Candles of Culture

Too often, television seems esthetically a benighted land; the networks may curse the darkness they have created, but they leave it to the independent and educational channels to light candles of culture. Two glowing examples from the current season:

>The Esso Repertory Theater, a weekly, one-hour sampling of the U.S.'s flowering rep companies and the only major straight-drama series on TV. The 13 rep groups, winnowed from 22 auditioned by Producer David Susskind, stretch from Washington, D.C., to the state of Washington, and their repertory has a still wider reach--from Euripides to Beckett. Last week the guest company was Chicago's Hull House Theater, their offering was Harold Pinter's demanding The Dumb Waiter. And their rendition? So stunningly effective as to be worth the series' syndication price alone.*

>The Creative Person, a National Educational Television series aimed at elucidating the thesis: "The creative person has a special gift: his private vision of the world." The cycle of half-hour programs has already premiered over 20 of the U.S.'s largest NET channels, will eventually be carried by all 90 of them. The opener, "A James Thurber's-Eye View of Men, Women and Less Alarming Creatures," was a resourceful, rousing revue adapted from the author's work. This week's show focuses fascinatingly on Household Poet-Critic John Ciardi; among its vignettes: a sound track of the artist reading his own domestic verse ("Men marry what they need, I marry you"), while the camera watches his wife pouring herself coffee in their Metuchen, N.J., kitchen. Among future subjects: Painter Leonard Baskin, Indian Composer Ravi Shankar, Author P. G. Wodehouse, Film Maker Jean Renoir, and Metropolitan Opera Impresario Rudolf Bing.

* The plays are viewable only on nine Atlantic Coast stations, although sponsors farther west may yet buy syndication rights, as they did with Esso's earlier efforts, such as the Festival of Performing Arts series.

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