PARTISAN REVIEW
American in-feeling, but to which the blithe spirit of the players them–
selves made the principal solicitation. These players asked your indul–
gence where the American Repertory Theater DEMANDED YOUR
SUPPORT, and where the commercial theater
(Medea, The Heiress, A
Streetcar Named Desire, Antony and Cleopatra)
manipulated your
emotions for two hours in a thorough yet perfunctory manner, as though
your object in attending the theater was not to give anything at all, even
understanding or tolerance, but to receive a certain bargained-for satis–
faction, like a customer in a whorehouse. A modesty of ambition, a
limi–
tation of purpose, an acknowledgment of weaknesses characterized all
the repertory performances; perfection was not aimed at, but only a
generous sufficiency; there was no truculence, neither the boorish truc–
ulence of financial success nor the weak truculence of artistic failure.
The theater was not treated either as "entertainment" in the Broadway
sense or as a moral imperative in the manner of Miss LeGallienne or
Piscator. The tone taken by these productions was one of pleasant serious–
ness or of serious pleasantry; the final impression left was one of the
humane and the droll.
John Bull's Other Island, The Respectful Prostitute, The Old Lady
Says «No!",
the four Chekhov comedies, none of these plays are master–
pieces, and
Volpone,
as I have indicated, was played as if it had never
been one. They are intelligent and witty fancies, located in some region
of the mind between the sentimen tal and the sardonic, even the Sartre
play (surely the French
Born Yesterday,
whose political stridencies
have been moderated by the direction of Mary Hunter and by the
equable performance of Meg Mundy as the prostitute with the vacuum
cleaner, till the play seems not quite so much a crude indictment of
the American South as a dream that a French savant might have had
on the subject of the Scottsboro case, a dream full of distortions and
confusions, half-digested facts and conventional notions, moments of
terror and interludes of ribaldry, a wonderful hodge-podge, in fact, in
the brain of a clever man, to which this company has lent credibility by
treating it as a parody which nevertheless speaks truth.
The Old Lady Says «No!"
is frankly a nightmare (based on Stephen
Dedalus's witticism) which mixes up an eighteenth-century costume
piece with a modem expressionist drama. The curtain goes up on ro–
mantic Robert Emmet with a price on his head, in the green jacket
and top boots, declaiming in blank verse from a garden to his lady-love
in the window above. He is surprised by Major Sirr and his redcoats;
swords are drawn; he falls to the ground; and at this point the story
suddenly collapses. A doctor is summoned to the stage. In history brave
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