of theatricality which is
constantly popping up throughout the play serves a
different function than in the other plays. Since the
characters are so profoundly untheatrical, theatricality is
necessary to give them roles, to make them do something.
The Connection has another effect, namely to
establish a sort of observer-observed relationship
between the audience and the junkies. The junkies
are presented to us as curious animals, whom we are
invited to observe,
Jim's condescending, circus-prompter attitude
("they will be turned
on a scientifically accurate amount of heroin in the
next act"); Jaybird's
more indirect condescension, implied, for example,
in his having spent many weeks among the junkies
collecting material for the play, shining floodlights
on the junkies. The junkies are on exhibit and
Cowboy's sudden resentment toward the end-"what
do you think we live in, a freak show
The theatricality of Genet's
characters demonstrates their
hollowness and is as degrading
as the theatricality used to put
the junkies on exhibit and make
them play roles; but the
degradation is arrived at from
opposite directions, and the
responsibility for it in The
Connection seems to lie more
with the observers than with the
characters.
how his characters, despite the dead
inactivity of their world, become
differentiated, characterized, and
humanized. At first we see only
shadowy figures in a dull opium
dream momentarily engaged for our
benefit in a grotesque pantomime. But
as the play proceeds they become
human being with individual
personalities, problems, strengths, and
weaknesses. The theatrical machinery
has succeeded in bringing forth
identifiable individuals. This is
perhaps the basic "action" of the
play.
The world of the avant-garde theater seems remote from ordinary
society, and the junkies' world in The Connection is no exception.
. Remoteness from ordinary society is a needed to criticism of that society.,
and theatricality is needed to give the characters sufficient public
relationships to society, for them to be observable. The junkies have almost
no relationship with the outside world,
and very little with one another. have one connection with the outside world,
The end