Collected Essays Page 19

  Perhaps the obvious needs stating first: There is no such thing as “reality” in any theatrical exhibition that can properly be called a play. The reason for this is that stage time is not, and cannot be, street time. In street time, Willy Loman’s story would take sixty-two years to play out instead of two and a half hours. Thus, whether a play strives for straight realism or for some more abstracted style, with the very act of condensation the artificial enters even as the first of its lines is being written. The only important question is the nature of that artificiality and how it is acknowledged by the play, and what ought to be judged is not the extent to which the artifice is “nonlinear” or “metaphorical” or “dreamlike” but rather its efficiency in getting across the playwright’s vision of life. This in turn raises questions about a style’s suitability to its subject and about the kind of language—what variation on “real” speech—the playwright chooses.

  When I began writing plays in the late Thirties, “realism” was the reigning style in the English-language commercial theater, which was just about all the theater there was at the time in America and Britain. Theater could still be thought of then as a popular art, though one knew (and this was long before television) that something of its mass appeal had gone out of it, and a lot of its Twenties glamour, too. In general, one blamed the movies, which had stolen theater’s audience and thus its civic power, such as it was, as well as its cultural influence. Despite the obvious fact that our audience was predominantly middle class, we continued to believe that we were making theater for an audience comprising a representative variety of New York City people and even beyond; in other words, theatergoers of many different cultural and educational levels. In New York, where plays had a ticket price of 55 cents to $4.40 (as opposed to $40 to $100 today), one somehow took for granted that a professor might be sitting next to a housewife, a priest beside a skilled worker, or a grammar school teacher, or a business executive, or a student. This perception of a democratic audience, accurate or not, influenced the writing of plays directed at the commonsensical experience of everyday people. (Black or Asian or Hispanic faces were not represented, of course, but these were beyond the consciousness of the prevailing culture.) Even into the Forties, production costs were relatively within reason; plays such as All My Sons or Death of a Salesman, for example, cost between $20,000 and $40,000 to produce, a budget small enough to be raised among half a dozen modest contributors who could afford to lose their investment with some embarrassment but reasonably little pain, given the killing they occasionally would make.

  We were torn, those of us who tried to convince ourselves that we were carrying on the time-honored tradition of theater as a civic art rather than as a purely commercial exercise, because to attract even the fitful interest of a Broadway producer, and thus to engage the audience, we had to bow to realism, even if we admired and wished to explore the more “poetic” forms. An Expressionist like the German Ernst Toller, for example, would not have been read past his sixth page by a Broadway producer or, for that matter, by a producer in London. There is not one “important” playwright of Toller’s era who was then, or is now, welcome in the commercial theater, not Chekhov, not Ibsen, not Hauptmann, not Pirandello, Strindberg, Turgenev, or even Shaw.

  To perform a Beckett play like Waiting for Godot in the proximity of today’s Broadway, one has to have a cast of movie stars for a very short run, as was done a little while back at Lincoln Center with Robin Williams, Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Irwin, and Lukas Haas. Things were probably worse half a century ago or more. One need only read Eugene O’Neill’s letters castigating the “showshop” mentality of Broadway and the narrow compass of the American theater audience’s imagination, or Shaw’s ridiculing of British provincialism, to understand that for some mysterious reason the Anglo-Saxon culture has regarded theater as an entertainment first and last, an art of escape with none of the Continental or Russian involvement in moral or philosophical obligations. The English-language theater was, in fact, almost pridefully commercial; it was a profit-making enterprise wedded to a form whose “realistic” veneer would be universally recognized. Musicals were the exception—they alone had the happy license to part from reality, at least to some extent—but for straight plays even satire was uncommercial enough to merit George Kaufman’s definition of it as what closes on Saturday night.

  The point is that what we think of as “straight realism” was tiresome half a century ago but nonetheless went unquestioned as a reflection of life by audience and reviewer alike. At a time when “experimental” is all that need be said of a play for it to gain serious consideration, it is not a bad idea to confess that an extraordinarily few such researches have achieved any kind of enduring life. It is not quite enough to know how to escape restrictions; sooner or later one also has to think of arriving somewhere.

  American theater’s one formal innovation in the Thirties, and probably the single exception to realism’s domination, was the WPA’s Living Newspaper. An epic in presentational form, written like movies by groups of writers under an editor-producer rather than individually, the Living Newspaper dealt exuberantly with social issues such as public ownership of electrical power, labor unions, agriculture, and medicine, and was extremely popular. The WPA was government-subsidized, using unemployed actors, designers, and technicians, and had no need to make a profit, so a show could call upon large casts and elaborate production elements. And the ticket price was low. It could send Orson Welles, for example, into Harlem storefronts with a big cast playing Macbeth, charging a quarter a seat. Theater-for-profit was hardly affected by what might be called this epic-populist approach, because, then as now, it was simply too expensive to produce commercially.

