Where Are The New Playwrights?
THE OUTCRY, "WHERE ARE OUR NEW PLAYWRIGHTS?", I frequently heard in the last five or ten years, seems to have been uttered with particular intensity during the theatre season that is now drawing to .a close. Is it justified?
Insofar as it implies that virtually no fresh writing talent has been emerging in our theatre, it can be refuted by a listing that includes Jack Richardson (The Prodigal), William Snyder (The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker), William Hanley (Mrs. Daily Has a Lover), Murray Schisgal (The Typists and The Tiger), David Rayfiel (P.S. 193), Hugh Wheeler (Big Fish, Little Fish), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Jack Gelber (The Connection), Lewis John Carlino (Cages), Frank Gilroy (Who'll Save the Plowboy?), Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad), J.P. Donleavy (The Ginger Man), Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns), Sidney Michaels (Dylan). And because he has written one smash hit in addition to some excellent one-acters, is Edward Albee, at the age of 36, a "veteran" playwright?
Yet such evidence somehow does not convince us, nor relieve our sense of frustration about the state of American playwriting. Can these men compare to the writers of the twenties and thirties and forties—O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Rice, Barry, Behrman, George Kelly, Sidney Howard, Odets, Hellman, Kingsley, Williams, Miller, Inge—almost all with a sustained, substantial body of work produced over a period of years? Isn't it a fact that there just aren't the playwrights there used to be?
There probably aren't—but for reasons that in no way negate the real talent or potential of the new writers I have named. The reasons have to do with the changed state of the theatre itself. The number of plays presented on Broadway during the period of l919-1929 mounted to an average of 200 a season. At present the number has been reduced to about 70.
It is difficult for new playwrights to look forward to a prolonged career in the theatre where the conditions of theatrical productions are inimical to the staging of many plays. To put this paradoxically, let us say that to have more good plays, more bad plays must be produced.
Theatrical production today is at least ten times more costly than it was in our "golden age." There were many more regularly active producers then than at present. Each of those producers presented two or more plays every season. A failure was neither a disgrace nor a terrifying financial disaster. Operating costs were so low that profits might be declared within three or four weeks after a play's opening. It was no alarming risk to invest $5,000 or $10,000 in a possibly imperfect play by either a new or a well-known playwright. Arthur Hopkins, a pioneer in the production of sound drama in the twenties, pointed out that he was satisfied if only one of his four seasonal offerings proved a hit; if two of them did, he considered it a bonanza year.
A theatre which depends entirely on the production of immediate smash hits is doomed. The immediate cause for concern over the fate of new playwrights then is related to the defects in the internal structure of our theatre which, without exaggeration, may be described as anarchy. Where there is a free-for-all competition for separate benefits for all the supposedly collaborating constituents (playwrights, actors, directors, designers, agents, real-estate interests), there can be no security for anyone. The theatre, once a profession, ceases to preserve that status as a business.
Such a theatre does not encourage, let alone support, the new playwright either morally or monetarily. Consider some of the plays in my foregoing list. Many of them are rarely cited as evidence of fresh talent because, having been produced off Broadway or not having been conspicuously successful, they are now held to be negligible and are therefore quickly forgotten. Playgoers, even reviewers, rarely sustain their authors with renewed mention or managers with option money on future work.
A large number of these playwrights and their plays begin obscurely and remain in obscurity because we pay scant attention to that which does not strike us at first flash as complete achievement Absolute success is the goal.
A large number of these playwrights and their plays begin obscurely and remain in obscurity because we pay scant attention to that which does not strike us at first flash as complete achievement. Absolute success is the goal.
A single play of promise even a single outstanding play, is not the same as a body of dramatic work. We are witnesses to a kind of disappearing act: now we see the new playwright, now he is gone. We tend to forget his presence was once real. The more or less bright beginnings these plays and playwrights bespeak do not assure continuous growth or mature development. The implications of Van Wyck Brooks' symbolic statement that America is the land of first acts become ominous in the context of our theatre. In part, we, the audience, as well as the theatrical profession itself are to blame. We hail the new playwright for his "novelty"! To score a smash, to become the talk of the town, the subject of all interviews the star of all panels and symposia, the cynosure at all parties rattles the successful neophyte and makes the wear and tear of continuous effort required for progress as a writer discouraging. It used to be commonplace to mock Hollywood for its hysterical fabrication of "genius" with every emerging personality. But New York is hardly better.
What happens to the new playwright in such an atmosphere? His first failure discourages him and he vanishes. If his first play succeeds but is followed by several failures, he retires to other fields, perhaps television or movies, which pay more, demand less and induce far less anguish. The nub of the problem is not an absence of playwrights but the state of the theatre itself.
Since we have all come to recognize the sorry confusion which defeats our hopes in the future health of our theatre and to look on it as being in a state of endemic crisis, certain counterforces intended to repair the damaged edifice have begun to operate. This is particularly true in regard to writing for the theatre.
