THEATER ’70

Any theater person who was good in 1955 is nervous, very nervous, in 1970. As society’s perpetually ailing “abstract and brief chronicle.’’ the theater is lunging into the Seventies with a consuming lust for genius. There is no place in the theater evolving around us for the merely good.

Healthy mediocrity was enough to keep a show running in New York even six or seven years ago. But our one-time best playwrights have fallen into a kind of early dotage. The Williams-Miller-Inge-Anderson group had begun to prove itself on the whole commercially unviable in the mid-Sixties, and even today the retread productions of Death of a Salesman or Camino Real don’t wow them at provincial universities any more than they do in New York. And the efforts of establishment playwrights to accommodate themselves to what they take to be modish have been disastrous. Even Edward Albee, than whom no playwright responds quicker to a new idea, has not been able to keep up with his audience since A Delicate Balance.

RC

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Richmond Crinkley

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Theater

New York

Any theater person who was good in 1955 is nervous, very nervous, in 1970. As society’s perpetually ailing “abstract and brief chronicle.’’ the theater is lunging into the Seventies with a consuming lust for genius. There is no place in the theater evolving around us for the merely good.

Healthy mediocrity was enough to keep a show running in New York even six or seven years ago. But our one-time best playwrights have fallen into a kind of early dotage. The Williams-Miller-Inge-Anderson group had begun to prove itself on the whole commercially unviable in the mid-Sixties, and even today the retread productions of Death of a Salesman or Camino Real don’t wow them at provincial universities any more than they do in New York. And the efforts of establishment playwrights to accommodate themselves to what they take to be modish have been disastrous. Even Edward Albee, than whom no playwright responds quicker to a new idea, has not been able to keep up with his audience since A Delicate Balance.