The Unseen Audience
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Unseen Audience IT is an old story that television has taken over the realm of the "B" movie, except for the supercolossals of the...
...In the meantime, the middle has dropped out of sight: the exploration of social reality which has traditionally been the province of theater...
...And, oddly enough, it is television series, the spiritual home of the cornball, which are bearing the burden of social commentary...
...Now this is cheating a little...
...You're nothing and you come from nothing . . . You won't be happy until I'm back there on those dirty streets...
...In a good number of them, the cast of characters and setting merely provide a framework for a freewheeling analysis of many aspects of contemporary life...
...I was reminded of television's emerging role recently when I saw an installment of Nurses (ThursdayCBS) which dealt with the race problem...
...It has picked up . . . well, if not the torch at least the small beam of light which the theater let drop...
...What is frequently overlooked is that it has taken over the function of theater as well...
...I saw a demonstration of the power of the TV image—as against reality—not long ago at New York University where I teach...
...For what "Express Stop from Lenox Avenue" finally does is to make the boy a white Negro...
...James Baldwin had previously attracted about 200...
...The fact is that we know very little about the impact of TV on its audience...
...In the meantime, the boy has spent the night on the town and has been beaten up...
...Not that Harlem is not full of good boys who are misjudged as a result of ugly white expectations...
...Not in the Norman Mailer meaning of the term, to be sure, but in the sense that the Negro characters were nice middleclass types virtually indistinguishable from whites...
...Remember when any treatment of the Negro—on stage or in the movies—almost always dealt with a white Negro...
...It was sound though fairly predictable liberal agit-prop, well-intentioned and properly tuned-in to student emotional and intellectual wave-lengths...
...But that is another play...
...In the inevitable reconciliation, the youth is persuaded to go back downtown to his hospital job, but he is only meagerly hopeful...
...Allen consented, but he made it clear that he was coming as writer and as man-ofideas, not as entertainer...
...When her favorite patient, a bookish man who keeps her in reading matter, is discovered drunk and gravely ill as a result of his having consumed a bottle of liquor smuggled into the ward, Jennie immediately accuses her cousin...
...I got to fight the man, then go home...
...The didacticism on which I have commented in the past thus has free play...
...Until the end, however, the script does not cheat...
...He read sections from his last novel, then gave a suitably hortatory talk—a good part of it from a prepared text—in which he outlined areas of social unease yet to be cleared up in America...
...The weakness of this far-betterthan-average script is precisely in its good intentions...
...Researchers have discovered something called "selective seeing," which presumably enables us to screen out what we don't want to see, and to see only what we expect to see in terms of our preexisting prejudices...
...I invited Steve Allen to give a talk to one of those inevitable student literary societies...
...One or two even turned nasty and wanted to know by what authority he offers serious ideas...
...It has become polarized between puny and irrelevant avantgardism on the one hand, and expense account titillation on the other...
...The truth of the matter, as the last few seasons painfully attest, is that theater has virtually abdicated its function...
...It was poor Jennie who unwittingly smuggled in the booze when she delivered a package of books to her literate patient—"between the Faulkner and the Nabokov," he scrupulously explains...
...That suited us fine...
...The image of Harlem as a vast no-man's-land is unmitigatedly bleak, and the audience identifies completely with Jennie's desire to cut loose once and for all from the ghetto world of her childhood...
...Old myths—especially comforting ones—die hard, and we are still prone to think of theater as serious, given to sturdy facing-up-toreality, while TV is the never-never land of the fadeproof smile...
...he says resignedly...
...It turns out he is not a delinquent, he is a good boy, and Jennie's compassion and understanding are not put to the test after all...
...They even looked like whites, and some of these "pioneering" works actually dealt with Negroes who could pass as whites...
...In the question period, the audience had their chance, and they showed where they stood...
...Allen takes his social and cultural responsibilities seriously and asked the chairman to announce that he was on hand to speak as a writer, and not as an entertainer...
...It is fair to say that the gap between TV and the sophisticated perception of things, which is supposed to be the province of theater, is steadily being narrowed...
...And Enter Laughing, a mere sugarcube of a play about a Jewish boy in the '30s who wants to be an actor, is Grand Concourse kitsch at its worst...
