Offstage

ByRUSSELL MALONEY

Terribly, Terribly Hurt

Several months ago, during the dreadful interval between the close of the grippe season and the first sticky steps of approaching spring, while the last snows of winter lay melting in Shubert Alley, the Playwrights’ Company, in association with Elia Kazan, presented Truckline Café, a sort of thoughtful melodrama by Maxwell Anderson. This was a mistake, as it turned out. The play closed less than two weeks after its opening, snarled at by the critics and mourned by few.

Among the mourners, naturally enough, were Mr. Kazan, co-producer, and Harold Clurman, the director. Nor was their mourning silent. They took space in the morning newspapers to denounce the critics — “a group of men who are hired to report the events of our stage and who more and more are acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise — either by their training or by their taste.”

The Messrs. Clurman’s and Kazan’s manifesto went on to say, in a low, trembling voice, “The sorriest aspect of the situation is that the mass of professional theater people, including some of the most talented men in America, are impotent in the situation, and can do nothing more about it than bemoan the state of affairs privately and talk vaguely about doing ‘something.’ Nothing is ever done, no opposition point of view is ever expressed. There is a blackout of all taste except the taste of these men.”

Well, well.

Here’s Frankenstein complaining that the monster is getting boisterous. Who turned the unassuming little theater-news reporter into a “critic” — who but “the mass of professional theater people, including some of the most talented men in America”? Will Clurman and Kazan look me in the eye and tell me that, if the notices about Truckline Cafe had been favorable, they would not have quoted them in their advertising? Had they not engaged a press agent, at a salary of some hundreds of dollars a week, to butter up the newspaper boys, feed them gossip and feature stories, and send them free seats for the New York opening? Among the actors they hired for Truckline Cafe, is there a single one who has not pasted into a scrapbook every newspaper review in which his name is mentioned? In a word, has any professional theater person ever conducted himself in such a manner as to give a newspaper critic even a faint suspicion that he is not the personal spokesman of Almighty God?

A Plain Yes or No

When a man decides to stand up for his principles, the actual issue involved is, more likely than not, so fragile that the armor-clad defender of the right looks kind of silly. But certainly it is illogical that a handful of writers should be in control of the American theater — or even that they or anybody else should think they are in control. It leads to a situation in which everybody is always looking over his shoulder. Critic and producer alike will soon be unable to keep anything on their stomachs, let alone do anything creative for the American theater.

One solution offered freely by various managers and actors with whom I have talked over the problem is to eliminate critics altogether. This takes only ten years. It was done in Vienna some time ago. As I got the story, it was managed as a gigantically scaled snub: the Viennese theater just pretended that the Viennese critics weren’t there. If the critics praised a play, the managers ignored the praise; if the verdict was unfavorable, they ignored that, too. The critics got no seats, no attention, no prestige, no bribes. And after ten years there were no critics.

I am not sure that the critical fraternity in New York City deserves this dismal fate, although it would certainly be fun for an outsider to watch. The opening of a play is a news event of some importance to a considerable number of people, and a signed expression of the reporter’s opinion ought not to harm an adult intelligence: reason enough for the existence of critics. It is a little alarming, perhaps, that these arbiters have to return to their offices on the dead run — those, at least, who work on morning papers —and write their story in little more than an hour; still, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that more leisure might not necessarily produce a more illuminating or entertaining critique.

As for their banding together as “The Critics’ Circle” and announcing an annual prize play in competition with the Pulitzer Prize, this is merely touching. I don’t know quite what adjective to attach to the fact that one producing company found it necessary, a year or so ago, to announce publicly that, the next time they spotted a tipsy critic at one of their openings, there would be affidavits signed by witnesses and general hell to pay. It would, of course, be unfair to talk this way without noting that within the Critics’ Circle there is an inner circle composed of obviously sound writers.

The big question is, then: Which comes first, the flop or the critic? Does the critic make or merely report the flop? As we consider this question, we must remind ourselves that these days there are only two kinds of plays — hits and flops. Producers as a class are merely financial megalomaniacs who have for some reason taken to producing plays instead of playing the horses. What they and the backers they recruit for their productions regard as the type of sound, conservative investment in the theater is Life with Father, now in its seventh year. As soon as it becomes evident that a play, however ingratiating, isn’t going to run seven years, it is tossed out into the alley to make room for a new candidate. All that the average manager wants is a plain yes or no — has he got a hit or a flop?

Now a hit or a flop is usually pretty obvious. Nevertheless, the hit-or-flop psychology probably constitutes a critical bottleneck. Unconsciously the critics have been turned into judges instead of appreciators. Variety, the trade journal, even keeps a “box score,” in which the critics are graded, to three decimal places, solely according to their success in separating the hits from the flops. To be sure, some of the critics have protested against the implications of this box score, but obviously not hard enough. It goes on from year to year.

Blueprint for Critics

The tide is rising; no critic is safe. Irwin Shaw, in an introduction to The Assassin, recently published as a book after a quick flop in New York, has some things to say. The Shuberts, who have a finger in more productions than you would believe possible, have never liked critics. The voices are becoming articulate. The critics are soon going to have to explain their conduct; and since their conduct is now and then preposterous, they had better begin to act differently.

Let them — as the editors of Time used to say — let them remember that they are just one member of an audience, and not necessarily the most cultured one at that. Let them be subjective instead of objective. “I cried when the social worker took Gwendolyn’s illegitimate baby away from her,” “I laughed when the fat man’s pants fell off,” “I think So-and-So is an awfully pretty girl even if she is a bad actress,” “I had such a hang-over I hardly cared what was going on” — these simple statements are a fair sample of a permissible critical attitude.

What’s Wrong with the American Theater?

All such discussions as these inevitably lead to the old, old question: What’s wrong with the American theater? Well, let’s go back to the Clurman-Kazan manifesto, which says perhaps more than the writers realized they were saying. It addresses itself, in a large-type headline, “To the Theater Going Public.” It was published in two New York morning newspapers.

The trouble with the American theater, then, is that it is geographically limited to a fifteen-block area lying due west of Broadway, in the City of New York. Mind you, I’m not saying that it is feasible to distribute dramatic entertainment any more fairly among the hundred and thirty-odd million people of this nation. It is quaint, though, isn’t it? There the American theater is, a silting duck. Decentralization would solve the critic problem and the atomic-bomb problem at the same time.