Gore Vidal
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
"Love love love love love love love love love love" give or
take a few "loves" was the entire lyric of a song by Charlie Chaplin
and I, herewith, propose that it be adopted as the American theater's
official anthem. Just name your problem, sit back and let love solve it:
race prejudice, foreign relations, even Job reeling beneath the unkind
attentions of a dubious Yale God gets off the hook at the end through
Love, which has now replaced the Third Act Marines of a simpler time.
On those rare occasions when some other solution tries to creep into the
popular theater it either fails or else survives once whatever alien gold
was in it has been transmuted to base Love by the alchemy of produc–
tion. Granted Mr. Arthur Miller worries his head about Problems of
the day, but as for his heart, well, scratched he bleeds Love. Even that
attention we must pay his salesman is but a command to love him.
Our popular theater ponders, to the exclusion of all else, the pathos
of Love withheld, of Love lost, of Love found after three acts of jittery
footling while the man learns Tenderness (never the woman since, ac–
cording to commercial lore, Woman
knows).
Moon-guided, triple–
crowned, inscrutable, American woman in our theater is never so wise
as when she's not thinking at all, just being, and listening with a tiny
smile to the third act speech of the man who has had to learn Tender–
ness the hard way. "Gosh, Marge, I know how it was but it won't be
like that no more, honest, baby, it won't. No, sir, when I got knocked
down in that fight with that two-hundred pound woman
in
Salt Lake I
knew what we had was all there is and I'm gonna change, Marge, I swear
because that's all there is, what we got ... love." And Marge (played
by an actress weighing in at ninety-seven tensely muscular pounds) opens
her arms slowly as though semaphoring bad news to a foundering ship;
she takes his great empty buffalo head in her arms. "It's all right,
Walter," she says in a voice meant to be tender though
aficionados
will
detect the approaching kill in this last
veronica.
"I'm here, Walter."
And the curtain falls.
Yet, in all fairness to our commercial theater, the preoccupation
