A Broadway Existential Stance
BRUKENFELD, DICK
men, two insurance salesmen, three owners of housing appliance concerns, one minister, and two liquor store owners. Besides their higher incomes, it was found that the "exploiters" were typically...
...Even on Broadway, in such recent hits as Inadmissible Evidence, Joe Egg, I Never Sang for My Father, and the current Promises, Promises, the imaginary fourth wall has been broken down by characters pleading their cases to the spectators, who function as conscience/jury...
...Rioting has become a significant factor in American cities in the second half of the 1960s, new groups (such as the Black Power Coalition) have emerged, and Negroes have sharply increased their participation in the everyday American political processes...
...We have moved, Kerr tells us, from a logical to a phenomenological theater, where "we come back to the thrilling, agitating, inexplicableness of ourselves when we drop logic for close attention...
...He complains he was not free to do what he wanted, only what the actors invited him to do...
...In contrast to most other Negroes, they generally approved of the existing political leadership of the city, more frequently condemned the use of violence, and were more likely to make the claim that their religion was an important factor in guiding their lives...
...As the audience reemerges, the logic, the illusion, the narrative form, and the taboos that accompanied the oneway mirror, picture frame conception of the stage are dissolving in the encounter...
...Clifford Vaughn (a fictitious name) lives the double life of a black who thrives on society in its present form...
...Besides their higher incomes, it was found that the "exploiters" were typically older, better educated and expressed a different view of life than the average black Houstonian...
...I don't think this is a matter of addition, but an indication of the man's particular skills...
...Polemicist critics such as Eric Bentley and Robert Brustein tend to deal with the third problem first, relating the play to a political or social context before getting into the work under consideration...
...This image is less that of a professional than of an addict...
...The reviews and comment are collected in chapters that range in theme from "The Struggle to See" and "Film, Stage, Novel" to "Repertory in Labor" and "Practical Matters...
...The riots, the concern with poverty and more equalized opportunity, and the millions of new voters represent a mass expression of power heretofore unknown in the black community...
...To many playgoers these two fronts are the here and now of dramatic art...
...The classic role of the drama critic has been to venture forth on a scouting patrol, which too often becomes a search and destroy mission, bringing back to the potential auditor answers to three questions: What is the writer trying to do...
...Most branches of American commerce have fortunately made genuine progress since the Great Depression...
...In his new book, Thirty Plays Hath November, the New York Times' Sunday drama critic serves as a kind of Sartrean scoutmaster...
...I enjoy stately, dignified religious services," he says...
...What is important now is the confrontation, and the questioning that comes with it...
...On the other hand, the varied activities directed from the paneled office of his $80,000 home include the numbers racket, which he supposedly heads, a successful mortuary where funeral costs average 14 per cent higher than those charged by 10 morticians serving whites, and ownership of several apartments used by prostitutes in the city's well-known red-light district...
...He believes that many Negroes "are just plain lazy," and that their salvation lies in "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps...
...Your hand reaches, when you crawl out in the morning, for the tool that has betrayed you a hundred times...
...What is most disturbing in this critic's make-up, however, is his de-fensiveness about Broadway...
...This development is by no means restricted to mano a mono confrontations like Richard Schechner's "visual-verbal participatory game," Dionysus in '69, or to guerrilla troupes which accost pedestrians in an open attempt to change their politics...
...But the masochistic, jackpot fantasies that narcotize many of Kerr's "professionals" still keep them from using modern business techniques to make their work commercially viable...
...He takes us on an existential training tour over the past five years of change, revealing a bit of his identity along the way...
...Walter Kerr, on the other hand, is an impressionist who concentrates on the first two, the What and How Well of a play...
...Broadway, of course, is Kerr's home base...
...The pieces in the "Practical Matters" chapter may have been inspired by specific criticisms...
...333 pp...
...It was in part to subdue the noisy, high spirts out front that house managers of the late 19th century, taking advantage of newly developed electric lighting systems, literally turned off the viewers by plunging them into darkness, focusing all attention up front...
...The center of his life, he claims, is his local Methodist Episcopal church...
...Most of the serious young authors with whom he deals come from the British Isles...
...Surely then, an important goal for today's critic —short of doing away with his profession altogether—should be encouraging this repressed class to assert itself...
...There is one awkward thing about being a professional...
...This is not to diminish Kerr's chosen task...
