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PARTISAN REVIEW
tors" and out-of-town rewrites-involves not only too many cooks,
but too many poisoners. The problem, for one example, of making a
play or book into a serious musical differs tremendously from
that
of making it into an outright opera. For, in the case of the opera,
it is fundamental, it is taken for granted, that the music comes first
-which clarifies not just the terms of the adaptation but metamor–
phoses the whole nature of the effect. But with the serious musical
drama, what is attempted is some sort of equality between text and
music, some sort of William-and-Mary joint reign (as though with
even the actual William and Mary, William were not given the exe–
cutive power!) Hence the result of attempting a "balanced" effect
between text and score is again and again a divided house or a
split personality.
Because of its own adulterating methods, and its show-business
economics that pay court to bourgeois tastes .and defer to popular
prejudices, the theater is a place where milk rises to the top, often
only the faster for being curdled. Hence there is constant, rather des–
perate novelty, but little that is new; much concern for fac;ade and
decor, and little that is solid. Most of the theater is simply a catering
service, and not even for the Best People. Moreover, the born play–
wright- even when as passionate and independent-minded as an
O 'Neill-is all too frequently anything but a born writer. Nowhere
so quickly as in our prose drama does language date or come to seem
stiff or grandiloquent or hackneyed. How far back beyond O'Neill
-himself sadly vulnerable-can we find in English any prose drama
even marginally alive? Not surely in Galsworthy, let alone a
Second
Mrs. Tanqueray;
and only so far as it smacks of comedy in Shaw's
early problem plays. In the face of this, poetic drama is not just a
literary luxury or a highbrow desideratum for our theater; it alone
would seem to have real staying power; in it alone can drama's
rather quick-rusting machinery be offset by a continuing vigor of
language. Even in brand new prose drama what so often tends to
disappoint literary people is the quality of the writing: where it
doesn't seem pretentious or derivative, it seems fibreless and flat. It
is on this account all the greater pity that in America we do not com–
pensate for middling good drama with superior high comedy and sa–
tire; that, instead, the middling good drama proves the better pro–
duct of the two. Indeed, if we would learn where the professional
