New York Theatre

Broadway's commercialism, a cause of complaint for many years, hardly applies this season. Commercial shows make money; Broadway shows have not.

Yes, a few well-publicized musicals (My Fair Lady, Camelot...) earn more than their keep; but a single failure is disasterous. This weekend a million dollars worth of extravagance will crumble when Kean and The Gay Life close. Another half million dollar production, Kicks & Co. folded before reaching the city.

An ugly phenomenon has accompanied the fiscal difficulties this fall: preoccupation with racial themes. Producers have always sought assured audiences, but now they are promoting a permanent theater party by catering to the Jewish and liberal segments of New York's population. Abominations such as Milk and Honey (back to Israel) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying are glorified soap-operas set to music, racial jokes that aren't particularly funny.

Racial self-consciousness is a step backwards in American theater. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1948) took an obviously Jewish figure in Willy Loman (dialect, family relations, and the rivalry with the neighbors' son suggest a Jewish background), but expanded the character, rather than caricaturing him, concentrating on the universal qualities rather than the special heritage of the hero. To succeed in 1961 (without really trying), Miller's play would have to end with Biff and Happy going off to work on a Kibbutz.

Or they could marry Negro girls. Kuamina (interracial love and scientific progress triumph in the heart of Africa) and The Blacks both tickle the liberal populace. The latter, a flood of race-hatred, contents an audience that wants to believe it would rather be oppressed than oppressor.

But not all plays dealing with racial themes use them only as salespoints: Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorious and Langston Hughes' Black Nativity are fine works. Indeed, Davis' satiric comedy is the only show on Broadway that is eminently worth seeing.

Off-Broadway, the temptation to titillate looms even greater, and is widely indulged. The Living Theater, which produced Jack Gelber's earliest, The Connection, his latest, The Apple, and Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of the Cites, is particularly guilty. The Connection deals with dope, jazz and all that evil stuff. It sells as a result. His new job, The Apple, is set in a coffee house that reproduces the visiting salesman's image of Greenwich Village.

There are two shows, however, which avoid off-Broadway's avant-grade rut and substitute real theatricality: Sean O'Casey's Red Roses for Me, at the Greenwich Mews, and last year's Leverett House musical, Sing Muse, by Erich Segal and Joseph Raposo. The O'Casey ranks with the Broadway production of six years ago, which was prematurely ousted from the theater when a lease expired. It is a thrilling and beautiful play, to my mind one of the few masterpieces of this century.

Sing Muse at the Van Dam Theater not only offers students a chance to compare an undergraduate with a professional production, but has grown into an even more entertaining show.