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1 A Theater of Containment Liberalism The Broadway theater of 1947 to 1962 played a small but significant part in the dominant culture of the era. Necessarily bound by the profit motive , theatrical producers on the “Great White Way” sought middle- and upper-class attendance for their shows and generally turned their backs on working class families. Audience surveys done by Playbill during the 1950s found that only about 10 percent of the audience identified themselves as working class. Workers stayed away in droves for many reasons. Ticket prices played an important role; a typical show cost about eight times as much as most movies. Second, most workers rightly sensed that they would feel “out of place” in a Broadway theater. As critic and theorist Francis Fergusson noted, Broadway belonged in the “comparatively small ‘luxury’ class” during the 1950s and early 1960s. “The vision of life which it projects is more like that of the ‘after-shave club’ than that of the ads, in family magazines, for trusses and detergents,” he said. Fergusson ’s conclusion is confirmed by a glance at the ads in any Broadway program during the period. The playbill for A Hatful of Rain for the week of 28 May 1956, for instance, contained advertisements for luxury cars, expensive women’s clothes, air and ship travel, nightclub entertainment, and a variety of other high-priced items from liquor to topcoats.1 While many workers in New York might have enjoyed Gazzo’s play about an Italian American family struggling for economic and psychological security , few ever went to see it. Finally, working-class families usually lacked a playgoing tradition. The grandparents might have gone to live theater occasionally; but for most of the twentieth century, movies and later radio and television provided nearly all the professional dramatic entertainment that workers had ever seen or heard. In 1955 critic Walter Kerr urged the New York theater to leave be- hind its elitist attitudes and welcome in the millions, because the drama “was not created by a minority for a minority.” Kerr conceded the “risk of vulgarity in turning toward what pleases the common customer” but argued that the theater would “continue to shrivel if we do not do it.”2 Like many cultural commentators, Kerr believed that the New York theater was in decline. Certainly when compared to theatrical activity in the 1920s or during the temporary boom years of 1942–1945, the number of shows available on Broadway during the 1950s had decreased. But by most measurements the Broadway theater of the mid 1950s was about where it had been twenty years before. During an average week in February in both 1936 and 1956, theatergoers could choose from about twenty-five different productions. Although more shows opened in the mid 1930s, the successful ones ran longer by 1955. Further, the proportion of productions that recouped their investment remained about the same from 1927 to 1959—roughly 22 percent. If the off-Broadway scene is factored into the comparison, New Yorkers and tourists actually had many more playgoing opportunities available to them than before. From a mere 875 Off-Broadway performances in 1953/54, the number rose to over 9,000 by 1963/64. (In 1963/64 Broadway itself saw only 7,975 performances .) Overall, professional theater in New York increased dramatically from 1947 to 1962, with most of the increase coming in the last half of the period.3 Nevertheless, Kerr was correct in assuming that the audience for professional theater in New York was generally elitist in social orientation. Although the audience increased in numbers during the 1950s, its demographic base remained nearly constant. Most spectators lived in the New York metropolitan area, their average age tended to be between thirty-five and forty-five, and they earned above-average incomes. More significant than residence, age, and income, however, were markers of race and class. A 1960 survey found that 68 percent of the audience had been to college or university, a remarkably high number compared to the general population, where, despite the GI Bill and other inducements, less than 40 percent of the population had attended institutions of higher education by 1960. When asked to indicate their occupations, 47 percent checked “professional, semiprofessional, and managerial,” and another 22 percent classified themselves as clerks and salespeople. (Because the survey-takers asked heads of households to answer their questions, women—who constituted roughly half of all theatergoers in the 1950s— 2...

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