On Stage

...I happen to think that the dramatists of the past 100 years have scaled new pinnacles (and descended into new chasms) which compare in height and steepness with those of any century in theater history, so I am bound to differ with Kerr...

...Tragedy, which is affirmation of the will at its fiercest, depends very largely upon the psychology of the moment...

...He is then saying that an Athenian playwright living in a city-state of some 350,000 people and voting directly (without the intervention of delegates) for public legislation has the same notion of freedom and the same possibilities of striving for it as a modern Greek playwright whose country of 8.5 million people has just been swallowed by a dictatorship...

...Comedy and tragedy have crossbred endlessly...

...and Euelpides and Pithetaerus in The Birds found their Cloud-Cuckoo-Land in midair...

...Thus, "if tragedy opens a possible door to the infinite, comedy tries to slam it shut, catching tragedy's finite fingers in the process...

...And again: "At the heart of tragedy, feeding it energy, stands godlike man passionately desiring a state of affairs more perfect than any that now exists...

...And so we arrive at Kerr's identification of comedy: Whereas "tragedy speaks always of freedom," comedy "will speak of nothing but limitation...

...Similarly, the Great Dionysia or festival of tragedies in Athens was indeed inaugurated some 50 years before the comic Lenaea festival...

...Comedy and tragedy exist in his book as autonomous entities, like human beings...

...He subsumes the other modes (melodrama, farce, tragicomedy), which were carefully reaffirmed in Eric Bentley's The Life of the Drama, under his two blanket headings, and so muffles their distinctive cries...

...And on somewhat lesser but nonetheless extremely provocative evidence it seems likely that comedy comes from tragedy...

...Goetz, Hugo, Kean, and Frantz Gerlach, every one of whom is investigating "the possibilities of human freedom...

...in France the fight is especially difficult...

...The pages of Walter Kerr's Tragedy and Comedy (Simon & Schuster, 350 pp., $5.95, no index) are never harsh or condemnatory, only regretful when he looks around him, and wistful when he looks back...

...Here Kerr is perhaps unconsciously denying the playwright his role...

...Kerr does not speak of his standpoint as an historian, but his book makes it evident that he is a nostalgic moralist...

...A modern character like Ionesco's Berenger in The Pedestrian in the Air illustrates Kerr's argument better than some of his ancient models do...

...Perhaps Kerr is even right in his accidental definition: Sartre is the tragic playwright of our time...

...The Greek drama abandoned the dithyramb...

...The statement is cautious, but no post hoc ergo propter hoc claim ought to go unchallenged...

...The same fate is suffered by the varied oriental dramas, many of them not at all obviously tragic or comic...

...The Greek comic playwrights drew their inspiration, as Norwood points out, from Greek myth, from history, from the writings of their contemporaries (which included tragedies) and the manners of their times...

...But all we know is that the earliest complete comedies we have, those of Aristophanes, came after the tragedies of Euripides...

...Tragedy seems to him to be "an investigation of the possibilities of human freedom," ????the will of the tragic character pushed to its farthest limits...

...As I read Kerr's accounts of tragedy and comedy I wanted to paraphrase him by saying that I would rather lose all definitions than lose the modern theater...

...They hold their sides, or hold hands or whatever, two sterile, immortal lovers who rule jealously over a kingdom in which every newborn child must follow the trade of his forebears or be declared illegitimate...

...Several quotations in this review have already hinted at this habit...

...Just in case I am wrong, I had better quote Nietzsche, who is good at providing final sentences: "When you are not rich, you should at least have enough pride to be poor...

...He is so fond of this figure of speech that at times his book reads like a morality play...

...Kerr has been to such respectable authorities on the Greek drama as H. D. F. Kitto, John Jones, and Gilbert Norwood, but he insists on making his own deductions from them...

...Yearnings of this sort peep out of Tragedy and Comedy from time to time: "For the Greeks, for tragedy sprung fresh from the root, calling a man a god was no mere metaphor...

...Toward the end of his book he catches a glimpse of the painful choice...

...The evidence Kerr refers to may be "provocative...

...Or else Kerr must recognize that the notion of freedom has undergone radical revision, in which case his definition of tragedy is redundant...

...At the same time, his language puts him into strait jackets...

...It is all the more interesting that in France Kerr's two playwrights, Sartre and Beckett, have been most successful in escaping from what I would call the "Port-Royal complex" and in adumbrating non-religious moralities in their drama...

