The following notes concern only a particular technique of theatrical art, that of transposing a written work from the imaginary realm of reading to the concrete realm of the stage. To look for anything more than “means of interpretation” in these often deliberately cryptic lines would be vain.

When so many theories, ars poetica and metaphysics have been made up about this art, it is perhaps necessary that one advance, as a preliminary, a few artisan's considerations.

One can never read the play often enough. Actors never read it often enough. They think they understand the play when they follow the plot more or less clearly—a fundamental error.

Death has not lessened Eugene O’Neill’s dominance over the serious American theatre. He towers over other American dramatists with a gigantism almost equal to that with which his characters tower over ordinary mortals. He died in 1953 at the age of 65, having had only one Broadway production in nineteen years, and none thoroughly successful in twenty years. Yet anyone who would evaluate the American theatre since the second World War is obliged to reckon with Eugene O’Neill, and that hardly at all because of the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh but rather because of the amazing concentration of his works which began to be produced in 1956. In May of that year, the off-Broadway group at The Circle-in-the-Square gave The Iceman Cometh its first successful performance in New York.

Musical comedy seemed for so long to be nothing but noisily sexy entertainment for an off evening that it is difficult even yet to get anyone to give it a really serious thought. Sophisticated theatergoers who have a taste for it seem to feel they must apologize for that taste as a kind of secret unsophisticated vice—like catsup on French fries—which they somehow never have managed to outgrow. They note by way of justification that in the past fifteen years the orchestras are less brassy, the plots less farcical, the ballets more adult and integral parts of the story, that the lyrics are cleverly sophisticated, that the scores have some catchy tunes. But in so doing, they miss the outstanding development of the musical in the past fifteen years or so—the development of a twentieth century dramatic poetry, a lyricism which appeals to sophisticated and unsophisticated alike, a lyricism which seemed impossible to combine with the realism developed by the 1920’s.

Francis Fergusson suggests that the drama since Shakespeare and until the 1940’s, when The Idea of a Theater was written, is partial in its “perspectives”, each play a “fragment” of Shakespeare’s “great mirror”. Kenneth Burke suggests that there is a close relationship between the nature of a play’s setting and its sense of action (A Grammar of Motives). Taken together, these statements indicate a relationship between the partial perspective of modern drama and the naturalist settings which prevailed in that drama from the Restoration to the Second War. They also indicate a relationship between the multiple set that has become popular in the American theatre since the war and the perspectives which the dramatists are trying to achieve.

Small ironies are the particular delight of those newspaper columns that deal in news and gossip about Broadway and its theatrical ventures; so it was natural that the most piquant tidbit of the 1955-56 season should have been the fact that Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, a play which managed at least the success of a five-month run in New York, had been turned down by every major London management before Irene Mayer Selznick decided to produce it here. The real surprise, however, was that Miss Bagnold’s lovely play should have been a success at all, even in a season unusual enough to list Giraudoux and Anouilh among its hit playwrights. The Chalk Garden is too many things that a Broadway hit is not. It is, first of all, primarily verbal, using language with a delight and a delicacy that is foreign to even our most serious playwrights.

In spite of his undeniable stature at home and abroad, Tennessee Williams has met with slight critical approbation. If not actively contemptuous, the little magazines have been cold. The acceptance of the ephemeral press, admittedly a mixed dish, has been succeeded by querulous denial, irritability, and, more frequently, silence from literary quarters. The reasons are not far to seek.

Mr. Williams has been too successful, and success on Broadway has come to be equated with the slick masquerading of the shoddy. Granted that Eugene O’Neill, too, has had his recent Broadway successes, but we may flatter ourselves that these amount to belated recognition of a “high seriousness” wanting in Tennesse Williams. After all, O’Neill had a tragic sense and a “daemon” (now inflated into myth), while all is negation in Williams. Or so Mr. Krutch would have us believe.