The Playwright's Public
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Playwright's Public In an earlier article ("Theatre at Any Price?", NL, January 31, 1966) I suggested that theater businessmen in New York had estranged the...
...The strongest version of a play is the chaste script...
...The prospect of a gigantic loss does not deter a playwright...
...Other playwrights-the younger who are desperate for a production, and the older ones who are sick of receiving illiterate rejection letters -may bypass New York altogether in favor of the few experimental companies in other parts of the country, or college drama groups, or the many venturesome producers in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain...
...An unreliable pointer is the subscription audience for the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center...
...His root dilemma, then, comes when he asks himself not, "Is this the best I can do...
...There is no question of New York's having a public for serious (not solemn) theater...
...It is a truism that a play does not "exist" until it is staged...
...For similar reasons, the past 20 years have given us an assortment of worthy American poems, paintings, short stories and (especially) sculpture, in addition to some of the best long fiction produced anywhere in the world...
...Thus many playwrights who are performed survive by the process of failing forward...
...But it is no longer an active, paying public...
...This dilemma is something like that alluded to by Dos Passos when he discussed Scott Fitzgerald's indecision about his public...
...A capitalization of $150,000 for a "legit" comedy is not unusual these days (musicals may cost four times that much) but it is an unnerving responsibility for a play to carry...
...in New York the doubt does not arise, since a dud serves perfectly well as a passport to prosperity and does not excite expectations for the future that will be hard to meet...
...no audience will ever be exposed to his brilliance...
...He comes back, too, for the New York public...
...By the time last season's program weighed in with one heavyweight play, one light-heavy, one undefeated champ and one aging flyweight, there were almost 40,000 subscribers...
...What has happened, of course, is that they have piled up behind that producers' gate...
...Should he therefore set out to write a conventional failure...
...or, if he has "the stuff," he can collect praise by addressing himself to readers of the literary journals...
...but, "How do I go about getting the final draft of this thing staged...
...A few may be fighting off oblivion by holding private readings...
...If it is done by an American college or a provincial workshop in the South, the Midwest or on the Pacific Coast, perhaps under the benevolent eye of a foundation, chances are that the facilities will be excellent and the production subcompetent...
...the two can cohabit...
...Every better-than-ordinary dramatist I have met would give his finest first act to win that public for his work...
...For another thing, the capital conies out of somebody else's mattress...
...Besides, a play may live briefly and distortedly in the provinces but it will also surely die there...
...the author may not be able to afford the trip to see how his play works there...
...On Broadway it will have to fill 45 per cent of the seats in a gaping house consistently for some 150 nights before it so much as earns back its investment...
...New York has a perpetual reservoir of talented, unemployed actors and directors, some of whom the playwright may know and insist on auditioning...
...But although many plays are faultily cast in New York, outside New York they are as a rule totally miscast...
...or even, "Do / like it...
...Meanwhile, back at the fiat: Are there any readers who would care to hear an acquaintance of mine reciting his latest script at home...
...For one thing, he writes plays out of the conviction that his work is bound to draw an audience...
...They would give an off-Broadway play a run of six months with a packed house every night, or a whole year of shaky business, even if they did not recommend it to their friends...
...But they are a dribble compared with the non-subscribers who went to see Marat/Sade...
...This public still keeps up with the dramatic criticism in the quarterlies and Sam Zolotow's theater gossip in the N. Y. Times...
...Nevertheless, an unproduced playwright who looks coolly at what is being done on the professional stage soon gets to feel agitated...
...his artistic "existence" does not have to precede his "essence...
...Forty thousand spectators...
...Where, indeed...
...The early plays of Murray Schisgal and Edward Albee, among many others, appeared in Europe before they did here...
...Such parlor games are of little practical value to a playwright but he can at least count on the polite-through-frenzied plaudits of his friends and the tactful criticism of his rivals...
...This situation perplexes the playwright...
...Some of the playwrights are possibly thoroughbreds who will never get off to a start...
...Elsewhere, his leading man-cumdirector will often be a former road show understudy and his ingenue the niece of a local industrialist who takes care of the company's annual deficit...
