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PARTISAN REVIEW
I do not think so. I am one of a large number of lovers of the
theater who are dissatisfied with Broadway. And the reason that Broad–
way is unsatisfactory is very simple: it is because it is a market, and
not a workshop. Like all markets, it depends upon its sources of supply,
but makes no provision for producing anything itself. Macy's markets
Mexican blown glass and plastic bathroom fixtures with godlike im–
partiality, but does not have to care how they are produced. The
Theatre Guild-one of the most successful and characteristic firms on
Broadway-markets Shaw, Molnar and O'Neill after they have been
formed and recognized elsewhere. Since the little-theater movement,
which began shortly before World War I, there has been a long and
distinguished list of directors, playwrights, designers, actors and patrons
of the theater who have tried to buck the Broadway system in order to
provide the theater with a workshop-that is, a place: a physical place
with some economic support, and (much more important) a place in
the public consciousness-in which the art of the theater could be
worked at first and sold second.
So many observers have pointed out that Broadway is fed by the off–
Broadway workshops (the little theaters and the college theater of this
country, and the theaters of Europe), that it is perhaps unnecessary to
substantiate the fact in detail. The little-theater movement, which
finally ended with the crash of '29, produced O'Neill, Paul Green, Stark
Young, Robert Edmund Jones, and many other artists who represent
the very best of the American Theater. The socially conscious anti–
Broadway Theater of the '30s-notably the Group Theater and the
short-lived but enormously significant Federal Theater-gave us Clur–
man, Strassberg, Clifford Odets, Franchot Tone, the late Jules Garfield,
Marc Blitzstein, and many others. And both of these off-Broadway
movements fed the show-shops with new ideas and new techniques and
styles too numerous to mention. When the off-Broadway theater grows
discouraged and fades away, and the theaters of Europe are darkened
by war or revolution, Broadway is bare and dry indeed, as anyone will
agree who remembers Broadway in the late '30s. Imagine what the
present season would be without the group in the Jan Huss auditorium,
the Circle in the Square Theater, the Theater de Lys, the Phoenix
Theater-and without Gide, Anouilh, and Giraudoux. And I do not
even mention the steady stream of recruits and ideas which the show
shops receive from the college and university theaters.
I know that some observers regard this process, whereby Broadway
is fed by workshop theaters off Broadway, as right and natural. The
late Mrs. E.
J.
R . Isaacs of
Theatre Arts Monthly
thought so: she
thought that the "Tributary Theater"-her name for everything off
