Reciprocal Invasion
By JOHN SIMON
WI-LAT distinguishes the current New York theatrical season so far is not the numerous closings after record short runs (though the fact that so many .plays had not enough breath in them even to reach New York is unusual), nor the far from inspiring quality of most of the plays surviving either on or off Broadway. This is par for a course that, un- weeded by adequate criticism, steadily grows to seed. What is significant, however, is that Broadway and off-Broadway have simultaneously invaded each other.
Until this year one could not have conceived of playwrights like Albee (author of the highly successful Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) or Richardson (of the forthcoming Lorenzo) being produced on Broadway. Similarly, such a dis- establishmentarian British import as Beyond the Fringe would until recently have been imaginable only off-Broadway—and therefore, in view of the financial problems involved, nowhere. When, a few years ago, Cranks dared to show its saucy face on the Great White Way, it was quickly and unjustly slapped into oblivion. Unconven- tional European playwrights like Brecht and Frisch, who in the paSt were .seen only briefly —if at all—off-Broadway, are soon to make their entry on Broadway with Mother Courage and Andorra, and it requires as little insight as power of prophecy to forecast that the entry will be triumphal--whatever the average playgoer and his cousin, the daily reviewer, may think in petto.
But the reverse movement is also in Lull swing. Even last season the best off-Broadway play was Frank E. Ciilroy's Who'll Save the
Ploughboy?, a well-constructed and simply but untritely stated piece, very satisfying in its totally unexperimental way. It had, in short everything that should have put it on Broadway, where, indeed, Mr. Gilroy's second play will be appearing this season. And late last season, off' Broadway gave Arthur Kopit's Oh, Dad, Pool Dad, etc., the kind of expensive, studiedly chic, typically Broadwayish production that made the audience ascribe its sinking feeling as much to imaginary thick carpeting and pneumatically' upholstered seats as to the very real deficicihnes of the play. This season, that mixture of home- spun and Tennessee Williams that has lately characterised Broadway is everywhere in evi- dence off-Broadway. (Mr. Williams himself recently proclaimed that he would henceforth be writing for off-Broadway only—a nicely cal- culated threat that has already assured his nod play the most lavish production on Broadway.) Mrs. Daily has a Lover, by William Hanley, is an example of this, and so is William Snyder's The Days and Nights of Beebee Fensterntaker, an intelligent, charming, uneven play that owes something to both Williams and Inge, and cries out for Broadway while managing quite pleasantly off it.
And that is the most interesting part: that Broadway thrives handsomely off off-Broadway: while off-Broadway is welcomed uptown with open arms. White Beebee Fenstertnaker is fondled by audiences in the Village, another lady, Virginia Woolf, is the darling of Broadway. Is the estab- lishment espousing the experimental, and the avant-garde going in for enzbourgeoisentent? think not. But maybe the time has come when the openly commercial and the covertly coin- mercial theatre are beginning to take stock of each other. Thus, in Who's Afraid of Virgitti4 Woolf? Albee has put on stage a living-roora that, to the casual eye; is furnished in the realist, or Ibsen-to-Miller, style. But there are bits, too, of cruel clowning, simultaneous monologising by two characters oblivious of each other, ultra- Strindbergian savagery, and a kind of gutter' poetry hitherto unknown both in poetry and in the gutter, that are new to Broadway—though not to the theatre of Beckett and Genet. Again, the off-Broadway production of Brecht's A Man's a Man -by the New Repertory Theatre wisely makes use of that elegantly cynical pro'. fessionalism which is Broadway's chief, and perhaps only, virtue, and so emerges well ahead of a rival mounting of the same play done in 3 style of militant deprivation by the Living Theatre.
For the rest, the question 'What is new on the New York stage?' would have to be answered with 'Whatever is old.' On Broadway, a number of old, not to say ancient, hands are trying to recapture past glories. Playwrights and composers of the Thirties are living, out, not so much theit own senility, as the dotage of their political and cultural outlook, in supposedly contemporary`. plays and musicals that look like aged dowager4 doing the twist.
Off-Broadway, the present novelty is to revive big old-time Broadway musicals like Anythini Goes on a smaller scale but in snippier style, which yields, at best, harmless banter. Mean' while, younger talents who have been watching old movies on television, have spawned musical pastiches of South Sea, jungle exploration and Forties' War-Bond-Drive movies, most of then, only a little less funny than these films then' selves are today. Thus the Thirties and Forties are very much with us in the current New York theatre. By 1963, with a little luck, we may loot forward to the discovery of the Fifti2s,
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