The 1969 70 Season

The 1969-70 season gave little pleasure, provoked little thought, made little money, and proved there’s one born every minute. Some of the new plays had been waiting in the wings for three or four years, and when they finally got into production, they had a distinctly déjà vu aura. The revivals— Harvey, for instance—gave a pretty good picture of some of the theater of the Twenties or Thirties, but the picture wasn’t as pleasing as we had hoped. The experimental work was a mixed bag—Stomp, The Persians, a revival of The Serpent, Macbeth—with each work trying to suggest that the true spirit of innovation lay with it and nowhere else.

In short, the season past proved that there is nothing new under the lights. Not that there should be, since every new technique has been tried by an experimental company in Sarajevo and every new theme already treated at a small college in Vermont. But there is in the American theater in mid-1970 no sense of consolidation, no will to assimilate.

RC

About the Author

Richmond Crinkley

Featured Tags

Manage following

William Shakespeare

The 1969-70 season gave little pleasure, provoked little thought, made little money, and proved there’s one born every minute. Some of the new plays had been waiting in the wings for three or four years, and when they finally got into production, they had a distinctly déjà vu aura. The revivals— Harvey, for instance—gave a pretty good picture of some of the theater of the Twenties or Thirties, but the picture wasn’t as pleasing as we had hoped. The experimental work was a mixed bag—Stomp, The Persians, a revival of The Serpent, Macbeth—with each work trying to suggest that the true spirit of innovation lay with it and nowhere else.

In short, the season past proved that there is nothing new under the lights. Not that there should be, since every new technique has been tried by an experimental company in Sarajevo and every new theme already treated at a small college in Vermont. But there is in the American theater in mid-1970 no sense of consolidation, no will to assimilate.