Off-Broadway, 1960

...whatever it is, it dearly belongs to the people involved...

...George Orwell discovered that the down-and-outer in Paris lives autonomously, suspect by the authorities, but deeply independent and capable of dignity...

...What content there is seems secondhand, squeezed from another source, such as novels adapted, or historical trials transposed verbatim...

...The play seems only slightly dated...

...This year we have a more amusing, though not particularly enduring, Irish tawdriness, also suprisingly nostalgic...

...We are, Genet has suggested, presently preoccupied with "the delicate world of reprobates," and this world is most appropriate to the off-Broadway theater, which also scorns to qualify within the existing commercial set-up...

...The beat character is supposed to be independent (bother nobody, nobody bother me) but I don't believe it, especially after seeing The Connection...

...What can one man do with another man's heart...

...This is not true in some other countries...

...If a beat character is easy to portray by doing nothing in particular except showing his wounds (or rather needle marks) there is perhaps some danger that off-Broadway playwrights might concentrate entirely on this, and rely on a subliminal sort of pathos to be fuddle everybody...

...there is something really defeated about the beatnik, the junkie, the delinquent...

...Its very freedom makes it possible for offBroadway to imitate Broadway, as in those drab little musicals full of "youthful enthusiasm" and "naive charm...

...But both good and bad actors really want to act, and may do so without being paid, and in the given economy this constitutes almost a crime, because it keeps the enterprise out of the eco nomic system...

...Unwilling, perhaps, and by default, and not very graceful about it, they are nevertheless forced to have faith in the doubtful but persistent little groups which will always be forming, dissolving and reforming around a play...

...The terror and incoherence of this world has been ably portrayed offBroadway by Jack Gelber and Edward Albee...

...As FOR THE PLAYWRIGHT who appears off-Broadway, he would probably sell his soul to make money just like everybody else, but since he is not allowed, or (like George Grosz trying to do magazine art) unable to make it, the rage with which he regards his exclusion sometimes puts grit into a personal style that might otherwise have complied with the rules of tourism...

...Things are made easy...

...On another level, press-agents make up charts on which you check off the plays you've seen, like Howard Johnson charts for ice-cream flavors, and the critic, whatever his intentions, is used mainly as a guide on how to respond to these flavors...

...The Zoo Story can be played to concentrate on the story...

...When Tennessee Williams speaks of "riding out" like a tenor sax, he is identifying himself shrewdly with the world of jazz, of hipsters...

...The latter tells the former that he is writing an article which will be a categorical denunciation of Broadway, manages to get the established playwright to agree with his views, and then informs him, to his horror, that this has been an interview...

...With a sordid subject the sentimentality can pass unnoticed...

...excesses, blunders and mistakes being the very essence of accomplishment...

...And finally, repeated three times, "You are not alone...

...All plays seem to belong to the past, and to fit into certain loose categories...

...The actors are afraid of the rhinoceroses occupying the seats, and the rhinoceroses are afraid of the actors...

...The Connection, by Jack Gelber, is a better demonstration of the beat than anything written, simply because it includes audible jazz, the visible Negro and his white equivalent, the physical suffering of the narcotic addict, and his special language...

...But most of the plays have been chosen for another reason...

...This makes for the sort of movie in which an actor who is not at all a good clown is decorated as one, and made to shed real tears over the decoration, and the camera focuses pathetically on these...

...At first an outsider and a square, incongruous in the musicians' pad which she has been led into, she at last identifies with the rest of the cast...

...The central character, the American, Kilroy, has a too-big heart...

...a performance it is, and therefore one must treat it as such...

...it is almost subliminal...

...But our reprobates are not so clownish...

...It is depressing to think that this may be true (euphemistically: whatever is proved would have to be unproved), that at the first opportunity any one of these people would jump at the chance of "being discovered," and remaining to work for the rest of their lives in order to stay "discovered...

...In a purely tech• nical way sentiment undermines the theater because it is a substitute for any real content, and induces sloven...

...Broadway may lose a lot of money for itself, but it is an asset to the city...

...There is complaisance on both sides, mixed with false confidence...

...First, the musical, and the longer it has been running the greater its attraction as a sight-seeing phenomenon...

...our underground Negroes are more dismaying than the cheerful Negroes attached to English casts of characters as representatives of such...

...An Anouihl play which on Broadway is polished and dead becomes, off-Broadway, awkward but alive...

...But when Camino Real failed, it was assumed that it was because it was too "way out," and for this reason could be placed under the aegis of off-Broadway...

...Last year I discovered that in the very latest English play there always comes a point when the hero starts criticizing the decor (the American audience worries secretly for the rest of the evening about the decor at home), and no matter how he rages, he afflicts us sentimentally, with forgotten aspirations, reminiscences of the thirties, or lost manners, like the man who tastes Tetley's tea...

