Theatre Chronicle
Winter in the Theatre
I
N THE
New York theatre, this is a big sad year. Every night is New
Year's Eve on Times Square. It is hard to walk along Broadway, hard to
get tickets, hard to get dinner. To find oneself installed in a seat before
a curtain is in itself a triumph; what the curtain discloses, when raised,
is not so important; the means have supplanted the end. Much of our
pleasure this year comes from the sense of our own achievement; in
the foyer, during the intermission, we are as likely to compare our
strategies as ticket-buyers as to compare our experiences of the play. Our
experiences have in fact been thin; the theatre has rationed itself,
drawing heavily on its own staples, on Shakespeare and Bizet, German
expressionism, barbershop harmony, the Whiffenpoof song, the charac–
ter of Dorothy Parker, which belongs as firmly to the theatre as a cari–
cature in Sardi's. There are on the stage this year only two things which
do not remind you of something else-Mary Martin and the character
played by Margaret Sullavan in
The Voice of the Turtle.
Everything
else is derivative, frankly so in
Othello,
where it is a question of a revival,
a restoration of a classic; mockingly so in
Carmen Jones,
where an opera
of passion becomes a "hot" show and a dark theme, given to dark actors,
becomes by paradox light; perversely, sentimentally, uneasily so in
One
Touch of Venus_,
where the tradition of the ballad, the tradition of
barbershop harmony, the tradition of German expressionism, are both
parodied and asserted; corruptly so in
Winged Victory,
where the play
is a bad imitation of a bad movie, and where the playwright can, at his
big moment, find no more suitable musical outlet for his democratic
emotions than the song of the Yale Whiffenpoofs.
This is not a war phenomenon. Since the collapse of the proletarian
theatre as an art-form eight years ago, the theatre has been plagiarizing
itself. Revivals have come thick and fast; there have been the straight
revivals of Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov and Ibsen; and the revivals–
with-a-difference,
Julius Caesar
in. uniforms,
Romeo and Juliet
as ballet,
the Negro
Macbeth-it
is significant that our white culture has had to
draw so heavily on the Negro (witness the
Macbeth,
J ack Carter as
Mephistopheles in Orson Welles's
Dr. Faustus"
and now Paul Robeson
and the cast of
Carmen Jones)
for the revivification of its classics; as
in the days of the Empire in Rome, it is the son of the freedman who
believes most in the national past, and the elite must depend on the feel–
ings and energies of its ex-slaves to experience its own artistic inheritance.
