Collected Essays Read online

  Synge rejected the then-dominant Ibsen and Zola for their realism with “joyless and pallid words” and instead, as in Riders to the Sea, when the women are lamenting the deaths of so many of their men working the angry sea, wrote

  MAURYA: In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old.

  Here it might be useful to remember that James Joyce, another Irish poet, revered Ibsen notwithstanding the pallor of his words in English, for Joyce had, by learning Ibsen’s Norwegian, penetrated the poetic structure of the plays and their outcry against the spiritual failure of the modern world.

  The advent of the Absurd and of Beckett and his followers both obscured and illuminated the traditional discussion of theater style. The Beckett difference, as it might be called, was to introduce humble people, or social sufferers—bums, in fact—with the plainest of language arranged so as to announce and develop pure theme. His could be called a presentational thematic play, announcing what it was about and never straying very far from what it sought to prove or what his instinct had led him to confirm. Beckett had parted with the time-honored tradition of inferential playwriting, in which the author’s thematic intentions were inferred from a seemingly autonomous story whose climax consisted of the joining together of story and the finally revealed underlying theme. With Beckett, the story was the theme, inseparably so, from page one. Moreover, he blatantly interpreted the story himself in his dialogue.

  By the Fifties, the notion that an elevated tone or diction was required for an escape from common realism was discarded in favor of the most common, undecorated speech. But it was not the traditional speech of realistic plays. Rather, it was a speech bent almost out of recognition by a surreal deracination. The Absurdist approach at first seemed to me to be celebrating the impotence of human hopes, even the futility of action itself. All but the flimsiest connectiveness between utterances was eventually eliminated, creating an atmosphere of sinister danger (in Pinter) or (in Beckett) the threatening sense of immanence familiar from bad dreams. Man was unique because he tripped over himself, and it was quite as though the emphatic absence of purpose in the characters had created a loss of syntax. I take it that in later years Beckett took pains to clarify this impression of human futility, emphasizing the struggle against inertia as his theme. In any case, however ridiculous so much of his dialogue is, the tenderness of feeling in his work is emphatically not that of the cynic or the hard ironist.

  Beckett fused style and meaning organically, the dominating theme of Godot being stasis and the struggle to overcome humanity’s endlessly repetitious paralysis before the need to act and change. We hear this theme as blatantly as a train announcement and as stripped clean as a bleached bone.

  ESTRAGON: Then adieu.

  POZZO: Adieu.

  VLADIMIR: Adieu.

  POZZO: Adieu.

  VLADIMIR: Adieu.

  POZZO: Adieu.

  ESTRAGON: Adieu.

  Silence.

  POZZO: And thank you.

  VLADIMIR: Thank YOU.

  POZZO: Not at all.

  ESTRAGON: Yes yes.

  POZZO: No no.

  VLADIMIR: Yes yes.

  ESTRAGON: No no.

  Silence.

  POZZO: I don’t seem to be able . . . (long hesitation) . . . to depart.

  ESTRAGON: Such is life.

  This is a vaudeville at the edge of the cliff, but vaudeville anyway, so I may be forgiven for being reminded of Jimmy Durante’s ditty—“Didja ever get the feelin’ that you wanted to go? But you wanted to stay? But you wanted to go?” Here is a language shorn of metaphor, simile, everything but its instructions, so the listener may hear the theme like a nail drawn across a pane of glass. Godot does not make the mistake of so many of its imitators; in its flight from realism it does not leave structure behind.

  My own tendency has been to shift styles according to the nature of my subject. All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, Death of a Salesman, The Price, The American Clock, my earliest work like The Golden Years, about the destruction of Mexico by the Spaniards, and the more recent plays like The Creation of the World, Some Kind of Love Story, The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass all differ greatly in their language. I have done this in order to find speech that springs naturally out of the characters and their backgrounds rather than imposing a general style. If my approach to playwriting is partly literary, I hope it is well hidden.

  It is necessary to employ the artificial in order to arrive at the real. More than one actor in my plays has told me that it is surprisingly difficult to memorize their dialogue. The speeches sound like real, almost reported talk when in fact they are intensely composed, compressed into a sequential inevitability that seems natural but isn’t. But all this, important though it may be, is slightly to one side of the point. Experimental or traditional, the real question to ask of a work is whether it brings news, something truly felt by its author, an invention on his part or an echo.

  The struggle with what might be called reportorial realism, written “the way people talk,” is at least as old as the century. And although realism can land us further from common reality than can the most fantastic caprice, in the end stylization in the theater will be justified not by its novelty—at least not for long—but by the degree to which it illuminates how life works in our time. How a thing is said is only as new as what it is saying. The proof of this is the deep pile of experimental plays of two, three, five, ten years ago, which can only be appreciated anymore by the scholar-specialist. It is a pile, incidentally, no smaller than the one for so many conventionally realistic plays of the same era. Finding truth is no easier now when we are totally free to use any stylistic means at hand than it was a century or half a century ago, when a play had to be “real” to be read at all and had to make sense to sensible people.

