Swapping Obscenities

Liberty deteriorating into license has become a contemporary abuse in several arts. In Michael McClure's The Beard, which opened at a Greenwich Village theater last week, two characters made up as Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid swap repetitive obscenities for 60 minutes. To what end? If The Beard means to scandalize, it fails: its words are now numbingly familiar onstage. If it means to extol freedom of speech, it falters: its four-letter words express so little that they produce constraint of speech.

Why Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid are the heroine and hero is another secret that is safe with the playwright. They live in eternity and are decked out in white paper beards, presumably indicating that they are figures in mythology. Monotonous, ugly and self-concerned, their verbal mating dance is devoid of tenderness or desire. The innate hostility, fear, and infinite self-disgust that animate this twosome are conveyed with meticulous zeal by Billie Dixon as Harlow and Richard Bright as Billy.

The Beard's climactic scene, an oral sex act, is not as startling or fresh as McClure apparently thinks. It is a continuation of the second act curtain of Albee's Tiny Alice, in which Irene Worth, shielded from the audience by her robe, seemingly displayed her nude body to John Gielgud, who dropped to his knees before her while she uttered orgiastic cries. Both plays might have been more happily served by all-male casts.

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