The Season Just Past

As A Man who has been paid to write about the theatre for something like a quarter of a century, I should be reasonably equipped to deal with the offerings of a single season with authority, if not necessarily with any particular charm and wit. A critic, that is, full of the memories of a thousand plays (one of which, as it happens, he wrote himself) should have no real difficulty in evaluating the 55 that turned up on Broadway between the fall of 1955 and the spring of 1956. Life, however, is seldom as simple as it seems, and the human mind is rarely permitted any gain without an equivalent loss. There is nothing wrong with my powers of recall, and somewhat to my own horror, I can remember each of these productions almost as if I had visited it yesterday, but with the passing years, my judgment, I'm afraid, has grown increasingly detached, and my feeling for the stage, once so miraculously like that of a young man afflicted for the first time with love, is now rather more like that of a middle-aged husband. There is a settled affection for the loved one and a proper appreciation of her qualities, but I am aware also that she (continued on page 30) Broadway ... just past(continued from page 25) is occasionally a terrible bore and I am never really astonished by anything she does, either in the way of miracles or calamities. I go so tediously into my present attitude as a critic only because what I am about to write is in the nature of a minority report.

More hopeful and, I suspect, less clear eyed commentators than I, have observed that the recent New York theatrical season was one of the most brilliant in recorded history, marking, among many other gratifying things, the sudden, joyful renascence of an art form that most educated observers had considerd on its death bed, but honesty compels me to state that my own opinion is a little more temperate. For, though the season has conceivably been superior to those I have undergone in the past few years, it produced, with the solitary and bewitching exception of My Fair Lady, very little I can imagine treasuring up for my memoirs. I detected no magical rebirth but only a slight increase in general competence, and there were, as usual, at least 15 plays that made me want to lie down in the aisle and howl like a dog. We are stuck, therefore, with what I consider to be the facts of life as far as the American stage is concerned. You are, of course, compelled to read no further.

In the event, however, that you have decided to persist, the season, as I have said, was not greatly different from all the others I have known. The playwrights, as usual, struck me as dealers in a somewhat debased, though highly complex and arbitrary, literary form. They wrote of life, that is, with little of the real irony, subtlety or penetration that distinguishes the work of a good second-rate novelist (it has never, in fact, seemed to me that the average dramatist is comparable artistically with the author of a book of roughly equivalent stature), but they compensated to some extent for this failure to turn out prose of any special quality by the technical skill with which they met the difficult problems of their medium. To a reflective man, it must always appear little short of miraculous that a playwright can tell his story, whatever it may be, in almost precisely 120 minutes; that he is able to arrange, as a rule, a suitable climax for each of his three acts; and that, governed by the current economic necessities of the theatre, he is generally able to see to it that all his action takes place in an extremely limited area. It is not art, and it hasn't even much to do with what is commonly meant by the word "writing," but it is certainly sleight-of-hand of an impressive nature. The season that ended last spring was filled with just such demonstrations.

The acting was about customary, too. A great many celebrated people gave almost exactly the performances that have come to be expected of them. They behaved, that is, with a hard, brilliant, technical competence that is the result of a passionate, lifelong dedication to an art. They were admirable, but I can't remember any who was really astonishing. To be specific, for a change, I thought that the following were highly commendable, though for some reason not to be ranked with the kind of acting I will never forget. To take them up more or less in chronological order, Helen Hayes, succeeding Florence Eldridge in The Skin of Our Teeth, demonstrated again the kind of intelligence that makes her nearly incapable of making mistakes; a man called T. C. Jones did a burlesque of Tallulah Bankhead that struck me as the best sample I have ever seen of this erratic form; Shirley Booth, in The Desk Set, carried a remarkably tedious show on her astonishingly capable shoulders; Ruth Gordon, who may easily be the greatest humorist in the theatre, lifted Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker right out of nowhere; the Lunts who, like Miss Hayes, seem to have been born with art instinctive knowledge of the stage, turned an extremely bad play into at least an acceptable one (The Great Sebastians); and, of course, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews were responsible for a kind of charm that you will be very fortunate to see again in your lifetime.

