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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2021
We have money, big money, wanting to be spent on the theatre.
—Richard Scheduler in T20.The fact is, as we all know, that today's theatre is run with money. Tomorrow's theatre, such as it may be, must also be solvent…. I am concerned with certain economic facts of the present, certain trends that will shape the theatres of the future.
—Charles L. Mee, Jr. in T20.I have just been reading in the papers that you are writing a play. Write, write, write! It is ‘ necessary. Even should the play fail, don't let that discourage you…. a success, however slight, may be of vast service to the theatre…. By all means, golubchik, finish the play
—Chekhov in a letter to Gorki.1 Of course one might read, then register a complaint over what might have been if, say, Melville had not had to work on the New York customs docks for $4 a day, and been really free to write! To react in this fashion the reader would necessarily possess standards of excellence and powers of imagination that are simply beyond mine. Then, there is the stronger point to contend with, that these particular readings are peculiarly free of work that could be judged economically degraded. The merit in this argument is plainly seen by looking at the works of Fitzgerald in the late and middle thirties as well as Hemingway's very last output. And, finally, since I have not mentioned it elsewhere, it is appropriate to say here that throughout this essay I shall speak of the highest calibre work only. So much other work fits into the other class like a lump, that no discussion would be possible going to it for evidence.
2 The incredible responsibilities borne by Chekhov are especially touching. From the time he was designated by his parents to remain in Taganrog to act as disposal agent for their pitiful, bankruptcy-emptied house while the family went to Moscow, until his death in Germany, Chekhov supported brothers, sisters, parents, and wife with a generosity that is stupefying when one considers that it cost him his life. But it did not cost him (or us) his masterpieces: for while Olga Knipper acted with the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov, dying, dying of boredom, slapped flies in Yalta and wrote masterpieces.
3 Herbert Blau, “Decentralization: New Frontiers and Old Dead Ends,“ Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (T20), p. 55.
4 If my frivolous voice offends, it should be made clear that Blau invites the tone (not the offense) with his subtly disguised insanity—shrewdly hidden beneath a prose full of energy, slang, and erudition; he prefers (and this is the aim of his style) to be thought of as a regular guy who nonetheless has all the warmth, vigor, simple appetite and lovable charm of a peasant. But please, Mr. Blau, listen to a new neighbor (or even to a stranger): “Shake, pal. Who are you?”
5 “Things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other once contact has been severed.” Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 12.
6 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 140.
7 See Moses Hadas, Werner Jaeger, H. D. F. Kitto, et al. The community —indeed congregational—character of early theatre narrowed finally into the chorus: a representative community.
8 Hadas, Ancilla to Classical Reading(New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p. 42. Solon, as the story is given by Plutarch, attended a performance by Thespis some time after he left politics. The old statesman was scandalized, scolding the actor for the lies he told during the evening. Thespis assured him that lies were permissible in a play, to which Solon replied, “Ah, if we honor and commend such play as this, we shall find it some day in our business.” Hadas suggests that Solon used the arts of rhetoric and poetry to persuade his constituency. Perhaps, then, his anger was directed at someone's having competence in these arts besides himself.
9 Hesoid (8th cent., B.C.), who became a rhapsode late in life, had been inspired by performances of Homeric chapters when he was a boy. See Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Oxford University Press, 1945), I, 58f.
10 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), I, p. 56.
11 Philostratus, “The Life of Apollonius of Tyana,” quoted in Hadas' Ancilla to Classical Reading, p. 181. In writing the life of a sophist and celebrated mystic, Philostratus, a Hellenic biographer, seems under no compulsion to discuss Aeschylus’ career in much detail. Thus he seems detached. On the single issue of curtailing the chorus he wrote more than Aristotle (Poetics), who is of the same opinion nevertheless.
12 Jaeger, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 237-238.
13 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam Ed., 1963), p. 42.
14 Freud, op. cit., p. 36.
15 See Eric Bentley's foreword to “From the American Drama,” The Modern Theatre, Vol. 4 (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), pp. Viii-ix.
16 Freud, loc. cit.
17 Without doubt one feels this to be the case with disease. Viruses nowadays are hunted as if they were old time stage coach robbers with the research physician playing Wyatt Earp on their trail.
18 William B. Wood, “Personal Recollections of the Stage,” Philadelphia, 1855, quoted in A.M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959), pp. 544-545.
19 But to be fair to Blau, the New York Public Library is swamped with reserves on The Impossible Theatre, and I have not been able to get it to read. Certainly I cannot afford $10 to buy it.
20 It may be said without malice that Mr. Albee's output seems larger in achievement when viewing his short plays than the supposedly larger things which emulate their titles admirably—and unfortunately. Mr. Albee himself—and I have failed to turn up the source after some search—has published a fine and sardonic defense of the efficacy of the short play. It is a pity to imagine that so convincing an argument should have failed to enlist its author's line of action.
21 Nancy Marchand, a leading actress with the APA, reported to the writer in conversation—and was confirmed within moments by others who were present and in a position to know—that the audience outside New York was inspiring to someone like herself who had been raised on the usual American theatre magnet template (New York was attained finally, but you got to pension age before coming through the Lincoln Tunnel). Her reaction was: “They turn out, my boy, they turn out!! You see thousands … War and Peace doesn't bowl them over: they've readthe thing! and the rest of Tolstoi, as well. Even if a play's lousy, they come anyway. Naturally, they won't sayyoji're great if you're not; but it's like they know —regardless —that whatever they think of the performance, somethinglike work has gone into it.”
22 Brecht's greatest service to theatre, ranking him as an innovator second only to Aeschylus, was his effort at breaking imitation out of theatre's jelly mold. The primitive sugar stick was something we would not let out of our mouths easily—not until Brecht took some of our teeth along with the stick. But Brecht never quite succeeded.
23 Thorstein Veblen, “On War and Peace,” in The Portable Veblen, ed. Max Lerner (New York: The Viking Press, 1950), p. 570.
24 See Michael Straight, “Something for Everybody … etc.,” The New Republic, March 13, 1965.
25 It may not be remembered but the home of the festival was at first in a church, located on a run-down block in New York's lower East Side. Those years were characterized by erratic though occasionally marvelous productions, a dangerous neighborhood for a church, let alone a theatre, few patrons, and undiminished passion.
26 A. W. Gomme, “The Population of Athens in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, B.C.” Glasgow University Publications, #28 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1933).
28 Sir Paul Harvey in his Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (London: Oxford, 1955), relying presumably on both Haigh and Pickard-Cambridge (see his preface, p. vi, also p. 467 under Greek and Roman theatres), gives a figure of 27,000 for the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. Pickard-Cambridge, moreover, in The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (London: Oxford, 1953) is not convincing when he makes efforts to uphold this figure by arguing for an overflow crowd of standees. Vide Ch. VI, The Audience, p. 268. The modest figures here given are taken from The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (London: Oxford, 1957), ed. Phyllis Hartknoll, from “Greece“ by H. D. K. Kitto, pp. 332-337. See also Mumford, op. cit., Gomme, op. cit., and R. E. Wycherley, How the Greeks Built Cities (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1962), 2nd ed., passim.
29 Mumford, op. cit., pp. 167-168.
30 Ibid., p. 115.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p . 52.
33 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge: Harvard Univgrsity Press, 1953), p. 113.
34 Mumford, op. cit., pp. 151-152.
35 Percy Shelley, “In Defence of Poetry,” quoted in George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 109.