Essay: THE MODERN THEATER OR, THE WORLD AS A METAPHOR OF DREAD

THE theater is the Lazarus of the arts. Two thousand years of "worst seasons ever" between Periclean Athens "and Elizabethan England failed to bury it. Indeed, in the two and a half millenniums since Aeschylus, the number of dramatic geniuses could be counted on one and a half hands. The theater does not live on its masterpieces but between them. Man created the theater in his own image, and it wears two masks and a thousand faces. The mask of tragedy says weep—and bear it. The mask of comedy says grin—and bear it. The theater is witness and partner to man's endurance. Tawdry or frivolous, gallant, polemical or profound, the theater is the place where man speaks to man about man in his living presence.

Today that very serious dialogue is difficult, oblique and garbled. It sometimes seems like a bad phone connection—full of static, elusive, abrupt, frustrating and almost hostile. U.S. playwrights have even cut the wire—for the moment they have nothing to say about either humanity or the human predicament. That poet of the violated heart, Tennessee Williams, may return to his best form at any time; meanwhile, he carries repetition to the edge of self-parody (The Mutilated) or attempts religious allegories (Milk Train) in which symbols masquerade as wonders. Arthur Miller thumbs disconsolately through a three-hour "Dear Diary" (After the Fall), making moralistic marginal notes on his past. Edward Albee has been a ventriloquist rather than a voice ever since he lit that verbal holocaust between the sexes, Virginia Woolf.

Physically the U.S. theater is more robust than its gloomy pulse takers are willing to admit. Broadway is staging a minor revolution, from spruced-up theaters to flexible ticket pricing. Coast to coast, regional theaters are sprouting. But a handsome playhouse or sounder show-business economics does not make a home for a living theater unless there exist playwrights with something to say.

Life Without Sanctions

In the past three decades, the U.S. theater has dashed from the barricade to the bedroom, from a flirtation with Marx to an infatuation with Freud. The social-protest school, including Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw and Lillian Hellman, recessed when it lost its villain. The Depression took its critics with it.

The case-study cadets took over, blandly following Williams into the sexual badlands. From William Inge to Paddy Chayefsky, they gave their characters a good confessional cry, straightened out their kinky little complexes, and tucked them beddie-bye. These clinical gospelers of love enjoyed a vogue as long as playgoers were "yung and easily freudened," as Joyce once put it. But fashions are the autumns of ideas. Last season Murray Schisgal put all those clotted cliches into the mouths of three wackily soulful devotees of "adjustment" and "personal relationships," derisively labeled his play Luv, and the psychosexual jig was up.