The universities are becoming ever more aware of the services they may perform in this respect. They are doing this not only through courses on the subject but more concretely through productions of the best plays, ancient and modern, foreign and American, as well as scripts by fledgling dramatists.
The Actors Studio Playwrights Unit is now beginning to show results in the shape of various productions on and off Broadway. "Theatre 64" (Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder, Edward Albee) has staged a series of special performances of plays by promising new writers. A group calling itself the American Place Theater, sponsored by Saint Clement's Episcopal Church in New York, has plans for readings of the work of new playwrights and for the full production of The Old Glory, a triptych of one-act plays by one of America's foremost poets, Robert Lowell. All over town similar enterprises are being organized.
The New Dramatists Committee has done a remarkable job in fostering new playwrights. Among these we find such names as Robert Anderson, Arnold Schulman, Michael Stewart, Joseph Hayes, William Inge, Paddy Chayefsky, William Gibson, Sidney Michaels, Horton Foote. There are 37 playwright members now associated with the New Dramatists Committee. Readings by professional actors are set up, directors are called in for practical advice and criticism in areas with which the new dramatist may be unfamiliar. Run-through performances of untested scripts are given for invited audiences. Permission is obtained for the dramatist members to attend rehearsals of professional productions. An ambiance of fraternal discussion of both general and individual problems is created.
Various foundations (notably Ford and Rockefeller) have of late given serious attention to the needs of the theatre by grants to organizations in and out of New York, to university theatre departments, to individual playwrights, to directors for community theatre ventures.
Still another recent development in theatrical affairs furnishes cause for hope. The growing decentralization of our theatre, the spread of permanent, sometimes endowed, groups all over the country—in Minneapolis, Seattle, Memphis, Houston, San Francisco, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Washington, Dallas and New York—is of inestimable value.
All this is certainly helpful but it would be simpleminded to believe that encouraging advice, instruction and monetary assistance by themselves will bring about a flowering of new dramatic writing. While such devices constitute adjuncts to cultural activity, they do not provide dramatic inspiration! Let us agree for the moment that aside from the "accident" of individual genius—for which there is presumably no accounting—an age of splendid drama is the consequence of a series of complex factors. They form part of a "mystery" which patient inquiry may perhaps unravel.
These new organizations should serve to widen our theatre's scope. Broadway has no practical use for most of the world's dramatic masterpieces. A choice of classic plays—not limited to Shakespeare—will become the order of the day on the stages of the new organizations.
Such plays may spur the imaginations of young dramatists because the essential nature of a play which has endured the test of time is its concentration on what is basic and permanent in our lives. It reminds us forcibly of first principles. The importance of the classics as a contemporary contribution to the arts was made brilliantly cogent by Andre Malraux when he said, "During periods where all previous works are disdained, genius lapses, no man can build on a void, and a civilization that breaks with the styles at its disposal soon finds itself empty-handed."
The classics will also educate a wide audience hitherto unacquainted with them and therefore susceptible to their power. For among the things our theatre suffers from is the lack of an unspoiled audience, that is, an audience free from the poisonous pressures of the hothouse atmosphere of the show market. The audience which will come into being with the rise of the new theatres will in time become committed to them.
Here we approach the heart of our problem. For who says "audience" (or "public") must think of that entity of which they—audience or public—form a part. The theatre's incentive, its reason for existence, derives from the society from the society it serves.
When a society becomes conscious of itself—its needs, aspirations, enthusiasms, beliefs and hardships—the theatre is born. That is why the theatre as an organized institution, being a collective affair, usually develops later than the other arts.
Let us consider American instances. When our civilization was undergoing its early construction (up to 1888, let us say), there was comparatively little native drama. Our typical theatre consisted in great measure of minstrel shows, melodramas and "musicals" staged in saloons and river boats, together with importations from abroad in the wake of foreign—mostly European—stars.
In the late 19th century and in the early years of the 20th, there were modest burgeonings in the plays of James A. Herne, Clyde Fitch, William Vaughn Moody, Percy Mackaye, Langdon Mitchell, Edward Sheldon. (A mid-century piece, important for its time, was Uncle Tom's Cabin.)
American drama with any claim to a merit comparable to that of our better literature did not appear—following some "underground" manifestations in Provincetown, Greenwich Village and the lower East Side—until 1920, with O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon.
Why this emergence of an American "school" of dramatists at that particular time? With the settling of our land, with confirmed power and self-confidence, we began to look at ourselves with the objectivity which induces both calm and disquiet. Realistic novels were published, notably those of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, beginning a tradition carried on by Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and many others.
