THEATER CHRONICLE
viding a sanction for the theater of a more fundamental kind than the
market
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the government can give. A college or university engaged in
liberal education is supposedly trying to sort out the riches of our tra–
dition, to identify, acquire, and transmit the values and the ways of
thinking upon which the civilization is based, and so to nourish the arts
and sciences of our own time and place. This is a dialectical process
which must be renewed in a different way in every generation. And
the point is that the theater, at its best, is al
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engaged in that process.
When it is most deeply alive in its own time it is aware not only of
immediate issues and passing moods, but of their history and permanent
significance. The distinction I am trying to make between the theater
at its best, and that which enjoys only a momentary life, is like that
between statesmanship and practical politics. The practical politician
finds his power by taking advantage of the situations of the moment,
just as a hit on Broadway expresses merely the moods and the cliches
of a season. A statesman must also have the ear of the public moment
by moment, but at the same time he sees farther and moves toward more
permanent objectives. And in the same way a theater, if it is to survive
long enough to reach maturity, and make some permanent contribution,
must have the attention and interest of a public, yet at the same time
base its art upon the lasting lore of the tradition, and celebrate, in its
own time, some of the perennial issues and mysteries of human life.
Thus the aim of a university at its best is closely analogous to that of
the theater at
its
best. They would seem to be natural allies. And if
the university cannot provide the sanction for a theater of this kind,
what institution in our country can?
I began these remarks by pointing out that the theater is, in fact,
already in our universities in a way. And I do not want to minimize
what has already been accomplished.
If
you look over a list of plays
which have been produced in university and college theaters in this
country in the course of a single year, you will I think be greatly im–
pressed. You will find classics of every period and country; contempo–
rary plays from France or Spain or Germany or Italy; new American
plays by authors known and unknown. Of course the quality of these
productions varies greatly, but in some college theaters the standard
is high enough to make much of the so-called professional theater look
rather stale. And some college theaters succeed, over the years, in build–
ing a local audience outside the college altogether, and so establishing
the kind of far-sighted public sanction which I have been trying to
describe. And this goes on all over the country. In purely quantitative
terms, the university theater is enormous.
The reason that this picture, encouraging, even exciting though
