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PARTISAN REVIEW
serious and respected and to be rich, famous, and popular."
It
stimu–
lates the itch for self-promotion
(i .
e.,
Mailerism).
Counterculture:
by its ferocious antiintellectualism and bad man–
ners, it contributed to the moral and aesthetic confusion of our times.
("Relevance," unredeemed by "perception, texture, or form, " is
empty.) In its rage to change the world, it not only sanctioned the
denigration of traditional culture and artistic standards; it also re–
introduced totalitarian notions of culture "under the guise of a
revolutionary politics."
Ideal theater:
it seeks to create "out of inherited and invented
dramatic materials an art significant for our time." Neither "vulgarly
'relevant'" nor constrained by academic pieties, it strives "to keep the
theatre alive" by involving the audience in "imaginative enterprises. "
It
must experiment, venture into the unpopular, even at the risk of
alienating the spectator.
It
must be directed by "a single informing
mind," not by a participatory consensus. "Seminal" as against "con–
sumer" theater (necessary and useful though the latter may be) "devel–
ops new playwrights, new techniques, and new approaches to classical
material." Without its cultivation and encouragement, the theater dies.
T he Culture Watch
betrays its kinship with other American moral
pronunciamientos
by softening threats with hints of hope. Of course
American culture is "primarily characterized by complacency, sloth,
mediocrity, security, timidity, and received ideas," but thanks
to
Vietnam, Watergate, and other abominations, the agonies of a chas–
tized nation may be transmitted to the stage and enable our actors to
sound "the resources of the inner life." Even now, American acting at
its best "manages to penetrate more deeply than anything found on the
English stage."
Brustein's critique of the American theater (rea ll y of America
itself) is a curious amalgam of hard perceptive thinking, nostalgia, and
utopianism.
It
is curiously ahistorical with hardly a backward glance
at an early America which engendered his own flawed republic. On one
occasion, his strong political loyalties seem to have benumbed his
logic. How, for example, justify the "impudent" and vituperatively
"slanderous" (his words) and vastly over-praised
MacBird
for its
"liberating impact" while coming down hard on the agit-p rop pap
that was just as "liberating" for its adherents?
If,
as Brustein says, an
ugly aggressive play subverts the cause it seeks to advance, then neither
the anti-war movement nor the theater benefitted from that clever,
tiresome, and ignoble academic exercise he happily endorsed.
All the same, his overview of the American theater, a theater