...They put a needle in my arm too...

...The Pretender, by Lionel Abel, plays freely and incongruously with a race situation, stressing rational argument, with reversals, irony and wit...

...chartered buses provide a packaged evening of drinks, restaurant, show and transportation home, on Wednesday night opening curtain is pulled back to 7:30 to accommodate commuters...

...For no perceptible reason Kilroy must be stripped of his belongings, humiliated as a clown, and maltreated to the end of the play...

...Each hides behind a performance, but the emphasis is agonizingly on the Freudian inner sufferer...

...I hope not, because these writers have something good in common...

...Like "Brown 'n Serve," the two words are intimately linked in New York...

...I'm growing old and my eyes are going...

...The Blacks, by Genet, subtitled "A Clown Play," treats the clown in the European manner...

...Albee has the right idea...

...they have mentally assigned to it the function of proving-ground for their future Broadway directors and playwrights...

...As in a democracy, well-inten tioned incompetence is in the long run preferable to ill-intentioned competence...

...a style which is no style, a language which is against language, acting which is against acting...

...It is true that the American actor learns from the English that he should work on his voice, and from the French mime that he has far to go in developing his body, and from the Japanese that he should make his every action significant...

...For it was he who started it...

...THE GROWING CONSPIRACY to turn New York into an enormous hotel gives its theater a museum-like impersonality and eclecticism...

...the police wanting cabaret licenses and some control, firemen wanting electrical work done, and Actors' Equity wanting to establish salaries...

...Here Come the Clowns by Philip Barry, recently revived off-Broadway, shows a dwarf, a lesbian, a cuckold, etc...

...Ionesco's characters are the French little bourgeois, school-teachers, office-workers, civil servants, making little stabs at intellectual and cultural conversation on the surface of a great abyss (which is where the terror comes in...

...It is only what has so far been best expressed, because most easily, and because musicians are bet ter trained than actors...

...These plays are indigenous to their locale, not because New York and the hipster is the actual scene and subject, but because of the nihilism...

...Writers for off-Broadway can play without distraction, and work with a sort of aristocratic combination of frivolity and endurance...

...These groups do not set out deliberately to distort the play in order to package it more attractively, and the original intention is intimated by an actor here, or a director there, if you keep an eye out for it...

...I mean that quality which is maudlin and wants to have its hand held, and which is really the origin of the nostalgic play...

...liness in both actor and spectator...

...asks Byron, and Casanova seizes a piece of bread and stamps on it...

...Here Don Quixote reappears and warns him against self-pity (A considerable retreat from Quixote's first admonition to Truth, Valor and Devoir...

...This is the device of clowns, and all modern the...

...So that although this appears on the surface to be nothing more than a presentation of reality, impartial and without comment, we are appealed to secretly along the familiar lines of American drama under the auspices of Eugene O'Neill...

...The Zoo Story, a one-act by Edward Albee, consists mainly of a monologue delivered by a young beat character, a terrifying and disjointed account of his life, culminating in a kind of suicide...

...Machinal is plucked out of the thirties, Chekhov's A Country Scandal is introduced for the first time...

...Then foreign plays, provided they are made acceptable by being given the English treatment, and of course the English play itself, lately imported as an entire production...

...In an amusing sketch called Flim and Flam Edward Albee confronts a successful with a less successful playwright...

...Perhaps, under this system, incompetence is the secret of survival...

...the mask, black or white, is grotesque, but the wearer assured...

...But one feels that the author does not deeply believe that truth, because the the point is always that the heart is stamped on, the "portmanteau" thrown out the window, the delicate lady abased...

...Gallows Humor, by Jack Richardson, is witty in the manner of early comedy movies, with a biting edge to playfulness, and pantomimed philosophy...

...In The Connection an old salvation army sister cues us in...

...The Living Theater has simply survived, floundering in its strained sloppiness, its worst productions patted on the head by avuncular critics, and its best production, The Connection, using that strained sloppiness to effect...

...But this underworld is not absolutely identifiable with offBroadway...

...SENTIMENTALITY is by no means easy to avoid, and the greatest playwrights, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, treat it as a personal enemy which has to be continually wrestled with, watched for and warned against...

...unemployed actors, perpetual students, people who have been around a long time, and who keep going back to the small theaters in cellars, converted movie houses, cheap hotel ballrooms...

...it seems like such an operation...

...Throughout the strike the Mayor alluded to the "cultural and economic" effects on the city...

...But the title of the proposed article was to be "No Hero...

...Also Negro actors, before the "method...

...an assurance which the people who write for Broadway lack...

...By this I don't mean that all the acting is bad...

...Now it seems to me that the off-Broadway playwrights are the heroes of this theater...

...Thus it becomes practically a moral duty to keep the theater going, regardless of what you think of it...

...Tennessee Williams is an exception in that he is given a chance to fail on Broadway first...