  Call it a question of personal taste rather than principle, but I think that in theater work there is an optimum balance between two kinds of approaches: One is the traditional attempt to fill characters with acknowledged emotion, “as in life.” The other is in effect to evacuate emotion from characters, merely referring to their subjective life rather than acting it out, the so-called camp style. In his speculative prose, Brecht, for one, called for such a drying-out of script and acting, but except in his most agitprop and forgettable plays he failed or declined to practice this method. The strict containment not of emotion but of emotionalism is the hallmark of the Greek tragic plays, of Molière and Racine and the Japanese Noh plays, whereas Shakespeare, it seems to me, is the balance, the fusion of idea and feeling. In short, it is by no means the abstracting of emotion I dislike; it is the lack of feeling and the substitution of fashionably alienated ironies in its place.

  There has been a plethora of plays in recent years whose claim to modernity is based on indicated rather than felt emotion. The assumption, I suppose, is that this sec quality lends a play an intellectuality it may or may not have earned and in any case rescues it from the banality of work aimed at the audience’s belly rather than its head. The big devil to be avoided is sentimentality, emotion unearned.

  Theater, like politics, is always the art of the possible. And when economics makes it impossible to employ more than four or five actors in a single unchanging set, when competition for actors by TV and films prevents them from maturing in theater work, when the cost of advertising makes it effectively impossible for a play to survive without nearly unanimous critical praise, it seems to me a shame to dismiss a play that is not camp simply because it moves an audience. Can’t it be art if it moves people? If the pun can be pardoned, man lives not by head alone, and the balance between the two modes, one aimed at the mind and one the flesh, as it were, is what will interpret life more fully. After all, at least part of what we ask of a modern play is to show
us what life now feels like.

  Ultimately, every assault on the human mystery falls back to the ground, changing little, but the flight of the arrow continues claiming our attention over a longer time when its direction is toward the castle of reality rather than the wayward air.

  Subsidized Theatre

  1947/2000

  The commercial system of theatrical production in New York is some two centuries old. In contrast, theatre has been carried on in various parts of the West for a couple of thousand years but under very different production circumstances. The New York system is thus a sport, something created to reflect a vibrant capitalism with its joy in risk-taking and the excitement of the win-all-or-lose-all rodeo. We have arrived—in New York—at the expiration time of that theatrical way of life as far as straight plays are concerned. The system no longer works for non-musical theatre and hasn’t in years. The time has come to consider alternatives.

  I have sometimes wondered if there ever was what one could call a “healthy” theatrical circumstance. The classical Greek situation, turning out one masterpiece after another, usually appears to us as serene, like some great ship cruising stormy seas unperturbed by the tons of water crashing down on its decks. But then one recalls stories of the choreaqi, the men of wealth chosen for the honor of paying the bills for the chorus, who tried as best they could to duck the distinction. And to read almost any twenty pages of Aristophanes is to sense the backbiting and posturing and nastiness surrounding Greek theatre. Much the same mess seems to have prevailed in Elizabethan times, and Molière’s, Strindberg’s, Chekhov’s, Shaw’s, O’Casey’s, just as in our own.

  Theatre production these days is a problem with not even an acceptable definition let alone a solution. The theatre owner will tell you that it is simply that costs are too high even as he takes fifty-two percent of the gross. Nor is the stagehand or author or actor likely to look to himself for the source of the difficulty. All one can say is that the play that cost less than forty thousand to produce a generation ago now comes in at a million and a half or even two million and rising, the price of a ticket soaring from four or six dollars to seventy-five and up. It is a system which has almost literally eaten its own body alive.

  In the belly of the beast, as always, is the money and the conflicts it breeds. Where the state finances production, as it partially does in England and other parts of the world, its built-in urge to censor has to be curbed; where private investment does so, it is greed that must be bridled lest it lead down into the swamp of theatrical triviality where the great mass of the public is alleged to live and hence the promise of the biggest returns. Theatre is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we are in more than trouble now and an altogether new spirit will have to infuse those interested in changing—perhaps saving is the word—the production of plays on a professional level.

  Amid the gratitude, which I share, for the annual arrival of fine British plays on and off Broadway, it is useful to remember that every one of them, practically with no exceptions, came out of subsidized theatres. It is not possible to imagine that a Pinter, a Stoppard, a Hare, a Frayn, would have been nurtured in London’s commercial West End. They are all too chancey and their audiences admittedly too limited to warrant investment-for-profit. The British public, in short, has been financing a significant part of New York’s theatre for a long time now.

