Troubles of the Modern Theater
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
Troubles of the Modern Theater How Not to Write a Play. By Walter Kerr. Simon & Schuster. 244 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Joseph T Shipley "The trouble with the theater is There are nine and sixty...
...I cannot change my wife's habits without stiff-er resistance still...
...A similar opposition is set between the critical and the creative habit of mind, though probably more persons today (Kerr to the contrary notwithstanding) have seen Lessing's Nathan the Wise ??”it was the first play revived in Germany after Hitler's fall...
...Then, smiling Jack, he thrusts at three giants of the drama...
...He illustrates the need for story with a bed-time tale: "Once upon a time there was a little boy and his name was Johnny Kerr He emphasizes that change involves conflict: I cannot change the landscaping in front of my house without getting good stiff resistance from the earth beneath me...
...I doubt," adds the author, "that we need give up the dramatic ghost altogether...
...Only where there is rich rapport would a husband dare claim in print that he can change his wife's habits...
...The one tool the theater may claim as its distinctive instrument is dialogue...
...Kerr might have mentioned that, in a 1955 offering, a boy musical prodigy was played by a boy musical prodigy, and have gone on to speculate as to possible recruitings for the House of Flowers, Ladies of the Evening, and the tricksy trollops of Seventh Heaven...
...his plays...
...Being honest, he accepted Iago's evidence???who would so falsely contrive...
...What other current reviewer has given us a book about the drama which is a considered study of a basic problem of the art...
...Kerr suggests that the frequency today of such guiding terms is symptomatic of the authors' desperation...
...You meet here not only an argument, but a personality...
...Being honorable, he acted as he then was bound...
...One wonders, nevertheless, whether it is coincidence that a final note, repeated on the jacket, informs us that Mr...
...He illustrates bare and bad dialogue with quotations from Uncle Tom's Cabin (Aiken) and Beyond the Horizon (O'Neill...
...toilets are really flushed...
...But Ibsen leads to the lecture, Chekhov lapses to the yawn...
...He contents himself with observing that, in all such cases, imagination and art have stayed off the stage...
...These matters, however, and the lack of an index, are eddies in the flow of a most stimulating volume...
...I concur, having said that while there is poetry there is hope...
...and Mrs...
...in several recent plays, whether really used or not...
...Reviewed by Joseph T Shipley "The trouble with the theater is There are nine and sixty ways of constructing the rest of that sentence, and every single one of them is partly right...
...Thus Kerr speaks of the lyric and the dramatic poet as possessing "instincts" at poles apart, not considering that the two moods may exist in one person...
...not because of talkies, radio, TV, or high cost seats, Kerr avers???that fewer theaters offer poorer wares to smaller audiences...
...Shaw has misled us, declares the genial critic of the New York Herald Tribune...
...to our horror, get rich...
...He challenges E. M. Forster's definition of "story...
...Our audiences have a guilty conscience when they have a good time...
...Walter Kerr enjoys his work and his writings: he knows the theater...
...This radical reversal is no less sound, though less surprising, than the second of Kerr's desiderata...
...He begins with the blunt statement that there is no good theater because no one is writing good plays...
...And, by the book's end, you should have increased both your knowledge of the theater and your capacity for enjoying life...
...A little in this provocative volume is provoking...
...The playwright must stop serving the intellectual, and write for the masses...
...Like a true sportsman, he shoots for big game...
...Also, whether the author is not, after all, blaming great men for their inferior followers...
...who would not cleanse his 'scutcheon, even with his heart's blood...
...than have read his drama criticism or even his Laocoon...
...The discussion of realism moves to a trenchant point when Kerr points out that for imitation we have tried to substitute identity...
...His illustrations of bad work are drawn from noted workers...
...Shakespeare, whom Kerr delights to quote, has his songs and his sonnets as well as???even in...
...Walter Kerr enjoys his family, too...
...and the creative playwright Shaw is the critic Kerr tells us was potent enough to lead our age astray...
...language on its most probing, intense, and spell-binding level is verse: the theater must for greatness return to spontaneous, outpouring verse...
...Our playwrights serve us warmed-over Ibsen and watered-down Chekhov...
...It seems not Kerr the critic but Kerr the would-be playwright that set down the book's final words: Let us work with "the universal audience," let us show the audience some affection, "and we may...
...In The Voice of the Turtle real eggs are really scrambled onstage...
...It is even harder to change theatrical ways...
...The passage from O'Neill's 1920 Pulitzer Prize Play contains 263 words of stage direction for its 196 words of speech...
...Walter Kerr, with the courage of a confirmed critic, ignores all the common causes of our theatrical decline...
...All of the work we prize most highly was born of the commercial or at least competitive hurly-burly, and in the presence of a mass audi-ence...
...it guides the actors with such words as "piteously uncomprehendingly falteringly desperately...
...Shaw made us believe that the theater should serve the intelligent...
...Hence it is that the liveliest form in the current theater is the musical comedy...
...No great play has ever come from what might be called a minority theater...
...Othello's flaw is grown of too great trust and too great pride...
...Walter Kerr's solution is philistine, or democratic, according to the place you set your sights...
...The analysis of Tea and Sympathy, for instance, or of Camino Real, the contrast Kerr presents between two pieces by John Steinbeck, illuminate basic principles of dramaturgy with deft turns of phrase and lively images...
...Kerr's analysis of the ills of the drama today is engagingly set forth, with such chapter-heads as "The Day the Shopgirl Got Her Notice" and "The Slow Boat to Nowhere...
...And does Kerr continue the schoolboy notion that "Jealousy is an eminently suitable symbol to stand for the central quality in Othello...
...This love seeps through the writing, into the reader's mood...
...Kerr "are preparing a musical comedy for forthcoming Broadway production...
...More pervasive is a tendency to sharpen his points with too strong contrasts, the either-or that knows no blend...
...It has 28 dashes...
...Stanislavski hired a beggar to play a beggar...
...Hence it is...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
