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PARTISAN REVIEW
impossible for a fascist playwright to find backers at any time between
1930 and 1945. Even so the only American Communist play I know
of during the past several years had a small New York production and
full-scale production in Iron Curtain countries which presumably paid
royalties. Is the present plea for freedom of speech a plea for any
opinions other than Communist opinions? Or is the complaint that any
unorthodox opinion is dubbed Communist?
If
that's it, the unjustly ac–
cused playwright deserves our sympathy and help, like the unjustly
accused actor or professor. What I cannot see
is
how dramaturgy suffers.
A radical playwright, in any case, can't have it both ways: he
can't make his living by flinging accusations at established society and
then tell society it is taking his living away if it flings some accusations
back. In the past it has been very safe on Broadway to hold dangerous
views,
2
and the result has been a spate of easy virtue; the only play–
wright who couldn't have got his plays put on would have been the
anti-liberal; on the Negro question, for example, Broadway has its own
strict orthodoxy. I sometimes think the Broadway radical is one of the
most pampered members of the community. Though an unpampered
one said, when a play of his was rejected, "Well, you don't expect them
to pay for their own liquidation," the pampered ones may be defined
as those who expect just that.
In any event, one must look at a much longer span of time than
Messrs. Thurber and Miller were considering. The impression we have
of "decline" over a period of five or even ten years is reversed as soon
as one play we like comes along. I agree that
The Male Animal
is
better than the comedies of recent seasons, but there may be a better
one than
The Male Animal
at any moment (by Mr. Thurber, for all
I know). Pondering the American theater since 1900 one is bound to
long for plays better than any on the whole record. Before 1918, after
all, the American drama was almost moronic. The improvement in the
'208 was so great it rather naturally went to everyone's head. O'Neill
was thought
to
have superseded Ibsen, and to be comparable, rather, to
Shakespeare and Aeschlylus. I respect several of the critics who carried
on
in
this way and have been relieved to discover that, when challenged,
they retract their hyperboles and hence call for no refutation from the
rest of us. There was no Elizabethan age, there were not even any
Shaws, Chekhovs, and Strindbergs, but there were the Provincetown,
the Guild, the Group Theatre, the Mercury, the Federal Theatre. At
2 And Arthur Miller is indignant that it should now be otherwise. He
protests that circumstances make "it dangerous to dare and worse still, im–
practical" (Many Writers, Few Plays,"
New York Times,
August 10, 1952) .