  The minds of probably most American politicians—and even some critics and editorialists—seem to curdle at the idea of subsidizing any art, least of all theatre. To them, subsidized theatre seems to imply a crutch to help hold erect failed artists who can’t make it in the tough, Darwinian for-profit arena. After all, a good number of people have gotten rich on doing theatre work, why can’t these mendicants? And besides, isn’t theatre attendance on Broadway higher than ever? And if almost all the increase has gone to musicals, then so be it—the public has decided it doesn’t want straight plays. The system operates like any other market and if one can’t manage on its terms maybe he ought to give up and go into another line of work.

  With the richest theatre in America unable to produce a single new straight play season after season, leaving only a very occasional revival on the boards in that category, one is given the reason as being the failure of playwrights who somehow have forgotten how to do the job. That hundreds, thousands of plays are written in this country every year, without a single one good enough for professional production in our greatest entertainment city, is nothing short of a statistical marvel. So extreme is the situation that one is driven to drastic explanations; is it possible, one wonders, that this generation of New York producers, who will travel to England or even Australia to sign up a new hit play, are not competent to read and judge a script but only its reviews, or by having sat in the midst of a laughing or weeping audience to decide to reach for their contracts? I find this illiteracy far more likely than the idea that the playwriting art has simply gone to earth forever in a United States of two hundred and fifty million souls.

  For reasons I can’t pretend to understand, there are never more than a handful of playwrights in any age. Poets, novelists, essayists show up in numbers, but playwrights come in two’s and three’s. We presently have many more than this handful but the most commercialized theatre in the world has no place for them. Can it be that the commercial organization of professional theatre is, in fact, preventing the flowering of theatre, most especially in New York, where theatre is so important to the economy as well as the spirit of the place?

  But why bother even to complain about the Broadway theatre when it is clearly so artistically bankrupt where production of original straight plays is concerned? There are good reasons for caring, most of them forgotten. In the two- or three-hundred seat off-Broadway theatre, whatever its charm, it is next to impossible to produce plays with casts larger than half a dozen, not to mention those requiring multiple sets. Thus, the esthetic of playwriting itself is affected by this total commercialization, and playwriting becomes of necessity a constricted technique. I do not believe that, for example, most of my own plays would have found production on today’s Broadway, and what would one do with The Crucible on a shoebox stage with its twenty-one characters and several sets? I don’t think Salesman would have been produced by the present breed of Broadway producers because it is too sad—and in fact even in 1949 there was pressure to find a more upbeat title, the producer actually paying to poll theatre audiences asking if they’d like to see a play called Death of a Salesman. Practically none, quite naturally, said they would. Off-Broadway has its uses but creating plays of breadth and physical size is not one of them. Broadway theatres, on the other hand, once welcomed plays of size, which of course is not to deny that in any age the producer’s dream is a very funny play with a cast of two in one set.

  As things stand now, it is almost impossible to imagine an actor making a lifelong career acting in the theatre. The off-Broadway theatre is basically subsidized by people without families to support, its young underpaid actors whose eye is really on television or films, not theatre. Much is made of the great British actors, but almost without exception the Oliviers, Richardsons, Gielguds, Gambons, Guinnesses came out of subsidized theatres where they developed their craft in great roles in classic plays. There is no play in New York where anything like this kind of muscle building is possible. We have wonderfully talented actors who do incredible things in the three- or four-week rehearsal period normally allowed them, but if a bottom-line theatre, which is what we have, cannot afford longer rehearsals it doesn’t justify making a virtue of our deprivation.

  If we have theatres, we don’t have Theatre, which is not real estate but a collection of people of talent whose main interest and devotion is the creation of something beautiful. This is difficult to discuss because it is basically about an atmosphere. Playwrights as different as Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill have hated the absolute commercialization of New York theatre, and it is hard to thi
nk of any artist who has loved it, including some who have made fortunes out of it. My own impression is that the atmosphere has in some ways degenerated even further than when the earlier generation complained of it. Perhaps it is the immensity of the investment required now, but where there was once a certain comity between producer and artist, a certain collaborative equality between people with different but complimentary functions, it seems now like merely one more employer-employee relationship. A real power shift seems to be taking place. Producers speak now of having “given” a production to an author, quite as though profit-making were not at all involved in driving the deal but the generosity and largesse of one who is not only the holder of a lease on a theatre building but the proprietor of the art itself. There is some dangerous, if superficial, logic in this; the businessman is always around but the author, director, and actors vanish sometimes for years before they show up again with a new play and new roles. So that the illusion can easily grow that the business of theatre is business, and the art rather incidental. Indeed, the pressure is actually on now by certain producers to junk the traditional royalty arrangements with authors, who of course have for several generations retained ownership and control of their scripts, and to replace it with the producer’s taking over if not actual ownership then the right to make any script changes he desires. Some think we are moving into the Hollywood system, where the producer buys or commissions scripts and the author moves down to the bottom of the totem pole, without control or contractual rights once he is paid. Indeed, the Hollywood system sprang from the old Broadway practice of producers buying plays and even attaching their names to them as authors, as the famed John Golden did for many a year before the Dramatists Guild was organized to protect writers.