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RICHARD GILMAN
had to accept, and still have to accept, that they are allowed to be
artists only as the outcome of a struggle with their technic more
exhausting and consuming than we know of anywhere else in the life
of culture.
A pious myth retains its force: that the communal nature of the
theater is its major strength, heart of its energizing mysteries and
source of its values. Yet the truth is that as the theater sank more
and more into
divertissement
its communal nature bound it more and
more closely to the perversion of its possibilities, to banality, repetition
and sentimental acts. The audience for the theater has for a long
time now been much more of a quasi-sophisticated mob than a con–
scious collectivity, it is a horde seeking banality or else, in another
mood, sensation. To such an audience, as Henry James once pointed
out, sensations are what pass for augmentations of consciousness, and
it has been the sensational aspects of modern drama that have gained
it its public recognition. A phenomenon not wholly different from the
fate of the other arts, it nevertheless has been more maiming here,
less easy to surmount. For paintings and novels and poems may
surmount their scandalous successes by introducing themselves into
the private consciousness where response and judgment have at kast
the possibility of being freer.
The sensations of new drama are clearly so much more public
and immediate than those of the literary or graphic arts.
Right out
there in the middle of society
its altered sounds and shapes are ex–
perienced in one mood as heightened
divertissement,
in another as
affront and a kind of treason. What will not be experienced, except
by isolated individuals who in this very process distinguish themselves
from the horde of which they are physically a part, is the drama as
a work of art, as unreal, that is to say as the product of an escape
from time and from that life in which sensations function as sur–
rogates for consciousness. The sensations of new drama, like those of
any new art, are instead its means of access into consciousness.
They are also the signs of its struggle with itself, or rather with
its own history. Like a war waged with an external enemy while a
civil conflict goes on simultaneously, contemporary drama has fought
a double battle: against the theater and its audiences drugged with
tradition and received notions of the dramatic, and against its own
assumptions, its accumulated existence, the dead hand of its accom-
