GOING TO THEATER
97
same time, it can rediscover the commonness of someone whom it might
have been persuaded to admire. (Compare such genuine and psycho–
logically sophisticated films about the spiritual vocation as Rossellini's
The Flowers of St. Francis
and Bresson's
The Diary of a Country Priest.)
"Aren't you coming to bed?" says Luther's ex-nun wife in the particularly
hokey last scene of the play. "Shan't be long," replies he, brooding
over Faith and Works on a pedestal
in
the middle of the bare stage.
"Oh, Martin," she sighs, "you're a funny man.... Don't be long now,
Martin." Mr. and Mrs. Luther turn out to be just folks, like everyone
in the audience. A successful Broadway play must prove our warm,
fearful, frail, dirty-minded, lovable, common humanity-with a little
smut and a little culture thrown in.
Edifying cynicism-or, alternatively, sensationalism masking as cul–
tural expose-is of course the particularly successful formula of Edward
Albee. In the case of last year's smash
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
it
was the discovery of how coarse and vicious and foul-mouthed a pair of
college professors and their wives can be. ("It's just like any marriage,"
I swear I overheard a man explain to his wife after the performance,
"only a little more so.") But that play, at least, had a certain (vile)
integrity. Albee's new play,
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe,
directed by
Alan Schneider, which is based on the sententious novella of Carson
McCullers
(it,
at least, had hardly any dialogue), is a work of such
dedicated meretriciousness that it leaves one breathless. Take a coy,
elegaic narrator from
Our Town,
a giantess from
Moon for the
Misbe{!otten,
and a rural store from
Orpheus Descending.
Mix them
all together (alas, Albee couldn't work Arthur Miller into the brew;
his
material is so unredeemably urban), add a nasty dwarf who is
beloved by the giantess, and you have-a Broadway hit. It is a hit
which, I should guess, owes its success almost exclusively to one of the
most ignoble feelings ever to animate a Broadway audience-the wish to
see a deformed person without being seen back. One cannot blame Carson
McCullers for the nastiness of this play, though Albee has been faithful
enough to her book. But entirely different canons of taste govern the
use of the grotesque in literature-where one does not see, or in any
way directly sense-as distinct from the stage or film. And also what
constitutes a possible literary style on the page, to the eye, is something
quite different from what pleases the ear. True, Mrs. McCullers is
capable of such lines as: "First of all, love is a joint experience between
two persons-but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that
it is a similar experience for the two people involved." And of a
ponderous distinction between the lover and the beloved, which ends
