Louis Kronenberger
HIGHBROWS AND THE THEATER TODAY
Some Notes and Queries
Seven or eight years ago, when the Jean-Louis Barrault
company came from Paris to give Broadway its first general taste
in
years of distinguished French theater and acting, several of my liter–
ary friends, who ordinarily never went to the theater at all, planned
to make an exception of the Barrault troupe-indeed, bought tickets
well in advance for what, to a man, they particularly wanted to see.
And what they particularly wanted to see was Gide's adaptation of
Kafka's
The Trial;
and after seeing it, they
all
felt considerably let
down and didn't so much as think of going to anything else.
The incident interested me then, and has recurred to me at
in–
tervals ever since. I couldn't help wondering why, when for the first
time
in
years a notable French company visited America, my very
cultivated literary friends should pass over Marivaux or Moliere
in
favor of an adaptation into French of a novel · written
in
German
that they themselves had read in English. Or rather I didn't really
wonder at
all.
What my friends had done was just what I would
have supposed they would do. For one thing, of course, Kafka and
Gide were very much part of their cultural life. For another thing,
the theater as such was no part of their cultural life at all; they had
small interest in acting as acting, or even in plays as plays. As burnt
children, they never-in that pre-OfF-Broadway era-went near a
theater charred for them with disappointments. But all this, it seemed
to me, was not quite the whole of it. That my friends had lost inter–
est in the theater, as Broadway represented the theater, was almost
wholly the theater's fault and very little their own. But that-to the
e.xtent of preferring a dramatization of
The Trial-they
had lost in–
terest
in
the theater, as Moliere represented the theater, seemed rather