...Eliot gradually moved away, though, from The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral toward such almost secular plays as The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman...

...Not all of his examples illustrate his theoretical points, but none is less than entertaining...

...It was a statement about blood lines, about a claim of kinship that might be exercised at any time...

...In later ages tragedies and comedies coexisted????may even have cohabited...

...And the "minor forms of comedy," as Norwood calls them (the Spartan farce, the Italian farce or phlyax, and the mime) appear to have originated independently of either tragedy or "major" comedy...

...Here are some more: "Tragedy, as though sensing the ambiguity of comedy's love-hate attitude toward it, may very well make comedy a tantalizing proposal...

...Moliere's comedies are virtually unrelated to Corneille's tragedies, and most of them precede Racine's...

...The theoretical points deal with comedy's reminders of the "physical pressures from which man is never free," his body and its "blind demands" for meat and drink, rest, evacuation, and covering, as well as the "drags" exerted on man by objects in his life...

...But that is the luck of the paradox...

...For Kerr, then, if tragedy is not in some way resuscitated comedy will have nothing to feed on...

...Shaw's St...

...Ibsen, Strind-berg, and Shaw, all under the impress of Nietzsche, almost completed the separation...

...As an author he scrupulously and refreshingly stays away from jargon...

...Moralists are well-meaning people who wish things were better than they are...

...His discussions of different species of comedy, with the examples taken mostly from Shakespeare, Moliere, Aristophanes, and silent movies, are among the most agreeably written parts of the book...

...So much for limitations...

...And, as is usual in such cases, the author appends some faint hope that the old pinnacles may again be scaled...

...When read backward, it becomes, like Burke's history, a kind of morality...

...He avoids the rigor of tough argument by retreating from it with a couple of optimistic shrugs: "Tragedy may return to us, in this time of necessary action and enforced freedom, when man comes to feel once more that he does, or can, bring an advantage with him into the bruising fray...

...whereas Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace flies up to heaven on the back of a dung beetle and returns with a command from Zeus to halt the war between Athens and Sparta...

...It's a little early to say, and history doesn't help with prediction unless one reads it forward in time...

...And if we are, or were, dealing with something like a god in tragedy, we had best look at the matter hard...

...Comedy waits for tragedy as a lover waits for a girl he cannot very well do without...

...But there was no need to...

...he affects me as a lyric poet does, and I enjoy him best at short length and in privacy...

...He can assert that man's notion of his potential freedom has not changed, in which case he is at odds with that vast library of political theory...

...True, he redefines the words...

...Even Genet seems, in his clumsy fashion, to be trying to fight off writing a Christian drama...

...nor does he mention those of Feydeau, Ghelderode, and N. F. Simpson, many of which emphasize the "limitations" imposed on man by his body and by inert objects...

...Curiously enough, he does not mention Corneille and alludes only to Sartre's philosophical theories, never to his heroes, Orestes, Canoris...

...I would rather," he says, "lose a definition than a tragedy...

...Therefore, Kerr has a bad choice...

...Kerr examines scenes and themes from a number of tragedies in his search for an inclusive formula...

...We observe that, even though the theatrical performance grew out of devotional impulses, it proceeded to free itself steadily from religion...

...But he does not concede that tragedy and comedy might have been evolving...

...Moving on to comedy, Kerr finds not only that it mimics tragedy ("the comic mask is the tragic mask with the corners of the mouth forced upward as though by two fingers"), but that it depends on tragedy for its continued existence...

...He arrives later at his own definition...

...Tragedy may have already reappeared...

...But what if we do gaze forward from the past instead of back to it...

...Kerr talks about them with such personal feeling that he makes man, beside them, sound like a concept...

...Kerr sees all drama as belonging to one of the two big categories...

...When scanned from a stationary, bird's-eye view, like that of most historians, it turns into a map, a kind of geography...

...Yet Kerr has here formulated an almost perfect definition, not of tragedy in general, but of the plays of Corneille and Sartre...

...That is where the trouble with his book begins...

...Winnie in Happy Days is buried breast-deep in earth, while the three characters in Play are trapped in pots...

...Our original incongruity . . . still stands, shaking its sides and also shaking its head...

...Once again, Kerr's terms are broad enough to embrace a number of famous plays...

...Suppose tragedy did "return to us...

