Tuesday August 10th 1999 10:10:56

"Carmen", and I daresay the stage version of "The Collector", pale by comparison to Terrance McNally's "Sweet Eros", undoubtably the all-time No. 1 theatrical treatment of The Treatment.

I had the great good fortune to see it when it opened Off Broadway 30 years ago (with the young [but weren't we all then?] Sally Kirkland as The Treatee), when it created a minor hoorah -- not at all for the strict, onstage b & d, but for the fact that for part of the play the female kidnapping victim is (wait for it) topless. Amazing that uncovered mammaries in a theatrical setting don't cause hardly a ripple nowadays, whereas I'm surprised that anybody still has the balls to put on a performance of something that revolves pretty much entirely around female bondage.

It's a short, minimalist two-character play about a guy who kidnaps a girl and monologues at her while she writhes in her chair (hands in back, back to the audience), tries to reach a knife to cut herself loose, drools through her gag (I remember not believing what I was seeing until the guy angrily swipes the drool off her chin and makes some remark about it) and eventually is won over by him. (Of course!) I fire up Google and AllTheWeb periodically to see if anyone may have staged it and posted production stills, and tonight I hit paydirt.

I have no idea how or even whether these URLs will make it through Lynx's rendering of Dreambook, but try these:

http://www.theatre.iastate.edu/shows/98-99/default.html -- it's the last production of the year, at the bottom of the page. I wish to Christ the photographer could have climbed down from the balcony, but some of them are pretty good.

http://www.daily.iastate.edu/volumes/spring99/Apr-22-1999/ae8.html -- a promo piece in the school newspaper (the teeny picture in the upper right is actually a thumbnail link to an enlarged view of what I believe is the scene where she's fumbling with the knife while the guy is conked out sleeping).

harv

HARV: Sweet Eros is the play that I posted about a while back. I'm glad to find someone who actually saw it back in the late 60s (or at all, for that matter). Thank you for the links to the Iowa State stuff--Iowa State!!! Someday, I'll get off my butt and scan that picture from the script (a profile view of Sally Kirkland B&G).

Al