Michael Smith’s “Captain Jack’s Revenge,” currently in its second week at the Cafe La Mama, seems to me one of the more relevant theatrical events of this year. Relevant to my life, because I kept watching it, I kept wanting it to be there. Perhaps I saw it partly as one playwright seeing another playwright work out some interesting problems. But I found it freakily enchanting, even when at moments it creaked under the excessive weight of abstraction.

The play has a Godardian flatness, both in its language, which is curiously undirected, and in Smith’s staging. Unlike a lot of recent work, it isn’t manipulative, it doesn’t reach out, it rather removes itself from you so that you might be watching it from halfway down the block. It’s awfully cool, but its coolness turned me on so that I could float amiably among its various bizarre layers.

We’re hit early in the evening—the play is two and a half hours long—with the insane wealth of modern communication. At one time the following are activated simultaneously: the tv set, the phonograph, the slide projector, the movie projector, the telephone, and the doorbell. And hovering around on the floor—the mail. And with it all, with the full-bodied tones of Bach’s B Minor Mass and the Jackie Gleason show in color and the vast, efficient projections of exotic tribesmen, our three principal characters are together in a small, smartily tidily untidy apartment, out of touch with their lives.

The decor suggests an immaculate shipwreck. A spiritual dislocation has transpired with all the surfaces intact. Somnambulant role-playing goes on, and yet there are courteous explosions of inquiry, diverting seconds of despair that only tend to drive the characters closer to the action of role-playing. But drive is too strenuous a word for the discursive air that abounds through so much of the play. Better to speak of drifts. The experience could be characterized as a disorienting yet elegant stabilizing high. We’re out on the clouds, shot there through a series of lassitudinal eruptions.

Smith also plays with events mirroring events, and with plays within plays. “Captain Jack” seems to be both a working problem and a game. Its people articulate philosophic inquiry as a way of trying on ideas with which to then embody the characters they may be able to become after they’ve solved the problems hopefully stated in the ideas. The structure of the play also has the air of a working hypothesis, so that I at least had the eerie feeling that I was watching the exploration of a way of making the play.

Ondine (of Warhol productions) brings a slightly perturbed, toughy softness to Jack, the boyfriend. I missed a little tension but the muddledness seems appropriate. Lucy Silvay, as the elegantly floating girl who lives with Jack and is given to taking her spiritual temper before and after lunch and bed, seemed to me absolutely right, a charming vessel of unused resources. I found Jeffrey Herman, as William, the draft evader who lives with the couple, believable in still moments, but was bothered by an awkwardness in his movements about the stage. John Vaccaro as Reverend Thomas, Wallace Androchuk as Alfred Meacham (someone connected with Indian affairs), and Peter Murphy as General Canby, father of the girl (also called General Despair, if I heard correctly), all seemed valid in their own right but did not always seem to be in the same play.

“Captain Jack’s Revenge” is amiable, spooky, pokey, and delicious. But I felt no community sense at La Mama—a mixed-bag audience. Still, the play had its own integrity and respected that of its audience. It didn’t con them, didn’t sell them, didn’t suggest it was the last word in revolutionary technique, didn’t threaten, didn’t applaud itself. It simply, with much devotion, tried to work out a series of theatrical and deeply felt social and psychological ideas, and it let us meet it on whatever terms could make us comfortable. As I said, I wanted to be there because I liked its problems, I liked its terms, and I liked its people.

Two hundred years after “Ponteach” [another play reviewed in the same piece], we meet the noble savages of Michael Smith’s “Captain Jack’s Revenge” (at the Cafe La Mama) in a contemporary apartment. First they appear as a trio of disaffected Americans, a young man, his girl, and a draft-dodging friend. For Act Two they drop back a century to become Modoc Indians. In a play within the play, they perform the story of Captain Jack, the Modoc chief who climaxed fruitless negotiations with the government by shooting its head negotiator, General Canby.

Opposed to the young people are a trio of establishment oldies who appear first as the girl’s father and his friends, then as the government negotiators. But the actors’ attitudes persist through changes of time and role. To both daughter and the Modoc Indians, the father cum general is consistently paternalistic. Both as Indians and as their contemporary non-selves, the young trio seeks a “home in our own country.”

But I make “Captain Jack” sound too neat. Much of the play has a two-dimensional, almost oriental quality which leaves things open-ended. When the author raises an issue, he confronts us too with its contrary. Statements are balanced by their opposites. “What do you want to tell me?” the draft-dodger asks, and his host replies, “What do you want to hear?” The audience supplies the third dimension.

This balancing of opposites creates a style which reinforces the play’s anti-paternalistic theme. “Captain Jack” doesn’t dictate, it respects, it allows.

After immersing us in an image of the young trio’s disoriented life, filled with stimuli, empty of connections, Smith takes us into their imagination. Although the Captain Jack story is historical fact, in the play it becomes their shared fantasy. And it’s only through this myth that they can act and find purpose.

One point the play speaks to in its final moments is the necessity of imagination. It is precisely this lack of vision which prevents the father/general here and the Yankee traders of “Ponteach” from seeing the Indians as individual beings, like themselves yet separate.

But “Captain Jack” is a much richer, more subtle play than Major Rogers’s rustic effort. “An oriental, acid Pinter,” I noted. If Smith’s work seems occasionally diffuse, I find it a small price to pay for its open attitude toward the audience, its integrity of style, and its good use of the American past. Of the fifty or so plays I’ve seen over the past year, this is one of the handful I’d like to see again.

Michael Smith’s play is extraordinary: an impression of life wavering between fantasy and fact, between idea and vision. Its structure, its atmosphere and its analogies fuse easily and its reverberations survive however obscure and diffuse they are. At first the form suggests little more than a triangle of young American dropouts, deep in Greenwich Village with an acid taste on their tongues which long ago penetrated their minds. But they and their emotional disasters are used to fuse and connect with an episode from undead American history.

They are involved with the California of 1873 and a tribe of Indians oppressed by the American army. The arrival of the girl’s father (a General) with chaplain and liberal friend is the reason for a play within the play in which they all enact that history and that betrayal. The three visitors become the threatening and “moderate” 1873 Americans whose intransigence is their glory, while the young become the Indians with that race’s pride and obstinacy. The betrayal that the American army inflicts, causes the death of its own leaders, which parallels the girl’s double betrayal by her father. Where the Indians could avenge, the modern young trio can only make words, dream of revolution, take their acid trips, their pot: what ghastly blessings these prove.

For what extends and deepens the whole play is its powerful atmospheric of dislocation: by the end of the second act we are in a limbo somewhere between fantasy and fact. It is a void which the author has scrupulously prepared for: a void hinted at by the mysterious telephone calls, the alienated chatter, the persistent talk of illness invading the bodies. “I have just woken up and it’s nearly dark,” one of them says. The play drifts and wavers; a moral and actual vertigo. In the life of small talk there is betrayal, in that of fantasy dreams.

Certainly the whole is much too long, the characters indulge in too much instant poeticism and self commentary which block the play’s unnerving and uneasy pulse, but the experience of disorientation remains wonderfully strong. Nicholas Wright in the finest production he has achieved for this theatre breautifully paces and controls and restricts the players so that nothing teeters into histrionics. Michael Pennington’s Jack, though too young, is ideally disturbed.