Peace With the Theater

Playwright Robert Anderson explained to a rainy night audience at M.I.T. last Monday evening that artists can and should come to terms with the American theater. Expressing a point of view distant not only in time from the crusading days of his '39 Harvard thesis on future poetic drama in America, he followed a line of compromise. It seemed to him imperative that a playwright accept the theater of his day. An unproduced playwright is no playwright he argued, challenging someone to name a writer "discovered" after his death when his plays never reached an audience during his lifetime.

The author of Team and Sympathy decried American "hit" phobis but agreed that the audience's verdict about a play should be accepted. His position might be explained from his first flush of success, but Anderson has also seen the face of adversity, if dimly.

"All Summer Long," his most recent play failed on Broadway although the critics and a select audience praised it. He was content to blame himself for the plays inability to "take them from behind their television sets in the Bronx." It just wasn't theatrical enough, Anderson explained, or perhaps, he admitted, failure came from not having a big star and a name director.

Experience seemed to have softened him a little. He said he hoped for a time when the American theatre goer would follow a playwright's effort because he was a friend, like someone you take into your home because you are interested in him as a person--no matter what mood he's in or what he has to say. Anderson noted British audiences come closer to his idea. They tend to enjoy plays more for their own sake, he said, and not so much for their cocktail party value. Often the British will even go back to see a play a second time when someone new takes over a part whereas the American theater is likely to be empty once the "big name" leaves.

Speaking about the relation of playwright to director Anderson praised Kazan's genius, describing how he works up to a play by studying the author as well as the script. Anderson didn't think much of the idea of a writer-director. He said he was personally glad to have someone else work with the actors to get at his meaning, especially a director like Kazan, who he feels has a knack for getting a great deal out of the actor. By revealing personal things about himself, Anderson explained, Kazan gets his actors to do the same--making their experience available to them for interpreting a role. As a writer very conscious of the theater, Anderson said that if an actor could express something better with a gesture he was willing to let a line go. This attitude was not hard to understand, since Anderson writes the small play and depends heavily on under the line meanings. Once a writer accepts changes, he went on, he has an obligation not to undermine the directors choice. He thought that Tennesse Williams had been twice mistaken in printing his alternate form of the third act for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

To those in the audience who see Broadway as a rather one sided balance between commercialism and art, Mr. Anderson--now on the road to success--must have appeared informative but a little disappointing. He said nothing about repertory theater groups or productions of experimental drama. As long as the theater was full Anderson didn't seem to be overly concerned with who was coming and who was being deprived of theater because of high prices. "It's unfortunate" was about all he could muster. The problems of the playwright as a serious artist were passed over by the glib remark that all good plays are produced. And it might have been argued that Williams' independence of his director was admirable if he had a point. It seems as though he did when he decided for literary reasons to publish the original ending to his play.