  My own first playwriting attempt was purely mimetic, a realistic play about my own family. It won me some prizes and productions, but, interestingly, I could not wait to turn at once to a stylized treatment of life in a gigantic prison—modeled on Jackson state penitentiary in Michigan, near Ann Arbor, where I was in school. Jackson, with something like six thousand inmates, was the largest prison in the United States. I had visited the place over weekends with a friend, who, having taken one psychology course in college, was appointed its lone psychologist. The theme of my play, The Great Disobedience, was that prisons existed to make desperate workingmen insane. There was a chorus of sane prisoners chanting from a high overpass above the stage and a counterchorus of the insane trying to draw the other into their ranks. Inevitably, I discovered a strange problem of dramatic language, which could not engage so vast a human disaster with speech born in a warm kitchen. And this led to the question of whether the essential pressure toward poetic dramatic language, if not toward stylization itself, came from the inclusion of society as a major element in a play’s story or vision. Manifestly, prose realism was the language of the individual and of private life; poetry, the language of the man in the crowd, in society. Put another way, prose was the language of family relations; it was the inclusion of the larger world beyond that naturally opened a play to the poetic. Was it possible to create a style that would at once deeply engage an American audience that insisted on a recognizable reality of characters, locales, and themes while at the same time opening the stage to considerations of public morality and the mythic social fates—in short, to the invisible?

  Of course, this was hardly my preoccupation alone. I doubt there was ever a time when so much discussion went on about form and style. T. S. Eliot was writing his verse plays; Auden and Isherwood, their own. The poetic mimesis of Sean O’Casey was most popular, and W. B. Yeats’s dialogue was studied and praised, if not very often produced. The realism of Broadway—and the Strand and the Boulevard theater of France—was detested by the would-be poetic dramatists of my generation, just as it had always been since it came into vogue in the nineteenth century. What did this realism really come down to? A play devoid of symbolic or metaphysical persons and situations, its main virtue verisimilitu
de, with no revolutionary implications for society. Quite simply, conventional realism was conventional because it avowedly or implicitly supported convention. But it could just as easily do something quite different, or so it seemed. We thought of it as the perfect style for an unchallenging, simple-minded, linear, middle-class, conformist view of life. What I found confusing at the time, however, was that it was not so very long before the term “realism” came to be applied to the revolutionary style of playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov, and, quite frequently, Strindberg, writers whose whole thrust was in opposition to the bourgeois status quo and the hypocrisies on which it stood.

  Clifford Odets, for a few years in the mid-Thirties, was more wildly and lavishly celebrated than any playwright before or since. For younger writers such as myself, Odets was the trailblazer not just because of his declared radicalism but because of the fact that his plays were so manifestly written. But there was a misapprehension behind his popularity, too; since his characters were the very exemplars of realistic theater, lacking strangeness or stylish elegance, Odets was called a realist—indeed, a kind of reporter, no less, of Jewish life in the Bronx. I had never lived in the Bronx, but the speech of Brooklyn Jews could not have been much different, and it had no resemblance whatever to the way Odets’s people spoke:

  I’m super-disgusted with you!

  A man hits his wife and it is the first step to fascism!

  Look in the papers! On every side the clouds of war—

  Ask yourself a pertinent remark: could a boy make a living playing this instrument [a violin] in our competitive civilization today?

  I think I’ll run across the street and pick up an eight-cylinder lunch.

  Odets was turning dialogue into his personal jazz, and the surprised audience roared with delight. But had any Bronxite—or anyone else—ever really exclaimed, “God’s teeth, no!” or, “What exhaust pipe did he crawl out of?” or, “I feel like I’m shot from a cannon”?

  Inevitably, in a theater defined by realism, this had to be mistakenly labeled as simply a kind of reported news from the netherworld. But of course it was a poet’s invented diction, with slashes of imagery of a sort never heard before, onstage or off. Odets’s fervent ambition was to burst the bounds of Broadway while remaining inside its embrace, there being no other theatrical place in America for him to go. When the time came, as it probably had to, when some of the surprise was no longer there and when critics took the same pleasure in putting him down as they had in building him up, he found himself homeless on Broadway, and he left for the movies.

  I suppose his fate may have had some effect on my own explorations into “alternative” forms as I came out of the Thirties. All I knew for sure was that the word “poetry” wasn’t enough if a play’s underlying structure was a fractured one, a concept not fully realized. A real play was the discovery of the unity of its contradictions, and the essential poetry, the first poetry, was the synthesis of even the least of its parts to form a symbolic meaning. A certain consistency was implicit. The oak does not sprout maple leaves, and a certain kind of self-conscious lyricism does not belong in a realistic work. In short, I had come to believe that if one could create a very strong unity in a work, any audience could be led anywhere. Ideally, a good play must offer as sound an emotional proof of its thesis as a law case does factually, and you couldn’t really do that with words alone, lovely as they might be.

