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Birthday Mutterings GERALD WEALES • Quo vadimus? - E. B. White ONE OF THE JOBS of the play reviewer is to send regular messages back from the artistic front, praising, damning, describing individual artifacts as they find their way to the stage. One of the duties of the drama critic is to impose order on disorder - to domesticate trends, to track the Zeitgeist to her lair, to be ever ready to explain where American drama is today. My own messages have become intermittent since I no longer review regularly and, although I have done a deal of pigeonhole stuffing in my day, my only impression of the current theatrical scene is that everyone is riding off in all directions. In a recent article in the New York Times Hilton Kramer explained that all the arts, drama included, are returning to conventional (classic) forms, and shortly after that Arthur Sainer reported in the Village Voice that the avant-garde is alive and occasionally well in Baltimore, where the New Theatre Festival brought companies from all over the country to the University of Maryland campus . One's sense of the way things are is further addled by Bicentennial obliquity. In what other year could one expect to find The Battle of Brooklyn and Col. Robert Munford's The Patriots cheek-by-jowl with Arrabal off-off-Broadway, or a play like Ann Hawkes Hutton's The Decision mounted in a real theater with a star of sorts - Hugh O'Brian (Wyatt Earp as George Washington). Hutton's play is a compendium of cliches of the Paul Green-Kermit Hunter school of outdoor drama; at 417 418 GERALD WEALES least, the first act is. I left at the intermission because the reviewer I was with, bound to his seat by duty, said he would never speak to me again if I stayed. The healthiest thing about the American theater is the thing that makes it most difficult to define. It no longer depends on Broadway, or even on New York. As recently as the 1960s, one could still talk about American theater in terms of Broadway and off-Broadway, but the regional theaters and the university theaters are now producing new plays and new playwrights without the Broadway benediction. Preston Jones, whose A Texas Trilogy was so well received in Washington that a second run has been scheduled this summer (1976), has moved from a local (Dallas) to a national reputation without the New York imprimatur. I do not mean that playwrights and performers are indifferent to Broadway. It still provides the possibility of success, meaning publicity and money, but it has become a kind of receiving ground for pre-packaged goods. Broadway is now like the West End theater in London; commercial producers still initiate occasional musicals and all-star revivals, but it is dependent on outside producing organizations for most of its theater, either taking over productions as a whole or picking up scripts that have been tried out off-off-Broadway, performed in regional theaters, brought back to off-Broadway. The choicest recent example of the roundabout road to Broadway is Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children, which was performed off-off-Broadway in 1973, given a pub theater production in London in 1974, moved to the West End and made its way back to Broadway in 1975 where it was generally well received, although not by me (v. Commonweal, December 5, 1975). This is admittedly not a new phenomenon . Edward Albee's The Zoo Story got to off-Broadway by way of Germany , and Tennessee Williams's plays have usually come to New York through Miami or Spoleto or some such exotic place. What was once unusual, however, is now standard. As I write this, I am looking at the Theater Directory of the most recent Sunday New York Times (June 20, 1976). There are twenty-six productions on Broadway , although two of them - the American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center and Diana Ross at the Palace - are what the year-end roundups call "Specialties." Of the remaining twenty-four, less than ten can be said to have arrived on Broadway by the once conventional route of opening directly in New...

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