Theatre Owners Seen As Ruining American Stage

"Broadway has done everything to destroy the American theatre in the smug knowledge that nothing can destroy it," said Louis Kronenberger, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of English, last Thursday evening.

The New York stage is so tethered to the Broadway box-office that none of the city's 30 playhouses, that constitute the professional American stage, supports theatre culturally or on a long term basis, he added in his speech on "The American Theatre Today".

The two characteristics of the modern theatre are its isolationist status on Broadway and its highly commercial outlook which makes for little artistry and attracts to production staffs a host of "ignoramuses and vulgarians," interested only in popular entertainment and high profits.

Lack of Established Houses

Kronenberger, drama critic for Time magazine, also said that theatre here further suffers from having no sense of an established house, such as in the other arts. This lack, too, hinders playwrights, whose work must now be subjected to the whimsies of producers, directors, and other theatre overlords.

The lack of writers and actors in the tradition of high comedy, he pointed out, is another failing of American theatre today; and he condemned as mere "journalism" the popular practice of the dramatized novel.