  Odets’s contribution, ironically, was not his realistic portrayal of social reality—his alleged aim—but his willingness to be artificial; he brought back artificiality, if you will, just as ten years later Tennessee Williams did so with his birdsong from the magnolias. But Williams had an advantage: his language could be far more faithful to its real-world sources. Southern people really did love to talk, and often elaborately, and in accents much like Amanda’s in The Glass Menagerie:

  But Laura is, thank heavens, not only pretty but also very domestic. I’m not at all. I never was a bit. I never could make a thing but angel-food cake. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old saying a little bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! That gallantly smiling gentleman over there! [Points to husband’s picture] A telephone man who—fell in love with long distance! Now he travels and I don’t even know where!

  This, too, was called realism, but then how did it differ from the conventional realistic play? Clearly the very action of Williams’s plays, certainly the best of them, was working toward the building of a symbolic meaning that would express both the psychological development of his characters and his personal specter of a menacing America struggling with its own repressed sexuality. His earliest work is shot through with the left-wing attitudes of the time, which he managed gradually to fuse with his own vulnerability, his pain and anxiety at being overwhelmed and defeated by a crazy violence that underlay the American, one might say the whole Western, ethos. Without that confession of his pain and anxiety—his tragic vision—his words alone would have seemed, I think, flowery and excessively romantic.

  To consider such writers as purely private, self-involved persons is to disserve the truth. Odets when he began thought his egalitarian Marxism would heal America and create its new community, and Williams unfurled the banner of a forlorn but gallant resistance to the mendacity and the violence aimed at the oddball, the poet, the sexual dissident. But it may as well be admitted that in their different ways both men in the bitter end unwittingly collaborated with the monster they believed was trying to destroy them.

  O’Neill, of course, was an aesthetic rebel, but his socialism was private and did not inform his plays (though The Hairy Ape is surely an anti-capitalist work). It was his formal experiments and tragic ambience that set him apart. But O’Neill was a totally isolated phenomenon in the Broadway theater as a maker and user of new and old theatrical forms. Odets, on the other hand, while describing himself as a man of the Left, was, with the possible exception of his first produced play, Waiting for Lefty, no innovator where form was concerned. His was a poetic realism, but it was still bound to recognizably real types in actual social relationships. And this was perhaps inevitable; as both actor and revolutionary he had his eye on the great public and the reconstitution of power once a failed capitalism had been brought down. In the Depression, it was all but impossible for a Left writer not to think of the act of writing as a fulcrum for social change. Odets saw himself not only as a political realist but as an anarchic poet, a word-nurse (he kept a file of startling locutions) whose novel twists of language would lift his work into the skies. O’Neill, on the other hand, was not the revolutionary but the rebel, a despairing anarchist who, if he glimpsed any salvation, knew that it could come only with the tragic cleansing of the life-lie that is permanently ensconced in the human condition. Since, unlike Odets, he did not obligate himself to even foreshadow some new and better polity in place of the present corrupt one, he was free to explore all sorts of theatrical means by which to set forth the extant situation of the damned—that is, the Americans. Moreover, if O’Neill wanted his plays to register in the here and now, as he surely did, they need not necessarily be popular to justify his having written them, for he was hunting the sounding whale of ultimate meaning, and he expected to suffer for it (and to be misunderstood) as his models, like Strindberg, had. As much as any playwright could be, O’Neill seemed hardened to the possibility of failure, pledged as he was to drag the theater into the unfamiliar world of spirit and metaphysic.

  A critical or box-office failure for Odets meant rejection of a far more personal kind, a spit in the eye by an ungrateful and self-satisfied bo
urgeois society. A failed play was a denial of what Odets was owed, for he was chasing the public no differently than did his bourgeois and nonrevolutionary contemporaries, a public as fickle as it always was and is. O’Neill could say, as he did, that he was interested in relations not among men but between Man and God. For America, in his view, was damned, from virtue estranged by fixations on gain, racism, social climbing, and the rest of the materialist agenda.

  A good style for O’Neill was basically a question of the apt use of metaphor, imagery, and argot. “I wish to God I could write like that!” he wrote to O’Casey, who, incidentally, would no doubt have called himself a “realistic” writer in the sense that he was trying to turn Irish attention to Irish reality. But like Williams, O’Casey came from a culture that loved talk and sucked on language like a sweet candy:

  MRS. GOGAN: Oh, you’ve got a cold on you, Fluther.

  FLUTHER: Ah, it’s only a little one.

  MRS. GOGAN: You’d want to be careful, all th’ same. I knew a woman, a big lump of a woman, red-faced and round-bodied, a little awkward on her feet; you’d think, to look at her, she could put out her two arms an’ lift a two-storied house on th’ top of her head; got a ticklin’ in her throat, an’ a little cough, an’ th’ next mornin’ she had a little catchin’ in her chest, an’ they had just time to wet her lips with a little rum, an’ off she went.

  Even in the most mundane of conversational exchanges, O’Casey sought, and as often as not found, the lift of poetry. Indeed, that was the whole point—that the significantly poetic sprang from the raw and real experience of ordinary people. J. M. Synge, O’Casey’s forerunner at the turn of the century, had struck a similar chord. Synge was in a supremely conscious revolt against the banality of most theater language. As he wrote, the popular imagination was still

  fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.