SUBURBAN THEATER
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walls, generally in preparation for a flashback. The new techniques
-called "poetic realism"-are mostly borrowed from the Federal
Theatre, for, like the experiments of the 'thirties, they are designed
to involve the spectator more directly in the events on the stage.
But if the theater of the 'thirties engaged the spectator in order
to arouse him, the theater of the 'fifties labors to calm his anxieties
and flatter his foibles. Broadway now caters to an audience very much
like the audience of eighteenth-century sentimental drama in that it
prefers to see a sympathetic reflection of its own life or ideas. Despite
its forms, therefore, the substance of American drama still adheres to
a narrow realism: the audience is hypnotized into complacency by
dramatic representations of "real human situations," and even Job
and Hamlet are whittled down to suburban dimensions. In the 'fifties,
the spectator himself is the hero of the drama; by the introduction
of new dramatic forms, Broadway permits him to applaud his own
experience at the end of the play.
The Westport Comedy
In comedy, this has resulted in a new comic form and a new
comic hero. Low-brow zany farces of the type fashioned in the past
by Kaufman and Hart, George Kelly, George Abbott, and Morris
Ryskind, are now considered a form of entertainment too fleeting
and unreal to attract a backer's money or a spectator's attention; at
the same time, the satire-never too successful on Broadway-has
disappeared altogether. The transitional form was the situation com–
edy of the 'forties
(Dear Ruth, Junior Miss, Kiss and Tell),
usually
written by Norman Krasna or F. Hugh Herbert, and often hinging
on wholesome juveniles caught in an apparently compromising posi–
tion ("Gee, Ma, we was only holdin' hands!"). In the 'fifties, how–
ever, asexual innocence has developed into sophisticated worldliness,
and the result is the Westport comedy, a saga of the cultivated,
leisured upper classes.
The Westport comedy-which includes such frothy roundelays
as
Tunnel of Love, The Tender Trap,
The-Marriag~-Go-Round,
and
The Seven Year Itch-has
a tradition which can be traced back to
the trifles of Noel Coward and John Van Druten, but it is more im–
mediately influenced by upper-middlebrow reading matter like
New
Yorker
fiction. Its dialogue appropriately laconic and suggestive, this
form is invariably plotted around the suburbs' favorite indoor sport
