The Shallows of Modern Serious Drama

THE SHALLOWS OF MODERN SERIOUS DRAMA EVERYONE SEEMS FIRMLY CONVINCED that these are times to try men's souls. In our great wealth we find an irresistible honesty in admitting our bankruptcy. In a world geared to feed our appetites to bursting we take a glutton's pleasure in declaring our perpetual hunger. "The world is sick," those most sensitive to the modem condition tell us; and even those who do not believe them acquiesce to the most lurid evidence of decay. For the average television fan dozing before his weekly sample of serious TV drama just as for the research physicist keeping up with the latest Faulkner novel, tales of boy scouts turned savage, of Moms and Dads locked in degrading conflict, of schoolteachers and public servants caught in unspeakable corruption, of heroes crushed by a secret cowardice have become commonplace. vVe need no Gertrude Stein come back from the dead to tell us that this, too, is a lost generation ; we ask only for fresh proofs of its lostness, new, progressively more electrifying analogues of its enervating desperation. Vladimir Nabokov 's nymphets, Tennessee Williams' cannibals, and Samuel Beckett's ash cans for parents are no more than we feel we need. Fame and fortune await him who can top them. In the total effort made in the past two decades to find artistic equivalents for our dismay, the drama and its kindred forms have taken a leading part, not so much because of their superiority as because of their ability to reach a wide audience. Of serious novelists and poets, few have had so general a reception as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams , William Inge, and Paddy Chayevsky, particularly since their plays almost always have a film version; ~nd even their European brethren-John Osborne, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Samuel Beckett , and Eugene Ionesco-get a surprisingly large hearing every year, not just off-Broadway, but in University and Community theaters all over the country. But even if we limit the direct influence of this soft core to those who read and see plays or who see the relevant movies, we must still take into account the vast indirect influence on the thousands of serious television plays written in their blurred shadows. Whatever posterity may think of the drama of the mid-century, no voice has been louder and for that reason more effective in conditioning what frequently passes for mid-century high-mindedness. Modem serious drama, as distinct from box-office drama, has risen to its mission courageously. Driven by the starched specter of Victorian 111 September vapidity, it has struggled to revitalize itself by treating honestly the dilemmas of the modern temper. Goaded into a sense of inferiority by the example of modern fiction, it has resorted to unprecedented amalgams of subject matter and technique to achieve a comparable power. Everyone agrees that the results have been exciting, that its search for new kinds of dramatic images has yielded a gratifying number of compelling and sometimes even profound plays. Yet too seldom do we trouble to assess its achievement, to ask of this vital cultural force,«What have we here?" 112 MODERN DRAMA 2 The variety encompassed by plays so disparate as Anouilh's Time Remembered and Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cannot be ignored. Modern serious drama, the drama that unmistakably attempts to interpret contemporary life, has its delicacy and violence, its gaiety and pain, its illuminations and fatuities, its depths and shallows. Yet more surprising and even more important than its variety is its elusive uniformity . So much is made of its highly particularized events and of the Willy Lomans, Stanley Kowalskis, and Martys that dominate them that we often fail to see that a startling percentage of our serious plays are essentially the same play. The theater abounds in individual voices, but a great many of them are singing the same song, singing it with energy, ingenuity, and daring, it is true, but so frequently the same song that we have come to know it almost too well to try to identify it. Perhaps the only commonplace left to a world convinced of its fundamental incoherence is that experience is a chaos...