...Or, in the usual TV fashion, it provides a reconciliation...
...I got to go downtown...
...Now reconciliation, by definition, means that both sides yield a little...
...When he turned serious on them, they turned sulky...
...There was a carnival atmosphere which was vaguely disquieting...
...it does not shape them...
...She turns on him with cold fury...
...He is Harlem all the way, from his Bop goatee ("my fur," he calls it) to his loose, easy hipster talk...
...Never Too Late, a frankly frivolous, mildly sexy thing about overaged fatherhood, is not untypical of this lightweight theater...
...Daniel Boorstin would have felt gloomily vindicated had he been there...
...There are perhaps two or three things a season worth seeing...
...For as theater has faded into fecklessness, television has whistled its spirits into some semblance of courage...
...And in the case of most TV scripts, it means giving up part of one's sense of reality...
...Allen tried...
...The usual cultural stalwarts were not there, but the fraternity boys in their continental suits had turned out in battalions...
...A pretty young Negro nurse, only recently liberated from Harlem, discovers, to her dismay, that her cousin—an alumnus of the fiveminute car wash and the bowling alley—is coming to work in her hospital as an orderly...
...Regular theatergoing hardly makes sense any more...
...Instead of addressing themselves to the serious issues Allen raised, the questioners persistently nagged at him as an electronic glamor boy...
...Philip Roth under 100...
...the rest is dross...
...In the Nurses episode, "Express Stop from Lenox Avenue," on the other hand, we get a portrait of a Negro which has fascinating links to Norman Podhoretz's recent confessional in Commentary...
...The boy, it turns out, is innocent...
...I got to get up in the morning...
...But that should not be confused with a cultural enterprise...
...Then there is a wonderful moment when Jennie—superbly played by Ruby Dee—and the boy smile at each other with that sweet, yet rueful and tough humor that is the special talent of many Negroes...
...The chairman did so...
...When he started, they cheered vociferously...
...Some recent studies have indicated that it only reinforces people's attitudes and values...
...Enter TV...
...There are people, of course, who insist upon going to the theater without any particular sense of conviction, the way other people go to church— as an engaging middle-class ritual...
...They wanted to know how his show was doing, was he changing the format, and what were his plans for the future...
...It was clear they felt cheated...
...Do you know what I got to do...
...He was their Steve Allen...
...The nurse, Jennie, is a wistful cultureseeker, and her precarious respectability is threatened by her cousin's presence...
...In the end, it offers yet another liberal preachment about understanding and good will...
...TV is our great national schoolroom, and to demand that it grapple with reality unafraid is a little like saying that the Tropic of Cancer should be taught in junior high school English classes...
...The audience was virtually rude...
...That is all very well except that it begs the question, for where do the prejudices come from in the first place...
...The meeting room was jammed with perhaps 400 students—a few hundred others had been turned away...
...This is no easy question...
...When she learns of her mistake, she makes a pious pilgrimage uptown to apologize...
...The dramatic force of this script derives from the tension Jennie feels at association with the ghetto squalor she has worked so hard to escape...
...What might have been a love-feast between t? hero and audience turned into something cranky and tense and unstable...
...You Lenox Avenue animal," she snarls at him...
...Yet the puzzle remains: Should television attempt to be bluntly honest, as did Podhoretz, about race relations, or should it sing its old sweet song of faith, hope and charity...
...Series these days are not series in the old sense of continuing and cumulative action, as in soap opera...
...What the script degenerates into, as a result of liberal good will, is a story about the failure of perception, which is a very different matter altogether...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Unseen Audience IT is an old story that television has taken over the realm of the "B" movie, except for the supercolossals of the Samson/Hercules/ Attila-the-Hun variety...
...All in all, it was a frightening demonstration of the power of television...
...What appalled me is that the students wanted none of it...
...Some brandished little props and signs which were evidently familiar from the program...
...This in itself was a kind of polite anti-Negroism...
...Until we know just what happens when a viewer sees a show and who the viewers are—are they cultural innocents, a coast-to-coast tabula rasa, or already congealed into prejudices?—we cannot naively equate TV with theater and its very special audience...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
