Theater: New Focus

...He makes us see, for example, that the ostensibly anti-romantic revolt, from the 1880s on, has in fact deep roots in romanticism itself...

...As for Herbert Blau's book, it ought to be a landmark...

...The third is often hard to follow and at places clumsily overwritten...

...His passion for decentralized theater has led him to turn his back completely on Broadway, where there is no vision, and—even worse—where there is nothing to be learned...

...To join these eight in the common bond of "revolt" the author must categorize revolt into messianic, social, and existential (using the last term in its widest sense...

...He restores these genres to a respectable position in the drama, even though they may be "childish, savage, or sick...

...Still, it is worth sticking with—so much so that I wish I could persuade every theater student now in training to ponder it at length...

...It seems strange that a writer like Samuel Beckett should be excluded on the grounds that he has not yet "completed a sufficiently various body of writing...

...Brustein limits his canvas, as his title indicates, to The Theatre of Revolt, and chooses as representatives eight playwrights beginning with Ibsen and concluding with Genet...

...No one can sustain a polemic for 300 pages, not even an author who begins by saying that his purpose is "to talk up a revolution" and who believes in the theater as a means of saving the world...

...But a writer ought to be allowed to write about whomever he pleases, and if we can accept the limitations of Brustein's semantics, we can enjoy his book as a challenging critique of theater at its highest level...

...But Eric Bentley's and Robert Bru-stein's books are no doubt getting more —and more favorable—attention from scholars and reviewers...

...These are, in fact, the lectures of a teacher who is so thoroughly at home with his subject that he can afford to adopt a style that is anecdotal, and platitudinous...

...They have all gone to school, not only under Aristotle, but also under Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Antonin Artaud, and (especially) Sigmund Freud...

...Offhand it would seem that almost any playwright worth dealing with could be discussed in these terms, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine, all of whom Brustein assigns to the "theater of communion...

...He is at his best and clearest when he can express himself in terms of how plays were produced in his own theater—plays of Brecht, Shaw, Miller, Osborne, Pinter, O'Casey, Arden, Beckett, Genet, Shakespeare (Lear)—the complete list is one to be marveled at...

...Yet it is this last book—Herbert Blau's—which might well be the most influential, for it is a clarion call to young practitioners by one who is himself a rebellious practitioner...

...He quotes everybody and documents nothing...

...He looks back consciously and nostalgically to the Group Theater of the Thirties...

...and one cannot make such an admission without reexamining the entire posture of liberal intellectualism...

...Blau's storehouse is rich...

...The first half of Bentley's The Life of the Drama brings some surprisingly fresh insights to the time-honored chapter-headings of "Plot," "Character," "Dialogue," and so on, In the eighteen years since he emerged with The Playwright as Thinker, Eric Bentley has earned the right to relax, to talk, seemingly "off the cuff...

...The others are Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, and O'Neill...

...Macmillan...

...Its subtitle is "A Manifesto," and it scolds and harangues and preaches accordingly...

...Now I am committed...

...Bentley must be reserved for the new vitality he gives, in the second half of his book, to the concepts of melodrama and farce...

...He is alive to the perils of living in the 1960's, especially in America...

...309 pp...

...For them the theater is, or ought to be, the temple of our culture, even though no one is quite sure what deity is to be worshipped there...

...The reader is likely to stagger away from the book as a receptive student is said to have staggered out from a lecture of Jean-Paul Sartre...

...Two of the books are by knowledgeable and scholarly commentators who write about difficult concepts with ease and clarity...

...yet the cruder, savage forms can have an honesty far superior to "phony seriousness," those theater reflections of an age personified by Rodgers and Ham-merstein, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Give an audience a chance and it will certainly be wrong...

...Blau is an unashamed absolutist...

...It is the whole theater as a cultural institution that is "impossible" in our society—or very nearly...

...And don't expect them to cater to you if you have not built up some background in theatrical experiences and supplemented this with some homework before your own fire...

...It has the proper idealistic temperament and revolutionary spirit...

...The title only incidentally refers to the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco, of which Blau is one of the founders and directors...

...Nevertheless, the book does keep revolving around the embattled San Francisco group at varying distances* Even more than Bentley and Brustein, Blau convinces us that talking about our art forms, without at the same time talking about the world we live in, is hollow, dangerous talk...

...Blau is no mere crank or exhibitionist...

...The Impossible Theater should be for the younger generation of theater amateurs what Roy Mitchell's Creative Theatre was for many of us...

...Then, as he paused to breathe the outside air, he added, "But to what...

...So I fear the book will not reach its full and proper audience...

...He is a man of deep thought and refined feelings who has fortunately found his way into our theater...

...He is shaken by the clairvoyant utterances of Antonin Artaud...

...Our chief thanks to Mr...

...Nor will he cater to audiences elsewhere...

...The Impossible Theater, by Herbert Blau...

...And since he says much that the reader might want to refer to again, the lack of an index is almost the final frustration...

...The most "adult, civilized, healthy" kinds of plays remain the tragedies and comedies...

...Yet the lively searching mind behind the words too often gets lost...

...Reviewed by Warren S. Smith Don't turn to any of these gentlemen for pleasant or witty accounts of what has been happening on Broadway or the West End...

...He is capable of forcing us to refocus on the theater in such a way that we must, unwittingly, change our focus on the "real" world as well...

...he exclaimed...

...It is unlikely that Blau, the director, would permit a stage production to face its first audience with so little discipline as he imposes on himself as a writer...