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PAR TIS
AN
REV lEW
except the blunt obviousness with which they are handled and the self–
righteous tone of writers whose esthetic derives partly from the mental
therapists, and partly from those urgent dramas that once made radio
wonderful. It is not that one does not admire Mr. Arthur Miller's real
gifts for theater writing nor his good heart.
It
is his stunning solemnity
which annoys. Stop telling us what we already know! And don't write
sentences like: "That he had not the intellectual fluency to verbalize
his situation is not the same thing as saying that he lacked awareness,
even an overly intensified consciousness that the life he had made was
without form and inner meaning." Now that is not a writer writing nor
a man trying to get through to others; it is the voice of the holder of
a degree in Education; it is the Prophet Jones (without the fantasy) ;
it is Dorothy Schiff. One sympathizes with Mr. Miller's passion to be
admired, to be thought significant. All of us tend more or less con–
sciously to arrange our
personas
in an attractive way. But his attempt
is saddening because, though he is not taken seriously outside the popu–
lar theater and the press, he is almost good enough to be respected in
the way he wants and he
should
be good enough: his failure I attribute
to the popular theater's estrangement from the country's culture.
In the last fifteen years the French theater was used by Gide, Sartre,
Camus, de Montherlant, Genet, Anouilh, Julian Green, Giraudoux, an
eclectic list which goes on and on, comprising most of the better French
writers. And what have we had? Tennessee Williams (whom I happen
to admire), Mr. Miller, one small mood play by Miss Carson MoCullers,
Mr. Thornton Wilder in his later, three-cheers-for-Love manner and, of
course, the heady splendors of
J.B.
The cult of feeling has not only undone much of our theater writ–
ing but it has peculiarly victimized those gentle souls, the actors. They
have been taught that "truth" is everything. And what is "truth?" Feel–
mg. And what is feeling? Their own secret core to which the character
they are to interpret must be related. To listen to actors talk about
"truth" is a chilling experience. They employ a kind of solemn baby–
talk compounded of analysts' jargon and the arcane prose of the late
Stanislavsky. As one of them said severely of another's performance:
"He's not thinking; he's thinking he's thinking." Our actors have also
been taught to condemn the better English or French actors as "tech–
nical." "Technical" here
seems
to mean-in these circles words are em–
ployed for transient emotive effects, never meaning- that a separation
has been made between the actor's own feelings and those the part he
is playing calls for. To understand just who Iago is, the "technical"
actor will deliberately make the separation. Then, having got the proper
range, he will, by an effort of will, inhabit the character, using
himself