There were a great many performances for which I had only the mildest enthusiasm. One name that immediately comes to mind is that of Edward G. Robinson, whose work in Middle of the Night seemed to me almost unendurably monotonous, but there were atleast equal offenders. There were deplorable efforts by Mary Martin and George Abbott, again in The Skin of Our Teeth; by Lois Smith in The Young and the Beautiful; by Sam Levene in a wracking piece of work called The Hot Corner; and by Mr. and Mrs. Hume Cronyn, who seemed to be going out of their way to he tedious in a play called A Day by the Sea. There were other bad actors, some of them nearly incomprehensible, like the leading participants in really singular exhibits known as The Wooden Dish, Island of Goats, The Innkeepers, The Little Glass Clock, Deadfall, Debut and Wake Up, Darling. We will go into none of the details of these offerings.

There were also efforts that struck me as meriting some degree of your serious attention. Susan Strasberg, who has the misfortune or grace to be exactly 18 years old, gave, in The Diary of Anne Frank, one of the most radiant and intelligent exhibitions I have ever seen; Michael Redgrave, in Tiger at the Gates, turned up with a powerful and original acting style that appears to be a special gift of the British; Andy Griffith, in No Time for Sergeants, seemed to have a personality peculiarly and fascinatingly his own; Nancy Walker, in the revival of Noel Coward's Fallen Angels, managed to turn that ancient comedy into something never dreamed of by the elf who wrote it in the first place; David Wayne contributed his own special humor to The Ponder Heart, a play that otherwise left a great deal to be desired; and a young actress named Siobhan McKenna was enormously effective in something called The Chalk Garden, a British import that has unusual wit but perhaps not a great deal of substance. There were several plays that should have been a good bit better than they were, but somehow struck me as failing to get quite the acting they deserved, among them an interesting piece by Arthur Miller known as A View from the Bridge, which shared the billing with a curtainraiser entitled Memory of Two Mondays; A Hatful of Rain; Time Limit; Mister Johnson; and the highly controversial Waiting for Godot, about which it is interesting to note that Bert Lahr, who had the principal part, publicly announced that he hadn't the foggiest idea of what the damn thing was all about.

It is seldom my practice to visit the off-Broadway theatre on the ground that really good plays have a way of working their way uptown, but two revivals down there impressed me. One was a resurrection of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which I thought somewhat superior to the original, and the other was a version of Uncle Vanya. which a very talented company made to seem almost completely contemporaneous. The Phoenix Theatre, down on Twelfth Street, had, I'm embarrassed to say, an almost perfect record for boring me to insanity, its programs consisting for the most part of players and entertainments that I suspect should never have been rescued from obscurity.

Leading the major disappointments of the season was, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Pipe Dream, which was afflicted with one of the worst books ever written, the joint endeavor of Mr. Hammerstein and John Steinbeck. There were others, however, not very far behind, including a disaster called The Vamp, starring Carol Channing; Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which was as nearly as possible nothing at all; Janus, a vehicle for Margaret Sullavan, which had its public, though where these people came from is a considerable mystery to me; Mr. Wonderful, which would appear to demonstrate that an eccentric musical form is not enough; Orson Welles' highly personal rendition of King Lear, which was made even (concluded on page 50) Broadway ... just past(continued from page 30) odder by the circumstance that the star was compelled to operate from a wheel chair; and The Most Happy Fella, which, in my indignant minority opinion, was very dull indeed.

I have purposely avoided any discussion of the year's directors since an experience of my own has taught me that it is almost impossible to determine the respective contributions made by actors and writers as opposed to the man who theoretically instructs them how to behave. Six or seven years ago, it was my innocent habit to credit a separate, important magic to the people who handled the staging. After a lengthy experience with Burgess Meredith, who performed this service for a comedy of mine, I am convinced that almost nobody unconnected with a production has even the slightest idea of who is responsible for what, and that it is quite foolish and presumptuous for him to pretend that he has. If there is any unmistakable seal that marks the work of one director over another, I am hopelessly incompetent to identify it. So much for that.

If the season was really marked by anything I should say that it was brilliant and economical scenic designing. I think especially of Boris Aronson's really magnificent settings for A View from the Bridge, Oliver Smith's almost equally lovely work on My Fair Lady, and Loudon Sainthill's classic contribution to Tiger at the Gates, but there were a great many more. It was a year of astonishing pictorial beauty in the theatre.

