THEATER CHRONICLE
415
to their full stature. Russia offsets the gift of a fabulous theater and a
good Jiving with a heavy price in restrictions. To anyone who remarks
that Shakespeare also worked under a censorship, I can only reply that
it is open to anyone to compare Elizabethan with Soviet censorship,
both as to the regulations and their enforcement. In such a comparison
the Queen, and even the Puritan city fathers with whom she had little
in common, will make a good showing.
If
some of the Puritans would
have been as strict as Stalin had they had the opportunity, it remains
important that they did not have the opportunity.
The comparison of the two epochs and regimes could not be made
at all except that we still tend to think of censorship in an old-fashioned
way. We think of particular acts of censorship, the striking
Otlt
of a
forbidden word, the banning of a book. We have barely realized that
a greater efficiency in censorship has brought in its train a new men–
tality both for the censors and their
victims.
I have in mind not only
the more macabre horrors of the situation but also the prosaic dullness
of Soviet intellectuals. It resembles all too closely the dullness of the
bourgeoisie against which all left-wing movements, as far as the intelli–
gentsia is concerned, were a revolt.
Not long ago, two American playwrights said in the
New York
Times
that the American drama was threatened by the totalitarian men–
tality-in this case represented by the anti-red Senator McCarthy. One
of them-Arthur Miller-seemed to feel that the American playwright
can no longer speak freely, the other-oddly enough, James Thurber–
that he can no longer even breathe freely-freely enough to relax and
be funny.l Both statements have value as warnings, yet I cannot see
that they have as yet much substance in fact. Satiric or other comedy
may presuppose more freedom than at present exists in Russia, I can–
not see-thinking of Aristophanes and Moliere-that it presupposes
more freedom than at present exists in America, even granting a harsh
estimate of how much that
is.
And in what sense have our playwrights
lost their freedom of speech? It would, I suppose, be impossible for a
Communist playwright to find backers, just as it would have been
1 "The constant open season on writers has seriously depressed literature
in America. It has taken the exuberance and gaiety out of the theater. • . .
Playwrights may come out of hiding and start working happily again if they
hear the old reassuring sound of America laughing; but if the subpoenas for
Hellman and Odets are the beginning of an endless probe of Broadway, then
the American theater cannot be saved and will die" ("Dark Suspicions," by
James Thurber,
New York Times,
July 27, 1952). It is fair to add that Clifford
Odets is less in agreement with Arthur Miller and Miss Hellman than with
Mr. Kazan, that is to say, he believed his duty was not to go into hiding but
to talk.
