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with Love was thrust upon it by the society it reflects or tries to. :And
by Love the theater does not mean love in the Rousseau sense (to em–
ploy him as Romantic touchstone, pre-Agony). Nor is Love anything
quite so simple as successful copulation though that of course is of
coeval (as Mr. Faulkner would say) importance; after all, one of the
few goals our friendly society has set us is the more perfect union; the
general failure to achieve it, of course, ensures full employment to mental
therapists, causes dramatic religious conversions and, in the case of one
talented theater director, has driven him to pad obsessively the crotches
of the less flamboyantly hung actors (Aristophanes would have found
a joke in that; we can't). No, Love in our theater is not really sex
though sex is part of it. Love is a warm drugged-ness, a surrender of
the will and the mind to inchoate feelings of Togetherness. Thought
is
the enemy; any exercise of mind betrays Love, and Love's vengeance
in the theater is terrible for mind must be broken and made to recant,
and then to love Love. But before
we
score the silliness of our popular
theater, we ought to recognize that it reflects always more baldly than
the novel, say, the superstitions and prejudices of the day. The flabbiness
of tone in the theater differs only in its over-simplified effects from the
same flabbiness in the popular (and sometimes "serious") novel and,
to get to the root, it does no more than reflect the ubiquitous flab of
the Great Golfer's reign. Whether Tocqueville's worst fears have come
true or not, democracy is too much with us. It has been duly noted
how often people now say "I feel" such-and-such to be so rather than
"I think" such-and-such to be so. To make that shift of verb uncon–
sciously is to eschew mind and take cover in the cozier, more democratic
world of feeling. I suppose there are some who say of others pejoratively:
his feelings are not deep, but, pressed, they would admit that no one
really knows what another's feelings are though it is of course agreed
that we are all pretty much alike at heart: sensitive, warm, tender, our
moments of bad behavior the result of the green twig's early bending,
sure to straighten and flower beneath Love's therapeutic sun. In any
case, feeling is all in our theater and the deliberate exercise of mind is
thought an admission of emotional poverty. Particularly mistrusted
is
Bernard Shaw whose works are dismissed as displays of debater tricks,
the plots suitable only for adaptation as musical comedies. He did not
love Love; worse, he made the Devil a Love lover and chose as hero
Don Juan, a mere life lover.
Now it is almost too easy to put down Broadway. So much of what's
wrong is so obvious that most attacks on our theater lose force because
of the target's size. It is impossible with a shotgun at three paces not to
hit the Shubert theater. Yet it is curious how often the serious-minded