The general trend in the current theatre -- if there is any -- is toward the kind of writing that will preserve it as a separate medium, as distinguished from moving pictures and television. There are obviously a great many plays that can still be sold to rival media, and far too many men who are only too anxious to do so. However, it is hard to say how an expensive art form that, contrasted with television, depends on a certain amount of physical mobility on the part of the spectator, and, as contrasted with the cinema, often calls for extremely inconvenient hours, can hope to compete indefinitely with either of them, unless it offers something that a rigid code of morals and the simplest plotting and characterization will never be in a position to furnish. Most of the minds I have met in the theatre world vastly prefer something like Janus to, say, the works of Tennessee Williams, but the choice, I'm afraid, is no longer theirs. It has come down to a question either of writing for people who are not only comparatively solvent and willing to brave the terrible climate of Times Square, but even determined to see some recognizable fragment of human experience, or else of going out of business, or even taking up some cleaner and more rational line of work.

The effect of all this on the theatre has not been to achieve anything much in the way of better writing (I give you again The Great Sebastians here), but it has had the result of forcing most playwrights to think on slightly more advanced levels than It Happened One Night, and compelling producers to put on works the majority of which I'm sure are deeply repugnant to them. It has even forced a whole army of actors to adopt techniques that are surely foreign to their picturesque dispositions and to perform in a manner that Hollywood would consider a calamity at the box-office. As I've said, the legitimate stage has failed by far to meet its proper responsibilities; it has simply answered a challenge of a sort. The ladies and gentlemen connected with it have not really been virtuous; they have merely yielded to expediency.

It seems to me now that what has been said about My Fair Lady is far from adequate. Mr. Shaw's Pygmalion was a coldly intellectual exercise, expressing alike his contempt for physical love and the British social system, along with his unique enthusiasm for the doubtful science of phonetics. It would be hard to imagine a piece of writing with less apparent dramatic quality, but Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe have some-how managed both to contrive a piece that is practically guaranteed not to disturb the most fanatic Shavian and also to furnish the rest of us with some of the happiest memories we will ever acquire. The tune called The Rain in Spain is a lovely song by anybody's standards; the fact that Eliza is clearly committed to Professor Higgins at the end is only a sensible and very winning contradiction to one of Shaw's notorious perversities; and, surprisingly enough, almost nothing is lost of the fundamentally literary humor of the original. Contradicting something I just said, there can be no denying the taste and intelligence that Moss Hart, who directed, has shown in effecting so astonishing a change. Altogether, it is one of the supreme collaborations of our time.

To some extent, the same qualities are visible in The Diary of Anne Frank, A View from the Bridge, The Chalk Garden, Tiger at the Gates, No Time for Sergeants, The Matchmaker and The Lark. They all seem to be the result of thoughtfully combined and affectionate effort. I don't know what more can be asked of any workers in the theatre.

The other productions of the season just past were called Catch a Star, The Carefree Tree, A Roomful of Roses, The Heavenly Twins, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Red Roses for Me, The Righteous Are Bold, Miss Julie, Affair of Honor, The Innkeepers, The Littlest Revue, Tamburlaine, The Little Glass Clock, A Month in the Country, The Lovers, Shangri-La, Moliere's Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme (in French, of course), and more or less solo performances by Marcel Marceau, Joyce Grenfell and Maurice Chevalier. Whatever merit any of the aforementioned material had was almost imperceptible to me.

Finally, there are -- or were when this was written -- no less than five holdovers from the season of 1955-56. Their titles: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Damn Yankees, Inherit the Wind, Fanny and The Pajama Game. By this time, they all ought to be well enough known to you to require no comment. In any case, it has begun to occur to me that I must be very close to the end of your patience.

My Fair Lady made box-office history when scalpers began getting $1 20 per pair for tickets to this Rex Harrison-Julie Andrews smash.

Judy Holliday rehearses her starring part in the Comden and Green musical, The Bells are Ringing, under Jerome Robbins' direction.

Gwen Verdon writhed sinuously in the background of many a Hollywood musical; was noticed by Broadway in a second-lead roll in Can-Can; shot to stardom last season in Damn Yankees as the tempting Lola.

Gwen Verdon writhed sinuously in the background of many a Hollywood musical; was noticed by Broadway in a second-lead roll in Can-Can; shot to stardom last season in Damn Yankees as the tempting Lola.

Gwen Verdon writhed sinuously in the background of many a Hollywood musical; was noticed by Broadway in a second-lead roll in Can-Can; shot to stardom last season in Damn Yankees as the tempting Lola.

Gwen Verdon writhed sinuously in the background of many a Hollywood musical; was noticed by Broadway in a second-lead roll in Can-Can; shot to stardom last season in Damn Yankees as the tempting Lola.

In the corner, that Most Happy Fella, Robert Weede, nuzzles Jo Sullivan.