Repertory Theater: After the Fall

The concept of the repertory company is several thousand years older than Shakespeare: a troupe of actors who can perform in any of a dozen or more plays. By contrast with the one-shot, boffo-or-busto standards of commercial Broadway, the dream of the modern rep company is to produce plays that have merit in dramatic literature but only moderate box-office potential, to try out experimental plays and at the same time serve as a living library of the great classic plays of the past, to take green actors and train them to maturity in roles of all sizes, ages and centuries.

The most ambitious effort in the U.S. to date has been Manhattan’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, playing for the past year in a temporary Greenwich Village theater and scheduled to move into the Lincoln Center complex next fall. Last week the dream had all but ended. Director Robert Whitehead had been forced out of his job; Director Elia Kazan had followed suit and resigned; and Arthur Miller, the rep company’s principal playwright, had given up his association with the theater.

Compounded Errors. What had happened? Critics doubted that the trouble was money. There had been deficits, but they were less than the deficits that had been expected and budgeted. Nor was the massive head-lopping merely a power struggle within Lincoln Center’s family of music, dance, opera and theater. Guilty of some miserable productions, the repertory theater had been ultimately damned by its successes; the company that had been created to help revitalize the New York theater has succeeded only in imitating what is already there. News pictures of Miller and Kazan sweating out the “death watch” for daily reviews after an open ing illustrated how far they never got from Broadway.

The Lincoln Center rep company began compounding its errors from the outset. When it was set up nearly five years ago, the directors’ first move was to go for Broadway brand names and select two of the best: Whitehead, producer of Bus Stop among other things, and Kazan, one of Broadway’s most celebrated directors, who staged A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Arthur Miller, after eight years of silence as a playwright, offered his services, which at the time may have appeared to be a dividend.

Miller Showcase. Demonstrating their Broadway orientation, Elia Kazan and Whitehead selected Miller’s After the Fall as their first production. Whatever one thinks of the play, the one thing one can assuredly say is that no Broadway producer would have turned it down. A distinct timidity about striking out to new, non-Broadway frontiers was thus apparent at the beginning. The second choice, Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions, served mainly to display the panoramic flexibility of the Washington Square stage, a genuflection to physical plant rather than inner spirit. The third selection, S. N. Behrman’s But For Whom Charlie, was like buying Broadway goods at a fire sale; Behrman is now 71 years old, and Charlie is, in fact, an old man’s play, a drawing-room harangue about a great deal in the contemporary world that Behrman finds most offensive.

This season the rep company began with its worst fiasco yet, a revival of The Changeling that revealed just how inept the company, as presently assembled, is. For example, Actress Barbara Loden, who seemed to be a remarkable find as Marilyn Monroe in After The Fall, turned out to be embarrassingly like what one would expect Marilyn to have been if she had ever played Dostoevsky, as she was forever hoping to. And with Incident at Vichy—Arthur Miller’s new hit—things came full circle. Thus, approximately one year after its opening, Lincoln Center has served as little more than a showcase for Miller, an established Broadway talent.

A curious final irony is that while the Lincoln Center rep group has been failing so clamorously, a repertory company has quietly come to the city’s Phoenix Theater that is everything the Lincoln Center group might aspire to be. Called the Association of Producing Artists, it germinated as a professional acting company touring the provinces, now alternates between the University of Michigan and Manhattan. Its current production of Shaw’s Man and Superman is exquisitely performed, brilliantly thought out, and acted with a thoroughgoing ensemble spirit. A.P.A. took five years to reach its present perfection; Lincoln Center apparently expected its own repertory company to rise full-grown like Athena from the brow of Zeus.