570
PARTISAN REVIEW
Even smaller-scale comedy can be superbly exhilarating. Such things
as Jerome Robbins's best theater ballets, ,as
The Chalk Garden
or
My
Fair Lady
or
La Plume de Ma Tante
show what the theater can do
handsomely and in a sense uniquely. The "Rain in Spain" number
of
My Fair Lady,
the monks-with-their-bellropes number in
La Plume
de Ma Tante
are charmingly successful by any standards I know.
3
In all this I have no thesis to expound; I have speculated on
the relationship--or the lack of one- between the highbrow literary
world and the contemporary theater because if it is as tenuous as I
think, there is perhaps some point in trying to find out why-even if
a most potent cause, the theater's having so little of distinction to
offer, is obvious. In all this, moreover, I myself can only plead guilty
to some of my allegations about others. I too am strongly literary–
minded, and perhaps too much put off by what is vulgarized in the
theater, and made uneasy by what is theatrical. But I hope that, for
all that, I am aware that the stage has a special, reverberant voice,
or art, or artifice, and has qualities that must be accepted on their
own terms. I'm aware, too, that the theater can offer greater mo–
mentary satisfactions than most of us would critically allow-greater
ones, perhaps, than a strict critical sense is able to allow. Just here
we come upon a certain doubtful element, not in the theater alone
but in all things that, to a very marked degree, are "fascinating,"
that have an element that can smack of hypnotism or narcotics or
sleight-of-hand, and that can create an unnatural or night-lighted
vividness. To what extent, that is to say, can what is unduly fascinat–
ing be altogether "valid"? To what extent- in order to enjoy it–
must there be not so much a critical as a temperamental assent? Fas–
cinating, in any case, the theater surely can be; and
if
there is slight
desire, among our better writers, to go to the theater, there
is
often
a strong desire to write for it. Such writers are attracted by the pe–
culiar power and directness of the medium, though I'm not sure just
how aware many of them are of the difficulties. (Whatever their
limitations otherwise, an Eliot and a Graham Greene, besides start–
ing off with a certain theater sense, have had enough humility of sorts
to set about patiently learning their trade. Against this, too many in-
