THEATER CHRONICLE
413
been superseded and rendered obsolete by the movies. Once
A Prisoner
of Zenda
has been on the screen, you would never want to see it on
the stage. Pictures like
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and
High
Noon
transcend all the theater's efforts to present adventure. I can
explain the drama critics' enthusiasm for the recent thriller
Dial M
for Murder
only on the assumption that they don't go to the movies.
People who can see Humphrey Bogart at the corner movie for seventy
cents would be fools to trail downtown and pay several dollars to see
something in the same genre and not in the same class.
In short, along with the theater public, playwriting talent has been
deflected into TV, the movies, poetry, the novel, or out of the arts
altogether, with the result that (to coin a phrase) "there
is
no Amer–
ican drama." There is a lack not only of Shakespeares and O'Caseys
but also of Dekkers and Joneses. In America playwriting is not yet
a profession.
Playwriting may be said to be a profession when playwrights of
high average talent are given their chance, their chance being produc–
tion by performers who also constitute a profession. The American
theater does not consistently offer playwrights this chance. A play
cannot be produced on Broadway unless its producers think it has a
good chance of running for a year. Plays of "mere promise" are ex–
cluded; the theater is a place where promises are not kept. Hence,
though there is a place for the playwright to "succeed," there is no
place for
him
to begin or to develop. When young he can serve no
apprenticeship ; as he grows older he can maintain no continuity.
It has been said: "Without
Titus Andronicus,
no
Hamlet."
Yet if
a Shakespeare came along today, what would happen? Either
Titus
would never get produced at all; or it would
be
a flop and drive the
Bard to drink, teaching, and TV; or it would be a hit, and the poet
would spend an anxious lifetime writing twenty more
Tituses.
A profession of playwrights, I have intimated, presupposes a pro–
fession of actors. Despite Actors' Equity Association, there is no such
profession, there are merely some arrangements to stop employers
running off with their workers' wages. An adequate definition of an
acting profession would include what the French understand by
metier–
a standard of workmanship that you achieve by joining the group and
by practice; as with playwrights, the lack is apprenticeship in the be–
ginning and continuity later. You do not know what the art of acting
is
capable of unless you have seen an ensemble of players who have
worked together, year in, year out. Nor is there any adequate substitute,
in
the training of an individual actor, for the performance of dozens
or hundreds of real roles (the epithet
real
being inserted here to dis-