...The sketch, as performed, is much more amusing than the article would have been to read (such as this one...

...Spokesmen of the commercial theater have made an adjustment to offBroadway...

...ater, since it doesn't deal with heroes, may be said to deal with clowns...

...Unfortunately the beatniks are characters, and must be made to perform...

...In short, the general assumption is that the audience is a herd of rhinoceroses that has to be guided into the theater and retained there in orderly fashion for two hours...

...The Living Theater, the only offBroadway group to remain intact through several years, is particularly exasperating in its inept acting and direction, which seems so persistent as to be almost deliberate...

...It is an odd sort of assurance, which results in all sorts of excesses, blunders and mistakes...

...In the recent Broadway actors' strike, things that most people only surmise came into the open: for instance, that out of 12,000 Equity members only 731 were involved in the Broadway productions that closed down, or that the weekly minimum salary for Broadway actors is $103.50, whereas musicians get $155.50 and carpenters, property men and electricians, $156...

...The productions are by no means all avantgarde...

...In Mediterranean countries there is a corresponding respect accorded to the clown as artist...

...When "off-off Broadway" cabarets in coffee houses showed signs of success, they drew the attention of Police Department, Fire Department and Actors' Equity...

...When he removes his mask at the end of the play it comes as a genuine shock, as if some workman had come out from behind the scenes...

...You are not alone, don't be lonely, we love you...

...Whatever one thinks of Genet, and his commitment to hate, this theater has a dignity and clean formality which is badly needed in America...

...It is a sprawling, unselective sort of theater, where groups form and dissolve instantly, where anything may be presented, from abstract painting with jazz background music to the Oxford student type of exercise of the Greek plot...

...Then the tearful play about "tenderness" or "loneliness," written in good faith as a nostalgic recall of early Americana...

...I felt a new sensation of release, as if I could 'ride out' like a tenor sax taking the breaks in a Dixieland combo or a piano in a bop session...

...the actor straining over the line which moved the critic, the audience laughing hard at the joke the critic cited...

...Off-Broadway manages to qualify technically on all these counts, but only just, and by commercial standards it really doesn't...

...I've been in the hospital...

...Spanish phrases, "madrugada," ..sangre," ..miedo," arouse the bull-fight and first-year Spanish student...

...the charming Piccolo Teatro from Milan, and the Kabuki, which created such a stir that the Actors' Institute is now learning to play Kabuki in English...

...This is absolutely "sincere," and incidentally true, because self-pity is the great unadmitted trait of the American Kilroys, beatniks and reprobates...

...But our present attitude towards the clown is a fascination with his personal life, childhood, etc...

...The inner man was never presented nakedly as a hopeless case...

...All the technique in the world is useless if there is no content to apply it to...

...I am not at all deploring the importation of productions, especially the more exotic ones...

...Writers do not really want to use the theater...

...This whole phenomenon of "offBroadway" is the safety valve for the disqualified, and its main quality is its disqualification...

...American comedians used to have some of this workmanlike quality...

...In the preface to the published play Williams aligns himself with the beatniks in describing his approach...

...And no matter how inhuman the direction, the production is rewarding because the maltreatment is not intentional, or fitted into some doctrine of what the consumer wants...

...Here the suffering is the performance, a flat demonstration of despair, without irony, a sort of high-level advertisement and appeal...

...Broadway is a big cog in the tourist industry, and when its lights go out hundreds of waiters and garage attendants are laid off...

...I say unfortunately because in America the performances of either clowns or reprobates tend (as suggested by Tennessee Williams) to be self-pitying...

...I don't want to leave...

...Deliberate ineptitude would be a kind of protection, effectively preventing electricians' unions or other greedy factions from taking an interest...

...This gives it a sort of municipal power, a power over flow of traffic and efficient disposal of large numbers of people who don't know how to dispose of themselves...

...lonesco, Adamov, Becket, Behan, Ugo Betti, Genet, O'Casey, are treated as local discoveries, and taken up boldly by people who have never seen them produced, and who sometimes seem never to have acted or directed in their lives before...

...But significant of what...

...In Camino Real, Casanova, Don Quixote, etc., make their appearances to rouse the middle-brow romantics...

...to make the nose light up is an act of abasement, no art, but a signal of distress...

...This may be true, but when Tennessee Williams is most careless of Broadway requirements, or "sincere," his texture does not become tougher, as you might expect, but simply more "sincerely" phony, like the quote above...

...Harlequin, leather-masked, never gets fed except by trickery, thus he is light, and springs up from the fall, full of confidence and control...

...Camino Real is an aggrandizement of this: Kilroy's clown costume is a sack-cloth of humiliation...

...THERE IS ANOTHER audience, however, made up of local anachronisms in the form of permanent residents...

...The French avant-garde does not necessarily stress this world...