Dialogue: Theatre in America

Dialogue: Theatre in America jolh Aiagire Harold Stanley Clurman Kauffmann Harold Clurman is theatre critic for The Nation. He helped found the Group Theatreduringthe 1930s. Hisnumerousbooks include On Directing, All People are Famous, The Divine Pastime, and the recently published Ibsen. Stanley Kauffmann is theatreandfilm criticfor The New Republic. He has publishedfour novels and collectionsoffilmandtheatrecriticism,including A World on Film, Figures of Light, and Persons of the Drama. This dialogue was taped by Bonnie Marrancaand Gautam Dasguptain January1978. 19 Let's start with the currentstate of the theatre; in terms of the American past, that is. Harold Clurman: I think that the best period of the American theatre was in the twenties. When you have playwrights like O'Neill, Sam Behrman, Maxwell Anderson and George Kelly, and very good musicals-Gershwin and so forth-and many people coming from abroad-the Moscow Art Theatre and Habimah-you have an active theatre. Some of the plays that were then very important, popular or valuable are of course much less so today. But there was a richness of product. And also the actors, many of whom became moving picture actorsSpencer Tracy, Clark Gable-were all present. And we had rather better critics. George Jean Nathan I don't think was a very great critic but he was a stimulating one, and Stark Young was certainly good, and Atkinson, while he had severe limitations, was a very honest and respectable person. The Broadway theatre is no longer a place for serious drama. I think that on the whole it is a place for musical comedy and plays from England, and not necessarily the best plays from England. Off-off Broadway you have a very spotty situation. Some promising young people and experiments which are not to be scorned, but are on the whole immature. But the tendency for the popular press is to exalt them and therefore to mislead the people who are conducting these things and to mislead the public. So you get things about which a nice word might be said made into very, very important events. You have young playwrights like Mamet, who's talented, and they're praised beyond all credibility. That's very bad for them because they think this will go on. We have playwrights like Odets and Williams who were greeted enthusiastically but when they got to slow up and then got to be a little less exciting they began to be shamefully scorned. How do you feel about the Europeansituation? HC: It's hard to know. I've been to Poland and to Germany, and in both places the quality of production is very good. Except that the director and the scene designer have taken over at the expense of playwriting. Sometimes you're dazzled by what you see and you say, What did I get out of this? There's a very talented man in Berlin, by the name of Peter Stein, though I only saw one of his productions, Summerfolk. Handke is very much touted by my colleague Mr. Gilman and others. The theatre in France seems to me utterly dead at the moment. I very rarely see anything on the level of Sartre, Camus, or on the Beckett, Ionesco, Genet level. I think the best plays-not necessarily very fine plays-but the best general output today is in England. The English are responding to their situation. In other words, they're disgusted, angry, bitter, they all try to cover it up with humor and make a joke of themselves, but at least it's a 20 response. What is of the first importance in considering any theatre is the degree to which it responds to the situation in which it is placed. Stanley Kauffmann: I would like to flesh out bits of what's been said. It happens that it's just fifty years that I've been going to the theatre. I don't think there is any question that Broadway was an infinitely more interesting place fifty years ago. The 1927-28 season was the high point numerically. There were 234 productions. Long ago the number sank below 100, and has never got anywhere near it since. O'Neill...