Theatre at the Crossroads by John Gassner (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS, by John Gassner, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 327 pp. Price $5.95. The trouble with John Gassner's recent commentary on the American theater, Theatre at the Crossroads, stems'from the verY quality for which Harold Clurman praises the book on the dust-jacket: "that rare virtue: common sense." Commori sense does indeed characterize every paragraph of this immensely readable, engagingly articulate "chronicle" or "report" or "review" (Mr. Gassner's own terms) of the American theater of the Fifties. Part I, some 125 pages,· is restricted to "interrogations and persuasions"-to why, theoretically and ·pragmatically, American drama is for the most part middlebrow and Philistine; and to what level it must jack itself up, if it is once again to be as lively and vital a theater as we like to believe it was in the Twenties. Part II amounts to a kind of practical criticism, always brisk and often keen-edged, of some 60 plays, old and new, . produced in and around New York during the past decade. Grounded in the criteria for a healthy drama already postulated in Part I, these critical appraisals are all very fair, all highly commonsensical, and all infuriatingly even-tempered. The result for this reviewer, as he neared Mr. Gassner's final pages, was a growing weariness of common sense and an unsuppressed longing for a strong dose of the righteous indignation that puts second-rate art firmly into a second-rate niche once and for all. This is not to say that Mr. Gassner should not have written his book as he did, but that I should have preferred him, with all his lightly carried learning, his varied experience in the American theater, and his eminence as a theatrical critic, to have written a different kind of book altogether. Who else on the American scene today is in so favorable a position for writing the kind of book American drama so desperately needs-the kind that sweeps the stage clean of the meretricious, the pretentious, the synthetic, and the commercially vendable sort of play that has overrun Broadway during the last ten years, and prescribes in blunt, even dogmatic, terms the sort of drama that should take its place? Such a book will not be praised for common sense. It will seethe with a Shavian sense of having been had; and it will say, with all the massive integrity of a poorly cadenced sentence of Eugene O'Neill, what Mr. Gassner says here, but says too urbanely, too tactfully, too neutrally (though Mr. Gassner is not finally neutral in his ultimate evaluations). In his introduction Mr. Gassner calls his book both optimistic and pessimistic. And so it is. For we all can rejoice with Mr. Gassner that "theatre has been one of the few things in the twentieth century to escape thorough standardization except when enslaved by the super-state" (p. 4). But aside from this optimistic generalization the book in its entirety is a monument to sophisticated pessimism about the state of "one of the few popular institutions still worth taking seriously" (p. xiii). Mr. Gassner, however temperate in his language, is incurably honest: he loves the theater as only a man who knows it inside out can love it, but he knows also that it is a sick theater. Accordingly he diagnoses what ails it, and like all good diagnosticians he is careful not to overindulge his patient's hopes. Desperately he works to give credit where he can, but when one tots up his score sheet, one discovers that Mr. Gassner's Nays very considerably outbalance his Yeas. 401 402 MODERN DRAMA February Mr. Gassner's pessimism is an outgrowth of a complex of negative developments that has beset the contemporary playwright and play producer and director for many a year now. (1) Intellectual and emotional enervation. "The real defect in our theatre since 1948 bas been the waning of passion and the dilution of critical intellect" (p. 46). One example among many: Truman Capote's The Grass Harp. "American society has been described as a children's paradise. The same description would fit the mid-century American theatre . . ." (p. 151). (2) Imaginative...