Bargain-Basement Theater

The postage-stamp stage was set in the middle of a long, rectangular room that had once been a synagogue. Banked in two long tiers, the audience craned to watch the play as though peering from the ends of a bowling alley. But no one complained. Off-Broadway patrons have long since learned not to insist on comfortable surroundings. Any distress at last week's off-Broadway opening of August Strindberg's Easter was caused by the play and the production, not by the theater. To come off at all, the palely symbolic, poorly translated Easter--which creates joy out of the woe of a bedeviled Swedish family in the period from Maundy Thursday to Easter--needs not only sensitive acting but a unified acting style. Instead, Producer-Director David Ross came up with little good acting and no acting style.

But if Ross's attempt at Strindberg was only a noble experiment, a flock of similar experiments were doing nobly in converted nightclubs and church basements all around Manhattan. This season, off-Broadway theater can look its uptown big brother squarely in the eye.

Last week, just a short subway or taxi ride from Times Square, a theatergoer could pay his money (ticket range: $1.15 to $4.50) and take his choice of a dozen productions. The three top hits: The Threepenny Opera, the sardonic satire of London's 19th century underworld taken from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which holds the record for longevity off-Broadway (560 performances); a revival of The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill (225 performances); and Take a Giant Step, by Louis Peterson, another revival, which drew better reviews than the Broadway original (1953).

Broadway Invasion. All three hits have brought national fame to their companies. Later this month Carmen Capalbo and Stanley Chase, the 29-year-old producers of The Threepenny Opera, will invade Broadway with the world premiere of Graham Greene's The Potting Shed, follow up with a New York premiere of O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. After seeing their Iceman, O'Neill's widow asked Director Jose Quintero and associates to stage the profitable Broadway premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night. 'Take a Giant Step, which analyzes in painful detail the struggles of a Negro boy in a small New England town, has been bought by Hollywood, will also be produced next year in London.

Competing with these hits are the works of other theater giants. A group of young players called the Shakespear-wrights, now in their third season, are staging a sprightly version of Twelfth Night. Two other 17th century comedies are playing to packed houses: Ben Jonson's bawdy Volpone and Moliere's sophisticated The Misanthrope. Other hits: Sean O'Casey's rollicking comedy, Purple Dust, scheduled "indefinitely" at the Cherry Lane, a converted stable; Shoestring '57, a 30-skit musical review; and Me, Candido, an original drama by Walt Anderson about the flight of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City.

In all, off-Broadway has presented some 40 shows this season, seems certain to crack last year's record of 68. Still to come: George Bernard Shaw's Good King Charles's Golden Days, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, and a musical version of Tom Sawyer.

To spice its shows, off-Broadway frequently lures major stars downtown (for some such pittance as $100 a week). Prime showcase for Broadway stars has been the Phoenix Theater, which has presented Siobhan McKenna in Shaw's Saint Joan, Uta Hagen and Zero Mostel in The Good Woman of Setzuan.

The Kitchen Sink. One downtown producer estimates that only one out of every ten shows produced off-Broadway in the past five years has made money. The tiny (190 seats) Circle in the Square, which is staging The Iceman Cometh, has frequently scored with the critics, but made money on only three of its 15 productions, had a sizable debt when Iceman started to pay off. To stay solvent, off-Broadway producers necessarily become professional misers, e.g., the furniture for Easter came from the Salvation Army. By similar methods Capalbo and Chase staged The Threepenny Opera for only $10,000, one-twentieth the cost of an uptown musical, happily watched it pay off in eleven weeks. Union concessions help. Actors' weekly salaries usually range from $40 to $70, as opposed to an $85.85 minimum on Broadway. To boost the gate, audiences are crowded cheek by jowl with the actors, are sometimes pelted from the stage with dance slippers and rubber knives.

But despite the struggle to stay alive, off-Broadway producers are optimistic about the future. "The theater is changing," says Producer Chase. "It's going away from realism just for the sake of realism to a more imaginative form. People are just plain tired of going to the theater and looking at somebody's kitchen sink."

"The thing that's exciting down here off-Broadway," says T. Edward Hambleton, co-producer of the Phoenix Theater, which is interested in everything but the kitchen sink, "is bringing back the theater on a level that's part of living, that's as natural as going to a museum or having a good picture on the wall. That's the way a theater should be--not something you go to just on your wedding anniversary."

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