THEATER CHRONICLE
541
restore the play to its full life, first in the performers, and the imagined
scene, and the movement of the playas a whole, and then in the
response of the audience.
If
the production succeeds
in
this way it means
that a classic has actually been taken off the shelf, its perennial life and
its contemporary relevance reaffirmed. The college theater could be
a practical and experimental part of liberal education, as valuable in its
field as the laboratory is
in
the training of scientists.
If
the college theater did nothing but classics it might be labeled
antiquarian. I think that would be a mistake, because the new interpre–
tation of a work of art which reaches actual performance is to some
degree creative. We do not think of Toscanini as antiquarian when he
plays Beethoven, or Olivier as antiquarian when he plays Oedipus. But
I believe that the college theater should also do contemporary works,
and original plays by students, teachers and other unrecognized play–
wrights. And that part of the work of the theater is educational also,
like creative writing, painting or music. That is because the receiving
end of the educational process is in our own life, and art, such as it is.
By trying to do something of his own the student begins to see the
point of greatness, and to develop the strength to use it for his own
nourishment and guidance.
This picture of what the ideal college theater might do for the
ideal liberal college, if we had them both, is much too rosy, I know.
But before I recognize some of the actual difficulties, I wish to approach
the whole matter from another angle: is it good for the art of the
theater to take refuge in an academic institution?
Offhand many people would answer
No:
the academic is remote,
and artificially protected, while the theater, if it is to be alive, must take
its chances in the great cold world. A domesticated theater, obedient to
deans, Ph.D. requirements, parents, and trustees, is almost a contra–
diction in terms.
If
you want the theater, you know where to find it:
on Times Square. Anything which has not won the long gamble of
Broadway production and acquired the cachet of the luxury market,
is really not theater at all.
The history of the American theater for the last forty years gives
some support to this tough-minded position. Art theaters and little
theaters come and go, but Broadway, which is the theatrical market, or
"show-shop" as it is affectionately called, goes on in the same way year
after year: it represents what the late President Harding liked to call
"normalcy" in the theater. Should we be well advised, therefore, to accept
Broadway as the inevitable, the only possible place in our American
society for the theater to call its own?
