SUBURBAN THEATER
601
has about half the entertainment value of a caper by Bobby Clark.
As for art, following its source part way, it may be tempted into
troublesome areas, but it doesn't stray far before returning to its tra–
ditional home base, the love story (even
My Fair Lady
was marred
by its compromise ending). Similarly, it may flirt with unconven–
tional ideas but these are invariably resolved in a conventional fash–
ion: Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, in
West Side Story,
occasionally
satirize the social worker's view of juvenile delinquency, but Arthur
Laurents's book is, nevertheless, founded on just such glib, mechani–
cal rationalizations. Pushed far enough, the musical might develop
some works of consistent merit; but presently it is merely another
plaything for the suburban spectator, combining culture and
kitsch
in carefully measured doses.
The Domestic Psychodrama
If
the Westport comedy is a neutral reflection of the spectator's
extra-curricular sex life, and the musical caters to his more extensive
cultural experience, Broadway's serious plays dramatize his received
ideas and attitudes. The most popular form of the 'fifties-created
by almost every playwright with artistic aspirations- is the domestic
psychodrama, a pseudo-clinical study of maladjusted heroes and
heroines, usually in their family surroundings. Brimming with in–
sights and embodying popular ideas of psychoanalysis, the psycho–
drama has almost completely replaced the leftist melodrama of the
'thirties and the liberal message play of the 'forties.
It
owes much of
its popularity to the fact that, unlike Marxism, watered down Freud–
ianism is an ideology that can be affirmed by playwright and specta–
tor alike.
The success of the psychodrama is such that it has influenced
older dramatists like Elmer Rice and Maxwell Anderson, and even
playwrights as distinctive as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.*
*
Miller, essentially a social dramatist who probably would have been more
direct
if
he wrote in the 'thirties, has tended more and more to wrap his political
themes in psychological actions, possibly to get his plays accepted readily by
an audience indifferent to didactic works. A straightforward early play, like
All
My
Sons,
contains few depth-insights, but later plays like
Death of a Salesman
and
View From the Bridge
are loaded with them. Miller's "common man" is
still his central character, but he has now developed severe neurotic as well as
social stigmata. Willy Loman, for example, might have found peace in a new
social system, but he could more easily have found it in a psychiatric clinic,
