Bringing Down the Curtain
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Bringing Down the Curtain The best that can be said about the theater season just legally retired is that it is not the worst in living memory. After a...
...Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, whose audience was to be found more off-Broadway than on...
...At a time when it looms more as mediocrity than milestone, the musical dominates the theater like a colossus, from the blockbuster on Broadway to the intimate satirical revue off-Broadway...
...In the meantime, 196162 will go down in history as the season in which Brecht became not only respectable but commercial...
...On Shubert Alley, hope springs eternal—even if most of it eventually lands on the sidewalk with a thud...
...One additional observation should be made about that helter-skelter combination of formula and noise which was our commercial theater during the past 12 months: For the first time since the 1930s, there has been evident a real momentum toward the permanent theater company, a momentum which reached its crest this spring...
...The English invasion continued, in mounting volume though somewhat disappointing quality...
...Margaret Leighton's carrying on of the tradition that British actresses make the best Williams heroines...
...At present, an actor making his rounds on the streets of New York may be under consideration for casting by the Lincoln Center Theater, the Actors Studio's new producing unit, the Association of Producing Artists, the company at the Masque Theatre on 42nd Street, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Theater Group in Los Angeles, the Actors Workshop in San Francisco, the Alley in Houston, the Arena Stage in Washington, as well as the usual summer stock all over the place...
...If the money lost on junk this season— and every season—had been invested in a half-dozen first-rate endeavors or theaters or buildings, and if anyone could ever agree as to what those half-dozen were, we might one day have the finest theater in the world instead of the noisiest and most kaleidoscopic...
...After a succession of dismal seasons, each managing to be worse than the last, this is an achievement in itself...
...As for Brecht himself, we had to be satisfied with Brecht on Brecht, a collection of readings from the master's literary memorabilia and a few short scenes from his plays...
...But the columns have again started humming with the same old tunes and there is already a theater shortage for next year...
...In the Jungle of Cities, one of Brecht's earliest and least important works, continued in the Living Theater repertory, but we must wait until next year for a major work...
...Another season or two like the last one and off-Broadway will certainly have succeeded in killing the geese that laid its golden eggs...
...The exceptions were Paul Scofield's American debut...
...Of new American straight plays there has been a dearth, and other than The Night of the Iguana almost none of any significance...
...More than half of the Broadway shows currently running are musicals, including the Pulitzer Prize winner (How to Succeed in Business), and there is a sizeable proportion downtown...
...Apart from the normal percentage of hits and flops, and the usual array of talents, old and new, what actually happened this season...
...Of new American playwrights, the only ones worth talking about were offBroadway's Arthur Kopit (Oh, Dad, Poor Dad) and Frank Gilroy (Who'll Save the Plowboy...
...As for the rest of off-Broadway's increasingly copious offering, except for the usual rash of worthwhile but dullish revivals of semi-classics it hit a new low for sloppiness, ineptness and plain amateurishness...
...Without attempting to recapitulate in detail, let's consider some of the highlights and salient features of our practice of "non-theater" (using the word in the same sense as Ionesco's "anti-play...
...In the long run, the new boost to repertory theater may prove the season's most significant contribution...
...and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, a deliberate and literate attempt to imitate Brecht in which Scofield's blend of bravura and sensitivity made us almost understand Sir Thomas More...
...Above all, however, economics continues to be the major force in our theatrical non-pattern...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 13
