Books, Arts & Manners: The Theater of the Sixties

Thirty Plays Hath November By Walter Kerr Simon and Schuster, $6.50 Stages: The Fifty-Year Childhood of the American Theater By Emory Lewis Prentice-Hall, $7.95 The Jumping-Off Place: America Drama in the 1960s By Gerald Weales Macmillan, $6.95 The Sixties have a few months to go, but the mad rush to look back on them has already begun. And mad rush it is, for who wants to look back on such an exceedingly unsatisfactory decade? The _ theater is a particularly poignant case In point. Theatrical expectations build for months, and no one is trying to Tush any New Great Plays onstage before the end of the year. Better to be _ the Misunderstood Masterpiece of the Seventies than the Last Flop of the Sixties, __ Indexes to the retrospective surveys _ by Gerald Weales and Emory Lewis, | and to a new collection of Walter Kerr’s reviews, suggest the disordered _ Yatlety of the Sixties. Like the Jolly : Jump-Ups, there are thousands of peoPle, none of them very memorable, _ Squashed flat between the pages of fat books, Indeed, Lewis’s survey, Stages, which covers fifty years, not ten, reads like an enlarged copy of Cue, for which Lewis was a long-time critic. Page 97, for instance, mentions ten plays, six playwrights, plus the Latin Quarter, Nabisco, Tokay, the South, Catholicism, the American Indian, the Florida Keys, Stalin, Love, and the sexual revolution, the latter treated in lower case, probably to distinguish it from Love. So the lists are long, but not particularly encouraging. A similar book about the Fifties would have had different emphases. There would have been long listings for Williams, Miller, Inge and Anderson. Kerr and Lewis devote long sections of their volumes to Williams, Miller and Albee; Weales puts Williams and Miller together and gives Albee a chapter to himself. But the structures are artificial. Only Albee continues to turn out respectable, if highly uneven, material each year. Miller is Miller, a serious craftsman who writes too infrequently, and for Williams, the milk train doesn’t stop here anymore. The most significant development in the American theater in the Sixties is the decline of the playwright. He is no longer a consistently producing contributor to the drama as we experience it. In the Sixties, we are told, God is dead. But the playwright is deader. One-time playwrights prove the point. Few contemporary American playwrights have written more than one good play: Jack Gelber (The Connection), Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad), Jean-Claude Van Itallie (America Hurrah!), Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), and so forth. Similarly, the novelist-playwrights are one-timers, mostly unsuccessful: Saul Bel- | low (The Last Analysis), Norman Mailer (The Deer Park), James Baldwin (Blues for Mr. Charlie), and Joseph Heller (We Bombed in New Haven). Of the blacks, Lorraine Hansberry is dead, LeRoi Jones is an itinerant revolutionary, and Ed Bullins is moving into theater management. The non-materialization of a playwright for the Sixties worries the critic oriented to the printed page. It is the absence of much interesting matter in the theater that makes critics like Walter Kerr depend for their fireworks on the text—and, by extension, worry long and loud about theatrical productions which “depart from the text.” Kerr acknowledges that “The Bacchae will still be there when we’re all through roughing it up.” But the inter- — esting parts of his statement are 1) that © the continuing existence of the text is the important thing, and 2) that we have been “roughing it up,” or “mauling” it, as he puts it elsewhere. His first contention is noncontroversial and therefore interesting. As Dr. Johnson pointed out regarding his own celibacy, there could be no fear that the world would become depopulated because he was chaste. Likewise, we do not need to congratulate ourselves on the continued existence of The Bacchae. The Bacchae is. But how does one “maul” a text? The printed text of a play rightly gives much pleasure to many people, partic-_ ularly people who have no easy access to theater. But it remains a printed text. At best, the text is an occasion for drama. The reason The Bacchae is such an interesting play is that it can be “mauled.” Euripides, like Shakespeare, is meant for realization in a thousand ways, material for a dramatic extension of what Keats calls “negative capability.” One of the contributing factors to — the decline in the absolute authority of the text is the influence of the screenplay. For the film director, the screenplay is something to be worked with, maybe mauled. Film directors are frequently theater directors too. And what works in one medium will be made to — work in another if the same people are making the rules. The playwright contributes to the process by becoming, out of economic necessity, a screen-playwright. The happening, too, has tended to pull theater away from its anchor in the text. But directors and actors are — beginning to shy away from the happening psychology. A happening lacks the ordering presence of a director or a plot, and it therefore lacks the tension that defines theater. Gerald Weales makes the point nicely in The Jumping-Off Place: “. . . unless the activity of a happening is structured into a psychological or informational situation . . . it is minimal-_ ly interesting. After all, these activities are structured in real life.” He goes on to note how much more impact one © gets from watching Laurence Olivier pour a glass of water in Uncle Vanya than from watching a go-go girl pour a glass of water in a happening. “The happening, in its attempt to bring life into art, tends . . . towards dehuman- =-tzation.” Theater is somewhere between text and happening. The introduction of a _ person into a space, of the human im_age (as opposed to the impersonal body _ in the happening) into the text, creates _ drama. For the actor responds by testing his own limits of freedom within ~ the compass set by the director and the text. In Elizabethan, Restoration and _ eighteenth-century theater, the roles of _ playwright, director and leading actor tended to blur. But the authority figure existed. So he does now, but he is the _ director not the playwright. At the end 2 of the Sixties we are returning to a condition of the theater in Shakespeare’s time, when the text is the servant of the theater and not the theater the servant of the text.

