HIGHBROWS AND THEATER
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American theater stands, what the Best of Broadway can mean, we
have only to compare what the 'fifties have produced-whatever their
limitations-by way of new American poets or novelists or painters
with what they have produced in new playwrights. The only new
playwright of any note with a body of work behind him is William
Inge-someone who, beginning with a certain real feeling for lostness
in people, for inarticulate and fumbled lives, has grown more facile
in manner and sentimental in effect, till a feeling for lostness has
been largely dissolved in a sense of mere softness.
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And yet, though highbrows may be quite right, by scrupulous
standards, to show the theater their backs, I'm not sure that what
seems quite right seems at the same time quite natural; I'm not sure
that because playgoing today is no real cultural obligation for them,
that can explain why, with highbrows, it has failed of all fascination
and lure. No doubt the explanation lies in something more than the
disappointing quality of the plays; no doubt it lies, for one thing, in
what trouble one must go to, what prices one must pay, to be dis–
appointed; and for another thing-as against the extremely long odds
of playgoing- in the far surer satisfactions to be had in concerts or
ballet or long-playing records. Yet, even after making the case
stronger, I'm left wondering a little at the dying out of so immemorial
and universal a lure; at highbrows' ceasing to care, quite beyond how
little the theater may currently offer, for the world of the theater it–
self. I don't mean this in the banal romantic sense of that famous
expectant hush that comes over the theater as the lights go down, or
of man's irrepressible craving for make-believe; though what I do
mean does involve something romantic in us, something a little naively
susceptible. It has certainly to do with how we respond, or for that
matter surrender, to visual action or resonant speech; to performers
physically creating drama before our eyes, or to incidents that cun–
ningly heighten suspense. In all this- now in sophisticated ways, now
in primitive ones---something crafty is at work, something that brings
out the child, the simpleton, the savage in us; and that brings out,
again, the inheritor of long and complex traditions. Of all media de–
pendent upon language, the theater has always been the one most
capable of fierce intensity; indeed intensity, rather than reality, is the
