HIGHBROWS AND THEATER
563
Broadway's better evenings-it is not simply, as with any
art,
that
the pace slackens or the plot slumps: too often, there emerges some–
thing ruinously flashy or shamelessly vulgarized; or there is the sense
of some rusted field-piece out of battles long ago. Amid the honest
intentions of an Arthur Laurents's
A Clearing in the Woods,
which
is most depressing?-his attempting a kind of crude stream-of-con–
sciousness so late in the day; or in so wrong and resistant a medium;
or with such uneven and limited gifts.
As
for what is flashy and vulgarized, there is of course danger
in the medium of the theater itself, with its inherent need for vivid
effects, its innate demand for powerful emotions, its needing (on
technical grounds) to resort to tricks, its having (in the intellectual
sense) to smack of triteness. All too often the theater, in any strict
artistic view, corrupts; and the commercial theater corrupts catas–
trophically. Rare enough is what might be called a fine theater mind,
and rarer by far a fine theater mind that is also a pure one. On the
current Broadway scene, moreover, the gifted theater minds with the
greatest power are more often interpretative than creative, more often
directors than playwrights. And
if
directors like Joshua Logan and,
far more impressively, Elia Kazan, have themselves a touch of genius,
they can sometimes constitute the theater's evil genius as well. They
give the impression of taking over, of reshaping what they direct, as
a music or opera conductor, as a publishing house editor, would al–
most never do; and so we get a
Picnic
or a
Cat on a Hot Tin Root
that bears too vividly, in a kind of purple ink, their signature. Indeed,
Mr. Kazan's staging of Tennessee Williams's plays increasingly sug–
gests that when author and director have equally a very strong theater
sense, the effect is of Pelion on Ossa, of something damagingly vivid;
instead of the restraining hand and cooler tones that Mr. Williams
needs, his own sensationalizing of his material seems further sensa–
tionalized.
Again, all too much of the better side of Broadway is a matter
of gimmicks, or of works adapted from other mediums, or re-angled
from other eras. And it is not even that much of this is largely a
matter of cleverness, it is that the underbelly of the cleverness is so
streaked with compromise; that it is invalid in the very degree that
it is ingenious; that the very process of most play-production today–
of producers, co-producers, backers, directors, last-minute "collabora-