RC

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Richmond Crinkley

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Thirty Plays Hath November By Walter Kerr Simon and Schuster, $6.50 Stages: The Fifty-Year Childhood of the American Theater By Emory Lewis Prentice-Hall, $7.95 The Jumping-Off Place: America Drama in the 1960s By Gerald Weales Macmillan, $6.95 The Sixties have a few months to go, but the mad rush to look back on them has already begun. And mad rush it is, for who wants to look back on such an exceedingly unsatisfactory decade? The _ theater is a particularly poignant case In point. Theatrical expectations build for months, and no one is trying to Tush any New Great Plays onstage before the end of the year. Better to be _ the Misunderstood Masterpiece of the Seventies than the Last Flop of the Sixties, __ Indexes to the retrospective surveys _ by Gerald Weales and Emory Lewis, | and to a new collection of Walter Kerr’s reviews, suggest the disordered _ Yatlety of the Sixties. Like the Jolly : Jump-Ups, there are thousands of peoPle, none of them very memorable, _ Squashed flat between the pages of fat books, Indeed, Lewis’s survey, Stages, which covers fifty years, not ten, reads like an enlarged copy of Cue, for which Lewis was a long-time critic. Page 97, for instance, mentions ten plays, six playwrights, plus the Latin Quarter, Nabisco, Tokay, the South, Catholicism, the American Indian, the Florida Keys, Stalin, Love, and the sexual revolution, the latter treated in lower case, probably to distinguish it from Love. So the lists are long, but not particularly encouraging. A similar book about the Fifties would have had different emphases. There would have been long listings for Williams, Miller, Inge and Anderson. Kerr and Lewis devote long sections of their volumes to Williams, Miller and Albee; Weales puts Williams and Miller together and gives Albee a chapter to himself. But the structures are artificial. Only Albee continues to turn out respectable, if highly uneven, material each year. Miller is Miller, a serious craftsman who writes too infrequently, and for Williams, the milk train doesn’t stop here anymore. The most significant development in the American theater in the Sixties is the decline of the playwright. He is no longer a consistently producing contributor to the drama as we experience it. In the Sixties, we are told, God is dead. But the playwright is deader. One-time playwrights prove the point. Few contemporary American playwrights have written more than one good play: Jack Gelber (The Connection), Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad), Jean-Claude Van Itallie (America Hurrah!), Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), and so forth. Similarly, the novelist-playwrights are one-timers, mostly unsuccessful: Saul Bel- | low (The Last Analysis), Norman Mailer (The Deer Park), James Baldwin (Blues for Mr. Charlie), and Joseph Heller (We Bombed in New Haven). Of the blacks, Lorraine Hansberry is dead, LeRoi Jones is an itinerant revolutionary, and Ed Bullins is moving into theater management. The non-materialization of a playwright for the Sixties worries the critic oriented to the printed page. It is the absence of much interesting matter in the theater that makes critics like Walter Kerr depend for their fireworks on the text—and, by extension, worry long and loud about theatrical productions which “depart from the text.” Kerr acknowledges that “The Bacchae will still be there when we’re all through roughing it up.” But the inter- — esting parts of his statement are 1) that © the continuing existence of the text is the important thing, and 2) that we have been “roughing it up,” or “mauling” it, as he puts it elsewhere. His first contention is noncontroversial and therefore interesting. As Dr. Johnson pointed out regarding his own celibacy, there could be no fear that the world would become depopulated because he was chaste. Likewise, we do not need to congratulate ourselves on the continued existence of The Bacchae. The Bacchae is. But how does one “maul” a text? The printed text of a play rightly gives much pleasure to many people, partic-_ ularly people who have no easy access to theater. But it remains a printed text. At best, the text is an occasion for drama. The reason The Bacchae is such an interesting play is that it can be “mauled.” Euripides, like Shakespeare, is meant for realization in a thousand ways, material for a dramatic extension of what Keats calls “negative capability.” One of the contributing factors to — the decline in the absolute authority of the text is the influence of the screenplay. For the film director, the screenplay is something to be worked with, maybe mauled. Film directors are frequently theater directors too. And what works in one medium will be made to — work in another if the same people are making the rules. The playwright contributes to the process by becoming, out of economic necessity, a screen-playwright. The happening, too, has tended to pull theater away from its anchor in the text. But directors and actors are — beginning to shy away from the happening psychology. A happening lacks the ordering presence of a director or a plot, and it therefore lacks the tension that defines theater. Gerald Weales makes the point nicely in The Jumping-Off Place: “. . . unless the activity of a happening is structured into a psychological or informational situation . . . it is minimal-_ ly interesting. After all, these activities are structured in real life.” He goes on to note how much more impact one © gets from watching Laurence Olivier pour a glass of water in Uncle Vanya than from watching a go-go girl pour a glass of water in a happening. “The happening, in its attempt to bring life into art, tends . . . towards dehuman- =-tzation.” Theater is somewhere between text and happening. The introduction of a _ person into a space, of the human im_age (as opposed to the impersonal body _ in the happening) into the text, creates _ drama. For the actor responds by testing his own limits of freedom within ~ the compass set by the director and the text. In Elizabethan, Restoration and _ eighteenth-century theater, the roles of _ playwright, director and leading actor tended to blur. But the authority figure existed. So he does now, but he is the _ director not the playwright. At the end 2 of the Sixties we are returning to a condition of the theater in Shakespeare’s time, when the text is the servant of the theater and not the theater the servant of the text.