...there is no way for a 20th-century dramatist to produce work comparable to that of an ancient Greek, an Elizabethan, or a French neoclassicist...

...But he does not say much about Beckett's plays, nor Ionesco's...

...and will also die...

...Kerr does give Beckett some space (in another context), finding on page 299 that he "may speak as well for the 20th-century state of mind as anyone," and by page 322 that "there is considerable doubt in my mind as to whether Mr...

...Or if his definition is by chance inverted (anything can happen with paradoxes) then Beckett is the man writing the tragedies...

...He has brought off an amazing paradox: In attempting to exclude plays written in the past century from his definitions, he has defined some of their outstanding characteristics...

...He disagrees with George Steiner's ill-informed The Death of Tragedy and with Lionel Abel's fascinating Metatheatre because they close out or admit only with reluctance plays that have "for any length of time" been considered tragedies...

...as a matter of fact, are many of Strindberg's heroes, from The Stranger in To Damascus to Erik XIV...

...The dates prove no more than that tragedy was recognized as a socially acceptable form before comedy was...

...the trope was left inside the church when the Medieval theater was taken out on to the east steps and put into the hands of the guilds...

...he is at his strongest when, faced with a clinker of a musical about which there is nothing to say, he concentrates on one performance, giving us the motions, presence, and noises of a star actress doing her utmost to beguile hifn away from a dead book, arid lyrics, and scenery destined shortly for the fire dumps of New Jersey...

...If Socrates in The Clouds is strapped into a basket, Hamm in Endgame is imprisoned in a chair and his parents in ashcans...

...It may have consequences...

...They have only to combine this desire with the conventional "truth" found in every textbook that the theater in all its great periods comes out of religious ceremony, if not worship, and they are sucked into a dream of what the drama might be capable of if it went back to its religious sources...

...It brings man down to earth from tragic heights by recalling his mortality, his physical awkwardness...

...But in Tudor and Elizabethan, or Spanish, or 17th-century theater, apart from the odd lampoon or parody, comedy does not look like an outgrowth of tragedy...

...Berenger flies off into the sky, but he becomes more aware than ever up there of the earth's ugliness and of its pull on him...

...In recent centuries the absence of the older kind of tragedy means that comedy has been forced to take over tragedy's serious role, as well as sustaining its own...

...When he comes to man, or rather to the deflation of confident, unselfconscious, pre-modern man who knew his place in the universe —Kerr sees him as having been punctured by the usual trident, Copernicus-Darwin-Freud, followed by that latter-day Neptune, Marshall McLuhan????he is conceding that man has evolved, for better or worse...

...We know from his daily reviews that Kerr has a gift for imaginative description...

...Earlier, the comic playwright Epicharmus possibly imitated the structures of some of Aeschylus' tragedies, but structure is only one element in a play...

...Unfortunately, Othello, Ajax, and most of Euripides' tragedies may have to be bumped out of shape or amputated in places before they can be haled into this neatly rounded accommodation...

...Brand and most of Ibsen's heroines...

...How has he lost control over his material to such an extent that his conclusions contradict his beliefs...

...But since he talks of comedy as an offshoot of tragedy, and tragedy as an expression of the will to freedom, he works his way into a second strait jacket...

...However, "man is reevaluating himself, possibly readying himself for a test of strength that simply cannot be avoided...

...Yet since the 1890s and Paul Claudel, a succession of playwrights, among them T. S. Eliot, Henri Gheon, Andre Obey, Francois Mauriac, and Christopher Fry, have sought to recreate a religious, if not specifically Christian, drama...

...One such garment is personification...

...but they have never given birth to a third member of the family...

...Early theater, Western and Oriental, is a reaction to religious worship, an alternative form of communal activity, a release from religious discipline, a breaking away or breaking out...

...Joan, and a multitude of other characters created by such modems as Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Jean Cocteau, Garcia Lorca, and Brecht...

...We have very good evidence," he tells us, "to show that comedy in its fullness comes after . . . tragedy...

...There is????it hardly seems possible????a far larger library of documents on freedom than on tragedy...

...Once again, they apply no less aptly to the work of a modern playwright, Samuel Beckett...

...Beckett is truly a dramatist...

...Kerr, like most of us, would not recognize it (although he does descry material for tragedy in a dramatization, not yet made, of Gene Smith's best-seller about Wilson, When the Cheering Stopped...