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RICHARD GILMAN
motions like any others and one carried out in what is meant to be
society's quotidian midst instead of being placed before it as if on
a platter. Theaters of cruelty and of polemical immediacy issue from
a despair of drama's effectiveness under its old aesthetic patents as
much as from a disgust with the theater of public consolation and
confirmation, what Brecht meant by the "culinary" stage.
It may be that nothing will come ·forward as new, unassailable
creation. It is surely true that any art comes to find that its own
historical momentum becomes the enemy of its renewable prowess.
About ten years ago Eric Bentley wrote an essay entitled "Is Drama
an Extinct Species?" to which question he found himself able to
give a negative answer. But the question remains open. And mean–
while the history which gave rise to it is there to be examined.
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