Magazines: Dramatically Different

The “little magazines”—a select and often little-read group of literary periodicals—tend to remain small because they appeal to limited audiences. Yet one of the newer little magazines shows promise of surprising growth. It is the eight-year-old Tulane Drama Review, in which Editor Richard Schechner, a Tulane University Ph.D., combines a scholar’s skill with the insight and pugnacity of a first-rate journalist. Since taking over two years ago, he has increased the stature of T.D.R. enough that the American National Theater and Academy last month switched its group subscription from Show to T.D.R. ANTA’s 4,800 members will increase the magazine’s circulation to nearly 15,000, placing it among the leading literary quarterlies. “T.D.R. started off as a valuable magazine,” says Yale Drama Professor John Gassner; “now it is indispensible for anyone connected with the theater.”

Hard News. Schechner has won such praise by putting into his magazine something most literary editors overlook—hard news. When Julian Beck and his wife Judith Malina, the founders of Manhattan’s Living Theater, barricaded themselves in their theater to ward off eviction, he interviewed them through a megaphone. He keeps in touch with European theater on both sides of the Curtain. He prints a previously unpublished play in each issue; so far, each of the plays has been produced within a few months of its T.D.R. debut. Though Tulane University provides a New Orleans office and financial aid, Schechner is free to print what he pleases, depends largely on non-scholars for his articles. “We are not here,” he says “to inflate academic egos.” Schechner, who turns out the magazine with the help of Associate Editor Ted Hoffman, worked on college newspapers at Cornell and Iowa University, was in Paris writing his doctoral thesis on lonescu when he was tapped for the T.D.R. job.

Schechner has also stirred up interest with his caustically outspoken editorial comments. He delights in dissenting. While critics almost unanimously praised Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Schechner called it “a classic of bad taste.” He attacks plays that promote what he calls “morbidity and sexual perversity which are only there to titillate an impotent and homosexual theater and audience.” He denounces Broadway as “commodity theater,” and crusades for a quickening of local professional and university theaters, where, he believes, the true future of American theater lies. When just about everyone else was doing stories on Shakespeare, Schechner did a special issue on Marlowe.

Running Rebuttals. Although Schechner states his case with an almost belligerent finality, he is not at all averse to inviting an adversary to write a rebuttal that he runs directly after his own piece. The result, says Historian Jacques Barzun, “takes the theater out of the realm of mere grease paint and glamor and into that of ideas and feeling. Aeschylus and Shaw would applaud, and I do too.”