Dramatic Drought

FOR the fourth time in six years, the Pulitzer committee last week gave no prize for an American drama. The committee is correct. No American play of the 1967-68 season merited an award. While it may pique national vanity, an esthetic dry spell is no novelty in the long history of drama. The sands of mediocrity have sometimes silted over the theater for 2,000 years--for example, between the titans of Greek tragedy and the genius of Elizabethan England. The lackluster quality of contemporary U.S. playwriting and the dearth of substantial new talent are simply a gap rather than an omen. The conventional and obvious scapegoat is Broadway, but this is pure fallacy: Broadway, with all its faults, has presented, honored and sustained every major U.S. playwright.

The current plight of American drama reflects attrition of imagination rather than Philistine commercialism. The leading playwrights are faltering or repetitive. Films, TV and advertising have lured away young potential dramatists, thus giving volatile intellectual fashionmongers an excuse to depict the theater as enervating or backward. One barometer of the theatrical weather is the latest work of the best U.S. playwrights. For more than two decades, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams have dominated the American stage in much the way that Hemingway and Faulkner once dominated the novel. Miller is dramatically the descendant of Ibsen and socioeconomically the child of Marx. Williams is dramatically the descendant of Chekhov and psychologically the child of Freud. At present, they seem to have depleted their inheritance.

Old Dogs, Old Tricks. Miller's latest play, The Price, is a problem drama calcified in the technique and mentality of the late 1930s. Underlying all of Miller's thought is the conviction that if society is changed, man is redemptively altered and restored to respect, purpose and value. But the catastrophic events of 20th century history have shattered the presumptions of the problem play. Man's ineradicable genius for evil has reduced the doctrine of social engineering to puny tinkering. Playwrights like Beckett, lonesco and Genet have abandoned admonitory Ibsenite finger-waving for a nerve-shattering look into the abyss of existence itself, which in their view is stingingly futile, innately unjust and thoroughly absurd. In the future it may be said that they held a broken mirror up to the nature of the age, but for now they have rendered Miller obsolete by altering the central focus of theater from sociology to metaphysics.

As for Williams, his The Seven Descents of Myrtle was a bits-and-pieces montage snipped and pasted together from past works. Old dogs doing old tricks is nostalgically acceptable from performers like Maurice Chevalier or Marlene Dietrich, but coolly and perhaps cruelly rejectable from major playwrights. With eloquence and gallantry, Williams introduced to U.S. drama the previously inadmissible evidence of the emotional outcast and the sexual invert and made the stage vibrate to the heartbeats of the violated and the vulnerable. Himself a masterly creator of characters, Williams could not confer that gift on his disciples. An entire secondary echelon of playwrights--men like William Inge, Robert Anderson and Paddy Chayefsky--became Freudian scholastics. They invented the look-through character long before the appearance of the see-through dress. But to explain a character is to explain him away, and through the general permeation of Freudian concepts, an audience can do that almost faster than the playwright.

The dramatists plowing the Tennessee soil forget that Oedipus did not have a complex but a fate. Once analysis of motivation supplants action, the result is soporific drama, as exemplified this season by Anderson's I/ Never Sang for My Father and Chayefsky's The Latent Heterosexual. In contrast with the look-through transparency of these playwrights, Harold Pinter maintains a tantalizing and fascinating opacity in his characters. They are inexplicable and unpredictable as people in real life often are.

The hope of the American theater has sometimes been placed in off-Broadway: in terms of sustained achievement this amounts to wistful thinking. Of the several playwrights who got their start off-Broadway, only Edward Albee has remotely fulfilled his promise. But since Virginia Woolf, his work has persistently dwindled in strength or substance. For one thing, Albee has developed a galloping case of adaptationitis, culling plots, characters and even dialogue from other writers' novels and plays. More surprisingly, he has lost the forked tongue that contributed so much to the venomous delight of Virginia Woolf. Albee unquestionably is the finest talent fostered off-Broadway, but he remains a dramatic sapling who threatens never to become an oak.

Rumpus Room. The children's rumpus room of the U.S. theater is the off-off-Broadway cafe house--usually an operation that is long on valor but considerably shorter on value. Typical of this arena is Collision Course, a show consisting of eleven short plays, most of them by cafe-nurtured playwrights, presented last week at Manhattan's Cafe Au go Go. All were esthetic stillbirths. Alternating between juvenile temper tantrums and thumb-sucking private reveries, they dwelt on the tried-and-trite themes of alienation, lack of communication, male-female hostility, the nausea of being an American, and the pending nuclear apocalypse. In terms of the development of first-caliber playwrights, off-off-Broadway is still a dramatic pygmyland.

One notion that animates the patrons of culture centers across the length of the U.S. is that regional theaters will revitalize American drama. It seems to be almost an article of faith that the hinterland is teeming with mute dramatic Miltons who will be brought to full and glorious voice with a foundation grant. What is the hard news and dispiriting fact? Not a single new playwright of any magnitude has, to the present moment, been unearthed by the regional theater. Indeed, the number of new plays produced by the overwhelming majority of the regional theaters in any given season compares unfavorably with the pedal extremities of the two-toed sloth.

A Vaulting Image. The basic truth, ignored by optimists who lavish their creative hopes on a regional theater, is that never in history has great drama been lodged or nourished in the provinces of a nation. All the world's a stage, but only the great culture capitals, such as Paris, London and New York, are large enough worlds for a playwright. The city imbues him with conflict, crisis, tension. The city moves at a kinetic tempo; drama catches the beat. Like an opulent genius of creation, the city sketches a hundred finely shaded variations on a common human type, stages a thousand impromptu confrontations from dawn to dawn. All this is the adrenaline of drama, and in the U.S., only New York provides it.

No account of the state of the drama can ignore the society around it, since the theater is the most social of all art forms. Drama of sweep and scope makes large statements about the nature of life and refracts the temper of the times. All the great ages of theater have possessed a vaulting image of man, and an absorptive, undeviating concern with his destiny. "In apprehension, how like a god" is not casual Elizabethan rhetoric, but the supremely assured recognition that man is the noblest, grandest creature that walks the earth. And what does contemporary U.S. society say of the stature of man--how like a naked ape, how like an irrational id, how like a punch card in a computer? In the vertiginous distance between those views, one can read contemporary U.S. drama's petition in bankruptcy.

That there is plenty of petty rubbish onstage no one will deny, but the current abdication of audiences is indicative of a far subtler melody--they are rejecting the most intensive contact that can exist among human beings outside their private lives. As opposed to those who play it cool, the theater at its passionate best plays it nothing but hot. With molten fury it welds mind to mind, heart to heart, skin to skin, and soul to soul. Whenever the theater is weak, it is because man is denying man and shielding his feeblest self from the pain, power, majesty and glory of existence. But this is the only language that great drama ever spoke, and will again speak in a great theatrical age.

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