...On a first-name basis with the state governor, a deacon in his church, contributor of large sums to the naacp, and an active participant in Negro lodges, a fraternity, and charitable causes, Vaughn outwardly appears to be a model of respectability...
...Walter Kerr says it is too soon to tell...
...Kerr has a unique talent for fathoming an author's intent...
...But Kerr is too busy defending Broadway commercialism to see that its biggest problem lies in not being commercial enough...
...Those going to see Cabaret come face to face with their reflections from a huge mirror on stage...
...Once you've committed yourself to a profession, you're no longer fit for anything but to follow it...
...The opening moments of Philadelphia Here I Come, a play I had seen twice, seem more fully realized in Kerr's rendition than they did on stage...
...Thus he periodically steps back from his milieu to examine it, to question where he is at—just what Kerr says we should now do in existential drama...
...Yet Vaughn righteously attributes his success to "hard work, careful planning, and keeping my nose to the grindstone...
...Today, by comparison, we are timid, sweet-smelling sheep...
...Playgoers can no longer sit back passively and watch, as if through a one-way mirror, activities in the next room...
...Broadway has unfortunately become the Gulfstream...
...It is still living by the boom or bust mentality of the 1920s...
...When he does touch on the question of whether a play was worth doing, Kerr's remarks are brief, apt, confined to the playhouse walls...
...He cautions us to stay loose and examine everything, since we are in the process of trying to discover what relevance is...
...When those radicals line us up against the wall to shoot or strip us, I hope they will spare Walter Kerr...
...His longest consideration of theater as part of the outside world comes in the piece on existential "Hey, Wait a Minute Theatre...
...A Broadway Existential Stance THIRTY PLAYS HATH NOVEMBER By Walter Kerr Simon and Schuster...
...Currently, he is reported to be wandering further afield...
...They are now asked to participate, to become engage—or at the very least to maintain an awareness both of their presence at and participation in the unfoldings ot the dramatic experience...
...And was he truly prevented from expressing himself...
...The impact of urbanization has opened up new collective avenues of expression among Negroes...
...Reviewed by DICK BRUKENFELD Contributor, "Village Voice" Amid all the controversy about what the contemporary theater is and should be, a significant change in the role of the audience is taking place...
...Then, taking us orgy hopping to Dionysus in '69, Kerr demonstrates some of the pitfalls in his Broadway existential stance...
...How well has he succeeded...
...The audience-as-participant is not a new idea...
...Has the theater ever been democratic...
...and like a good director he often finds things even the playwright did not know about...
...While we may try to approach new experience without conviction or prejudice, no one is an empty vessel...
...If one quality can be said to characterize the professional today, it is the desire to perpetuate himself...
...Was it worth doing...
...In fact, encounters of this kind will perhaps help train playgoers of the future to assert themselves...
...If the currently moribund spirit of reconciliation and goodwill cannot be revived, a new civil war may well be in the making...
...What shape will the new drama take...
...Throughout the performance they are treated as denizens of a Berlin night club...
...After the critics have published their edicts, viewers lose their daring and become less expressive...
...It gives me comfort to know that I am in touch with the Lord...
...Habits are desperate acquisitions . . . you don't stop to think how likely you are to be both despised and poor by November...
...Kerr's report of the proceedings is amusing, yet underneath the Perlmanesque humor lurks something frantic—uptight but not out of sight...
...Nonetheless, when he defines professionalism as the driving force that keeps the commercial theater going, I begin to wonder...
...A strong advocate of audience power, Kerr opens with a report that at present only at previews is there any open confrontation between performance and playgoers...
...The book offers two superb essays on Chekhov and The Merchant of Venice, the latter making a good case for Shylock as a comic character...
...Conceivably, this will hasten a national recognition of the authors' conclusion that the only lasting solution to the racial dilemma is "for whites and Negroes to work together to improve their common lot as Americans...
...But in this volume, subtitled "Pain and Pleasure in the Contemporary Theatre," he devotes little attention to the more radical movements or to the many gifted playwrights emerging through the web of Off-off Broadway...
...For most of the theater's history, the playgoer enjoyed vigorous contact with the actors and with those at his elbows...
...and his favorite plays are the best of Tennessee Williams...
...6.50...
...Here, he relates the current disruption of political and social institutions to the disruption of theatrical order by the new nudity and by works like those of Stoppard and Pinter which refuse to give answers...
...He is the master at bringing to life the performance texture of what used to be called the mainstream of American theater...
Vol. 52 • July 1969 • No. 14
