Theatre Letter

Whenever the weakness of the American theatre in our time is deplored, the grasping commercialism of the Broadway producer is always cited as the final and ultimate cause of our dissatisfaction. That much maligned villain is really a very sensitive man who likes to think of himself as a person of discriminating taste, and so, like the rest of us, he is readily responsive to the harsh criticism levelled at him. He tries very hard to create for us a theatre of ideas, and yet, when he is unable in every instance to produce a great play, we turn on him with ferocity.

The recent season is an excellent case in point. Broadway was never so intrepid in catering to our announced appetites. We were offered Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, with the original settings and costumes of John Piper, a fine production by Agnes deMille, and the best group of singers to be assembled in a long time. There was Sartre’s Red Gloves. There was The Madwoman of Chaillot, with the original settings and costumes designed by Christian Bérard. American playwrights who tendered new plays were avid and relentless in their pursuit of ideas: Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story was a detailed exposition of how the fascist mentality can develop in our midst; Clifford Odets returned to New York with a bitterly serious study of Hollywood; Herman Wouk’s first play, The Traitor, took up such current questions as atomic fission, nationalism vs. internationalism, and academic freedom in America today; Arthur Miller came back to Broadway with an allegory of the forgotten man which he calls Death of a Salesman; Maxwell Anderson gave us one of the best of his historical plays in Anne of the Thousand Days; and Tennessee Williams added Summer and Smoke, yet another sensitive study of neurotic southern womanhood. Even frank bids for quick success like Fay Kanin’s Goodbye, My Fancy dealt with the decay in personal integrity that success in an academic environment may cause, while Edward, My Son, by Robert Morley and Noel Langley, was the case history of a British tycoon. This devotion to ideas became so contagious that even the field of the musical show was infected and Alan Jay Lerner gave us a sociological study of the decay of the American family in Love Life.