BROADWAY: In the Gutter

At any well-run funeral for a “beloved” actor or “distinguished” playwright, someone is bound to call the theater a shrine. And so it has been during much of its history. At certain times, it has been a shrine to God, or to the Fates, as the source of meaning in the human drama. Later, it became a shrine mostly to man seeking—vainly—to rule his own destiny.

But today’s theater does not even worship man; it lives, precariously, by holding him in contempt.

This notion is beginning to dawn even on hardheaded Broadway professionals as they seek to explain the facts: of 45 productions that have opened on Broadway since last autumn, 30 have already closed, half of them after scarcely a week. It is the most disastrous season within memory, not only financially but artistically, and few deny that the American theater suffers from a sickness of the soul.

Non-Heroes. The Theatre Guild’s President Lawrence Langner thinks that scripts cater to parochial Broadway tastes, insists that the rest of the nation is not so fond of rape, reefers and sodomy. His views won front-page attention in a recent issue of Variety under the banner: FOLKS DON’T DIG THAT FREUD. And Broadway Critic John Chapman has been offering a similar warning: the theater is in atrophy, he suggests, because it has lost faith in the spirit of man.

In mid-2Oth century America, the dominant note on the stage is not courage, excitement or hope. It is not even honest despair, which can be the beginning of fortitude. It is a kind of bored preoccupation with familiar vices, treated with tabloid sensationalism, or written off in psychological clichés, but too rarely measured against sin and salvation, human striving and human failure.

The trouble is not so much that playwrights are attracted to violent or ugly themes. These almost inevitably occur in great drama. The trouble is in the spirit in which these themes are treated. In any of its high periods, the drama implied a human condition capable of dignity and hence of tragedy. The non-hero of too many modern plays starts out in the gutter and ends up there; he is not tragic because he never rises and hence cannot fall.

Pink Puppets. Columbia University Dean Jacques Barzun extends the point.

The contemporary stage, he says, “is filled with characters all driven like machinery.

When that happens once or twice, it may be interesting, but after that, boredom.

Real drama always implies a certain amount of free will. But when you’ve got puppets from the start, you know after the first five minutes what the outcome will be—and it will not matter.” Of all the puppets on the Broadway stage—the psychology-prattlers and so-ciology-spouters, the junkies, the drunks, the rebellious adolescents, the child-eating moms, the vicious generals and sweet-souled “liberals,” the organization men who want to “sell out” and the staunch little women who won’t, the inarticulate minorities and their articulate champions —of all these, the most significant are the puppets maneuvered by Tennessee Williams. At times they have been stunningly lifelike, and once or twice Puppeteer Williams has put on a rattling good show.

But he and his imitators have also had a disastrous influence on the U.S. stage.

As Novelist-Critic Mary McCarthy wrote of A Streetcar Named Desire, “Williams is addicted to the embroidering lie, the stark contrast, the jagged scene, the jungle motifs (‘They come together with low, animal moans’), to suicide, homosexuality, rape and insanity. His work creates in the end that very effect of painful falsity which is imparted to the Kowalski household by Blanche’s pink lampshade.” Lost Pride. The pink light falls everywhere; even in a new political comedy, supposedly about an election that is surrounded by summitry, H-bombs and other momentous symbols of history (see THEATER), the author can think of no other key plot devices than a “nervous breakdown” and homosexuality. As for the off-Broadway theater, it sometimes shows encouraging desires to break old forms and find new ones. But in the main, the changes are mechanical and superficial. Example: beneath the Pirandelloan surface of The Connection (TIME, Jan. 25), there is just a den of junkies being exposed only for exposure’s sake. Typically, the play’s shortcoming is not in the fixes they take through the arm but in the lack of repair to their souls.

No serious critic is calling for “wholesome” theater as such. Some of the season’s worst plays have been entirely wholesome. But the fact remains that, as Critic Chapman puts it, “When man loses all pride in himself, he will go—and his theater is already going fast.”