The Theater: Finish Line

The previous Broadway season had worn such a last-place look that 1953-54 seemed by contrast almost a pennant winner. But on its own merits, it just squeezed into first division: its special contribution, indeed, was its notable number of pretty good evenings. There was nowhere a distinguished new drama or a brilliant new comedy; no new playwright flashed down like a comet to assume the look of a fixed star. Glaringly few established playwrights were represented, and none with distinction. Nor was there a truly good revival—or even much revived.

But 1953-54, no season of peaks, at least came off as an agreeable plateau. And beyond a nice steady flow of the respectable, the more-than-conventional, the slightly-better-than-average, there was a constant sense of small jets and gushes and freshets, and of a main flow fed by tributary streams. Perhaps more than anything else, 1953-54 was the season when off-Broadway began breathing, however faintly, down Broadway's neck. On lower Second Avenue, without having arisen out of anybody else's ashes, there emerged the Phoenix Theater. Whatever its shortcomings, it gave Manhattan its first really promising repertory—neither Old Guard nor avant-garde—in years. In The Golden Apple, it offered the season's one really individual musical. And the Phoenix's Golden Apple, like the Theatre de Lys' End As a Man, like the Circle in the Square's Girl on the Via Flaminia, went uptown in time to Broadway. Other off-Broadway successes: Marc Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, Leslie Stevens' Bullfight, and—after a late opening the season before—The World of Sholem Aleichem.

Broadway, all this time, was also happily in business. In Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny Court Martial, it turned out first-rate theater. In John Patrick's Teahouse of the August Moon (which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics Award), it offered the pleasantest sort of popular entertainment. In Edward Chodorov's Oh, Men! Oh, Women! it told an amusing yarn of a psychoanalyst. In Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, by mingling homosexuality with a radiant Deborah Kerr, it produced ideal matinee drama.

Actress Kerr added to the season's fine stockpile of feminine oomph. Heading the list was Audrey Hepburn, who, as the mermaid of Jean Giraudoux's rather waterlogged Ondine, proved a sprite that never was on sea or land. Equally near (though never under) the water, Shirley Booth was the principal lure of By the Beautiful Sea, while France's Jeanmaire brought something boyish, girlish and impish to the lumpish Girl in Pink Tights.

Of well-known playwrights, the only one to score big was George S. Kaufman with The Solid Gold Cadillac, and he only in collaboration with Howard Teichmann, and with help from a lady—Josephine Hull. But among the many promising first-timers on Broadway, there were not only Tea and Sympathy's Anderson, Via Flaminia's Alfred Hayes and End As a Man's Calder Willingham, but Louis Peterson with Take a Giant Step, Jane Bowles with In the Summer House and Julian Funt with The Magic and the Loss.

The season saw the death, in Eugene O'Neill, of America's most famous playwright and, in Lee Shubert, of Broadway's most powerful operator. And for the first time since 1943, Broadway offered nothing by Rodgers &Hammerstein.