...At the same time, most plays fail...
...But a staging by the Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh or the Questors on the outskirts of London, or at a stadttheater pays next to nothing in royalties...
...He might go so far as to conclude that they had been struck down by some highly selective plague...
...Then there is the public at the other extreme, or rather, a wouldbe public which almost never goes to Broadway and off-Broadway...
...it still makes an effort to see an occasional prestigeladen import...
...He must choose between writing a brilliant success for that hypothetical audience of whose taste he is confident (because it coincides with his), or turning out a flop for a producer...
...Last May, Maria Irene Forn?©s whose work had been previously seen off-off-Broadway was promoted to the Main Stem with The Office which closed during the previews (in effect before it had opened) and in so doing dropped $150,000...
...If he has had any commerce with commerce he knows that a script cannot pay its way offBroadway when it calls for more than two actors...
...Novelty is what the theater needs and feeds on...
...In any case, he goes continually into print, thanks to a certain latitude in publishing...
...or, "Will audiences like it...
...Sundry other plays had already folded after their first, second and fourth nights or out of town: a higher proportion than in any earlier season...
...The friends who come to his apartment readings may be charming people who have a way of putting together a compliment...
...Whatever one thinks of the productions now, a lot of people were attracted by the names Sartre, Brecht, B??chner and Wycherley, as well as Blau and Irving...
...He will be blamed for all the deficiencies in directing, acting and design by reviewers who cannot tell a play from its presentation or separate out the roles from the interpretations and the dialogue from the delivery...
...A provincial group may have the best of intentions and almost no acting or directing skills to support them...
...The question is: Where are the producers enterprising enough to put on the plays that will bring that public in...
...The latter still patronize old-fashioned discursiveness, informed by laboriously planted plot clues, leavened with domestic twittering, salubrious messages, and the rickety, barren wisecracks descended from Kaufman and Hart-all capped with a resolution that offers the hero three choices, every one of them predictable from bygone seasons, movies, and the leaden age of television...
...There are several of them, and they do not split cleanly into general intellectuals and lesser breeds, but rather into patchy groupings of theater highbrows and theater lowbrows...
...And they continue to multiply as the universities pour out playwriting graduates...
...He can even, if he wishes, alternate: a novel followed by a "book...
...some American playwrights have had repeated productions abroad and none in the U.S...
...Which New York public...
...it bears its full potential...
...it may even read plays for pleasure and comment on them with some authority...
...So much the better...
...The real difference is that, after being savaged in the provinces, the author has no firm idea whether the play or the production went wrong...
...Since then, the prices have gone up...
...It has been clipped too many times...
...In this respect, local newspaper reviewers are no worse than the ones in New York...
...He can collect a fortune by aiming his work at the book clubs...
...Some were attracted, no doubt, by the novelty of the house itself...
...A bad out-of-town production, on the other hand, is immeasurably more of a setback for the playwright than no production at all...
...Unnerving, that is, for the producer...
...So far as he can discern, no qualitative standards control the selection of scripts...
...So in the end the playwright probably comes back to New York and its producers' deafening roar of disinterest...
...This, in fact, is what most produced playwrights do-apparently having one failure produced is the best qualification for having a second (and third) produced...
...In New York it has some hope of being noticed...
...By the law of averages, for want of a less crude indicator, a casual observer might well wonder what has happened to the playwriting equivalents of our novelists, poets and artists...
...If he is stupid or stubborn enough to decide on the hit, no producer will option it...
...Nobody knows the size of this public...
...NL, January 31, 1966) I suggested that theater businessmen in New York had estranged the intellectual public and were hoping to screw out of the fickle remainder-those hit-mad high-livers-ticket prices that represent "whatever the market will bear...
...if they were, they would be in New York...
...They opted to write what they wanted to, and are paying the penalty...
...they are no substitute for the objective intelligentsia he was talking to when he wrote and rewrote his lines...
...Like most truisms, this one is largely false...
...to whom will I show it...
...But today the novelist's decision is a straightforward one that plunges him into no anguish...
...it is still capable of becoming...
Vol. 49 • September 1966 • No. 18
