Books in Brief: On Directing

On Directing, by Harold Clurman (Macmillan, 308 pages, $7.95). For anyone who hasn’t read The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman’s summing up of his experience in the theater will be useful as an intelligent and restrained statement of the guiding principles of the American theater in the 1940s and 1950s. Clurman has no axe to grind. He states his positions simply. But the virtue in the book is that much of the time Clurman says the obvious about theater that all too often doesn’t get said at all. For instance, he makes a useful distinction between the script (the written, unrealized drama) and the play (the drama as it manifests itself onstage). Half the book is devoted to notes on plays Clurman has directed, including Arthur Miller’s most recent work, from which Clurman parted company a couple of weeks after his book appeared. The notes on plays are more theatrical history than textbook advice, but what precedes them—on choosing a script and a cast, on setting, and on the process of directing—is valuable indeed. R. crinkley