The Cult of Social Theater

Before he delivered the Spencer Lecture last February, that great and good man of the theatre, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, noticed a casting poster for the HDC production of The Plebeians Rehearse The Uprising. Turning to the Associate Professor of English who was shepherding him around the Loeb, Sir Tyrone is said to have asked, "Isn't that the new thriller about de Sade and a lot of French lunatics?" Told that Plebeians was a recent play by Gunter Grass about Brecht, he shook his head, informed sources report, and muttered, "Jumping Jesus. Well, it's good to know it all goes on."

His confusion is understandable in a decade which has seen theatrical fashions vary more radically than the hemline. As soon as one catch-all grouping of dramatic trends has gained popular acceptance, another has come charging out of Europe to overtake it: Theatre of Alienation, Theatre of the Absurd, Theatre of Menace, Theatre of Cruelty, Theatre of Fact.... The list promises to be continued as long as publishers find it convenient to anthologize.

Eleven years ago, the play which struck New York as daring and venturesome was the ill-fated Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. Today, the same nerves have apparently been hit by the highly profitable Off-Broadway prank, MacBird. Obviously, these works have little in common aside from their relative popular momentum and their respective pans from Walter Kerr. Beckett's sad farce, already found on at least three Harvard reading lists, seems firmly included in the century's catalogue of major literature. Barbara Garson, on the other hand, has chosen quite deliberately to write on water in order to capture and abuse a given historical minute. (She hasn't succeeded very well, although parts of MacBird are screamingly funny.) Her mounting royalties, however, reflect the decade's most apparent theatrical pattern: a growing audience demand for "social commentary."

But what does it want? The theatre is an inherently social medium: it sends out an edited and ritualized mirror image of the society which puts it on and watches it. There is a running dialogue between the stage and audience--which manifests itself technically in the actors gauging the velocity of their performance against a specific audience's reactions.

Granted a suggestive script and an informed production, the inherent social force of the theatre can evoke aspects of men and societies for which the Relevant Issues are only images. But they cannot lure an audience whose cries of "Beat me, Beat me" are ushering in an era of dramatic Social Significance which promises to outstrip the thirties. Nevertheless (although perhaps unhappily), this siren song of the Relevant can be as useful to artists as it is currently seductive to audiences.

Some years ago, Ezra Pound advised young writers to occupy themselves with politics, because the imagery of commitment was the strongest the twentieth century could provide. Reality, to Pound, was no point of debate. "Any tendency to abstract general statement," he wrote, "is a greased slide." Assuredly, Pound's position is not a prediction that the world's artists will preach up a revolution, however much that thought may have been on his mind. He merely skewers the certain fact that a revolution, whether real or only plotted, can discipline art, and that the rhetoric of revolt can strengthen writing in a word poor century.

A number of dramatists and the preponderance of influential dramatic critics seem to have taken all this to heart. Popular thesis books like Brustein's Theatre of Revolt, Bentley's Bernard Shaw, and Blau's The Impossible Theatre argue that a binding social vision has characterized the best of twentieth century drama, and, in the case of Shaw and Brecht, has been responsible for the continuity of the century's finest playwrights. Few critics, other than Marxists, have been very disturbed that neither dramatist was particularly successful in getting programs adopted, legislation passed, or governments changed. It is enough that their didactic framework provided a sustaining discipline for their art. As Bentley writes about Shaw:

Now neither Brecht nor Shaw would have been particularly pleased to hear that his political commitments and didactic intentions had, in the end, only served as a springboard for his art. The former dismissed as "culinary" the vast percentage of Western dramaturgy and the latter, avowedly, never wrote a word "for art's sake." In performance, to ignore the revolutionary premise of their work is to castrate the thrust of their dramatics. But in New York, today, Brecht and Shaw are performed as Good Liberals with whom a right-minded audience can curl up and agree. This season Galileo was presented at Lincoln Center by a company which seriously confused it with A Man For All Seasons, and a few years ago Heartbreak House received an all-star Broadway revival, which reduced it to a "high comedy" version of You Can't Take It With You.

All of this becomes of particular interest in the light of the theatre's current preoccupation with plays which come in kissing distance of history. Across the country, regional repertory companies are putting on Mother Courage ("anti-war"); In White America, The Slave, Dutchman, and Blues for Mr. Charlie ("race relations"); and Marat/Sade ("revolutionary violence"). Off Broadway successes include America Hurrah and The Deer Park ("searing indictments"). Even our theatre of the boulevard is mining social commentry. Two successful musicals of the Broadway season were Cabaret, which touches on Fascism, and Hallelujah Baby, which is nominally concerned with Negroes: Neil Simon's newest laff riot, The Star Spangled Girl, is all about the relations of two leftist students and an America First blond.

Any catalogue which lumps Mother Courage in a list with Hallelujah Baby is bound to be a little perverse. Nevertheless, a shift is clearly discernible, not among the artists but in their audience. Unlike television fads -- detectives, cowboys, spies, camp heroes -- theatrical styles are not plotted out in advance. There is no planned obsolescence. Seasons fill an audience demand; they are based on what went well the last time around. Currently, the audience wants social commentary--in one form or another.

Nowhere in The Power Elite does C. Wright Mills attempt to probe the arts. He should have tried. The audience which attends these plays constitutes a very palpable elite which, if not synonymous with his own, is at least one aspect of the American power core. According to the Twentieth Century Fund's Performnig Arts: The Economic Dilemma, the national audience for all of the performing arts is less than four per cent of the population, eighteen years of age and older. Although these figures have to be adjusted sightly for the theatre audience alone, the authors (Baumol and Bowen) concluded --

The most remarkable finding is that audiences from art form to art form are "very" similar. They all show a median age in the middle 30's; over 60 per cent of the audience for each art form consists of people in the professions (and this finding holds for both sexes); all exhibit an extremely high level of education, with 50 per cent of the males having gone to graduate school and 50 per cent of the females having at least completed college; and there is a consistently high level of income, in no case involving a median under $11,000.

The reason why this establishment audience should be preoccupied with social themes is hard to pin down with facts and figures, but I suspect that their interest stems from a variety of escapism, peculiar to the theatre. Many years ago, Brecht was aware that empathetic drama, which preeminently characterizes American theatre, tends to serve as a purgative force. (Whether he was able to change this very much remains for future generations to decide.) It is an easily observed phenomenon that by sharing in a theatrical passion, audiences frequently feel relieved. As Brecht pointed out in 1930, this sort of theatre, "involves the spectator in the action on the stage" but "uses up his will to act."

In the American theatre, attendance is becoming equated with participation and/or concern. Most "anti-war" plays, for example, serve only to flatter an audience into the belief that they too are opposed to suffering and bloodshed. The applause which greets a Viet Rock is self congratulatory. Curiously, plays which exist only to show that the author is angry and that the people he's angry at had better feel pretty damn guilty and scared (I am thinking of LeRoi Jones), produce a similar response.

Audiences have always approached the arts generally, and the theatre specifically, to have their own moral schemes vindicated. For that matter, orthodox Catholic and Marxist critics think that's what the arts are for. But from the Dionysia to the Comedie audiences have been second-guessed.

In an art form which depends on the mutual recognition of audience and performers, it is patently unfortunate if either group is allowed to call the shots.