With our participation in the First World War and the resultant intimate contact with Europe, the development of new cultural vehicles, the hectic flush of affluence and greater world prestige, we began to divest ourselves of certain past inhibitions. We rejoiced in our success while at the same time we grew more self-critical. We felt we might look forward to a "Renaissance" (indeed, we claimed it was here), yet we suspected that, while our bodies glowed with well-being, our souls were starving. In the theatre, we had the Ziegfeld Follies on the one hand and Eugene O'Neill on the other, George Gershwin's musicals and The Theater Guild. We had come of age. The theatre was saying something.
The depression of the thirties, which struck our country's economy a heavy blow, also affected the arts. The theatre was severely damaged but did not die. In a sense it was stimulated. It brought us the play of social challenge which had, in its sounds of protest, more hopeful rhapsody than denunciation.
Odets awakened. Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan and men of the previous generation—Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood, S. N. Behrman—wrote plays which sounded notes largely unfamiliar in earlier American writing for the theatre. The Federal Theater Project, with its Living Newspapers, and such organizations as The Group Theater and The Theater Union, contributed much to the liveliness of our stage. Again the theatre was saying something.
The end of the Second World War brought a reaction against ordinary social or political panaceas. Critical challenge in drama took on a more personal tone. From Arthur Miller, who extended some of the lines traced in the plays of the thirties, through Tennessee Williams who, after the nostalgic melancholia of The Glass Menagerie added a certain sexual stress to the social meaning of his plays, dramatists like William Inge began to examine our social environment under the guidance of Freudian doctrine. Our theatre of the forties was still saying something.
The fifties—the period of Eisenhower "normalcy" and McCarthy frightfulness—made conformism the bugaboo of thoughtful folk. There seemed to be no escape except inward—toward an embattled privacy. The refuge of drugs in Jack Gelber's The Connection was more symbolic than factual. The lone individual, bereft of any objective ideal of sense of kinship with the mass of his fellow men—engaged in "business as usual"—could make contact with society only by allowing himself to be killed by it, as in the macabre comedy of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story.
Only when such preoccupations grip society, only when there is an irrepressible urge within a community—whether it be one of exultation, anger, religious zeal, a desire to remedy an injustice or to celebrate a great deed—is significant drama written. There must be some positive passion, moral principle or triumphant revelation to express.
Shaw, who once said he would destroy all his dramatic work if it had no "journalistic" relevance—that is, application to the preoccupations of the day—could have justified this pronouncement with the examples of the timeless St. Joan and the semi-symbolic Heartbreak House as much as with any of his earlier and more specifically social plays such as Widower's Houses or the later Apple Cart and Too True to Be Good.
If we ask ourselves, "Where are our new playwrights?" we cannot answer unless we also ask ourselves what we believe, what we are ready to affirm, what deeply in pleasure or pain we truly feel. A stultified society, one that is intimidated, frustrated, uncertain, complacent, conformist without recognizing that such is its condition, cannot produce living drama.
A number of the younger playwrights, however, are imbued with some of the fire needed to rouse us from our lethargy. We are not living in a dull, static period; we are merely evading its challenge. We are, in fact, living in a time of extraordinary, even revolutionary, change. The position of the United States in relation to the rest of the world is no longer exactly what it was even 10 years ago. Europe and South America view us in a new perspective, Asia is being transformed, Africa seethes; and we are all faced with a shocking discrepancy between our personal spiritual needs and the ever-increasing mechanization of modern society. We are on the verge of "thinking the unthinkable." All this must inevitably catch up with us not only on a political level but indirectly on a personal one.
Plays do not have to deal literally with these historical phenomena, but they must willy-nilly be affected by them in various subtle ways. English society at the height of the industrial revolution from 1780 to 1890 hardly produced any significant drama but began to do so when the Victorian Era entered its decline, just as more recently the English theatre has taken on a new complexion with the emergence of certain anti-Establishment forces in high places.
If our younger dramatists manage to overcome the disillusionment that followed the extravagant hopes of the thirties and the forties—which led to a retreat or nihilism in the fifties—and if, further, the new forces in our theatre begin to widen the channels of expression so that the Broadway impedimenta are removed, it may not be too "innocent" to suggest that the doldrums of which many of us complain will be dispelled in the future. It will not be necessary, in other words, to ask, "Where are our new playwrights?" We shall be thoroughly aware of them. 1964
Excerpts from The Collected Works of Harold Clurman published by Applause Theatre Books. Reprinted with the permission of Ellen Adler and J.C. Compton.
Drawing above reproduced by special arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, The Margo Feiden Galleries, NY.
HAROLD CLURMAN
A dynamic force as Producer, Director, Drama Critic, he founded the famed Group Theatre in 1931 with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Mr. Clurman directed the original productions of Awake & Sing, The Member Of The Wedding, Bus Stop, A Touch of the Poet, and Incident At Vichy among others. His classic account of the Group Theatre, The Fervent Years is a must read for all theatre lovers, as well as his On Directing, Ibsen, and All People Are Famous. A recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award, he was known as the “elder statesman of the American Theatre.”
