GOING TO THEATER
For most theater-goers the theater exists for the discussion of
it. The pleasure is more in having done it than in doing it. Like the
world of books and music, the theater is a market, in which items–
~raded
by critics and fellow-consumers-are offered for sampling. But
unlike the opera or the ballet or even, for some people, reading, the
theater is something to be "covered," a regular feature of their com–
mitment to metropolitan civilization. And . the New York theater bears
the stamp of its mechanically attending middle-class audience at every
tum. Like most of the people who make up its audience, most serious
theatrical productions put on in New York are lumpish, earnest, timid,
hypocritical, well-meaning, entirely calculated, and boring.
There are times, to tell the truth, when I'm convinced that it's all
the fault of the intermissions. For me, at least, the intermissions sum
up everything boring and diluted about the theater. (Think of being
forc ed
to walk out two or three times during a movie!) Intermissions
also induce in playwrights an entirely false and unnecessary type of
dramatic punctuation: the curtain line. Everything in the conditions
of theater-going leads to emotional triviality, to the dissipation of serious
feeling. It is not enough to reply that other live performing arts–
symphony concerts, the opera, the ballet-have the same formal con–
ditions of attendance. For I would wager that all of these have, and
rightly, a more enthusiastic, spirited audience than does the theater
today. And with the movies, the contrast is even more extraordinary.
It is simply a fact that ten times as many good American movies are
made each year as there are passable productions of plays mounted
on and off-Broadway. But, surely, the liveliness of the movies today,
when compared with the theater, is also immeasurably enhanced by
the liveliness of the way one goes to the movies. While the informal
conditions of movie-going create an inspired, spontaneous audience
("Hey! Let's go to the movies!") , the formal conditions of theater-going
perpetuate an audience which is already deadened, prepared in some
kind of emotional formaldehyde.
Several recent successes on Broadway offer a number of cases of the
