The American Scene; Great Dramatists

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent doing the arts for the American scene for Illinois Institute of Technology. On this highly showvinistic program, we've been taking, well, after all it's called the American scene. We've been playing up not merely American scene, but the Chicago scene. But the Chicago scene and the American scene overlap and sometimes we can range outside the territorial limits of Chicago and go into a foreign country, foreign areas of America outside the midland. Now, in praising American scene, it's not to absurd showinism, I think. I think it's a very proper one that we examine not merely our past but our present to see the accomplishment. And we have talked about American scholarship. We've talked about American literature of Mark Twain and so on. But why not talk about the American drama? There is, of course, in the emergence of art farms, there, one art farm, you will find a distinction, a

great achievement in another art farm at the same time. And in America, it is true, everybody knows, that the American fiction has had a international importance in France and England. They admit the dominant to the American creative fiction in the last 30 or 40 years. The same thing in criticism, although that's not quite so well known, but American criticism is a very great achievement of our time. And American poetry, also, of course. But American drama, and we ought to talk about American drama. So the subject today is for American dramatists. Those four being Lillian Hellman since she has just hit Broadway again after a rather long absence, not literally a long absence because other plays have been produced. But a long absence of great success. She's come back with a tremendous success. And then we're going to talk about also, probably more so, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and William Inns. These four dramatists have an international status, and I think they're worth

talking about. And to talk about them, I've asked Henry Nippler, one of my colleagues at the Illinois Institute of Technology, to discuss this with me. He is a specialist in the theater and the drama. He has appeared on television. Many of you have seen him from time to time talking about the Chicago Theater, Chicago Drama. And he is writing books about the theater and the drama, writing articles continuously. He's well -qualified to talk about the subject and we'll turn it over to him. Henry, first place, I think I said something about the status of the American drama, didn't I? But you can add to that much more tellingly than I have. Well, what you said all together far too often, you gave it a little tone below the poem, the novel, the criticism. And I think that the American drama has sufficiently come of age in the last, especially, I think, since the Second World War, not to need a slight tone of

patronizing appeal anymore. The American drama has gone all over the world, and especially the four that we have mentioned have had successes all over the world and have carried the name of American literature, maybe not as long, of course, as Faulkner or Hemingway who have been writing since the 20s, but certainly as fully in the last 10 or 15 years, after all the American drama is the youngest in a sense, it cannot be said to have started before O 'Neill and that is only after the First World War. Well, we are some historians who have become annoyed, I can't believe it. Yes, I know, but it is, I think it is fairly true that the American drama, in spite of an immense mass of play writing through the 19th century, didn't come into its own as an indigenous form. The first really large figure is O 'Neill. He's not about it, yes, and really it solves somebody else who has its greatness. Now,

the state of Sen, we agree, is very high, and I take back the patronizing apology. But it's interesting in France that not only is it high there, but the novelist of the writers themselves have adapted American novelists, for instance, Camel, putting dramatizing the Requiem for a Nun by Faulkner. They turn to America increasingly in this melange of Jean. Why do you think this is not merely a political matter, although that's probably tied up with it, that we have emerged, but why is it that the status is so great? Well, first of all, legal writers, at least most of them are. They have, they are accomplished craftsman of the theater, all of them. Maybe Lillian Helman, in a more conservative tradition than the others, she isn't in the ratio. She's low -poor, yes. And they are accomplished craftsman of the theater. They have been given the

opportunity to be that, because their plays have been performed, they have been successful, they have been able to find the time, the facilities, the directors, the actors, to work it out. The American theater is in technical terms and I include acting in that a very accomplished one. And also, one thing that maybe people don't quite realize is that in New York at any rate, there isn't much outside in New York. In New York at any rate, it is also very accomplished along experimental lines, more southern London, even more southern Paris. Oh, it means the off -roadway. The off -roadway is very important, and of course, none of these four rights off -roadway anymore, williams started out that way. Still, the off -roadway has helped immensely to crystallize, to experiment, to enable these, the whole dramatic picture to advance. In London, for example, there are only three, I would say, two or three houses that do the kind of thing that is done in about 20 in New York. Yes. In fact, the off -roadway season has

been almost as important or maybe more important than the on -roadway season this year, hasn't it? Yes. Well, this has been a bad season. So, and I'm afraid that a couple of other people have contributed to the badness of it. Both williams and inj have not done so well at the moment. It's also curious, isn't it? The shifting status of these major figures in the contemporary drama, if we think back to the past, the dramatists of the past are in a sense established or disestablished. There are fluctuations, but we don't terribly take that into account. I'm not only speaking of Shakespeare, but it doesn't others. Yes. Yet here, now Helmut has had this tremendous comeback this year with toys in the attic, which the reviewers treated with a kind of all more than anything else. They were all fired. It was so accomplished. I know. Either odd because it's a well -made play. There is craftsmanship here of the purely theatrical sort that sometimes one gets very contemptuous out, but it's also allied with a message, with themes and so on, which are important. So, they have to be odd

because they like it and they can see the craftsmanship counts. Yes. Well, Helmut writes well -made plays in the 19th century tradition of Scrib, and Sardou, and Ipsen, who writes well -made plays. And she is the one of those four that we're talking about that writes the four are the most important ones living today, who writes well -made plays. The plays that have a beginning, a middle and an end in the Aristotelian sense, that have good, rousing act endings and that lead to some particular Danoumars and particular unraveling of the whole plot in the end. The other's inch comes closest to that, I think, as a rule. He also uses, he comes close to it because he uses a realistic setting. His sets are in the old realistic tradition as a rule. He uses very simple things, though, and he doesn't necessarily use the kind of plot that Helmut uses, the one strand of events, everybody interacting on everybody else. He rather likes to put lines

of people next to each other and play them off against each other in a sort of juxtaposition of love affairs, juxtaposition of attitudes of people, especially in picnic and basketball. That was very penetrating that there is an old fashion, and you didn't say that's quite, old fashion atmosphere about injured. First, it seems a little bit like the Helmut world, but it isn't. After you get into it, he leads you away from that, into other things. First, it's picnic and bus stop. They start in the home, every day world, the bourgeois sort of setting, and then we begin to approach the terrors, or we approach the themes, which are so characteristic of our theatre. What are these themes? I think that's probably one of the chief signs of these four. Yes, the themes may have something to do with the fact that Inge told me once that he has not been very successful in England, but nor has Williams, he said,

but very successful in Scandinavia, Germany, and on the continent in general. That must have something to do with it. The themes of the artist deals with psychology, human psychology, but they deal with it in a almost more clinical sense. I don't like that word, but maybe it'll give an idea of what I mean. There are much more aware of it. There are much more conscious areas. You're really manipulating psychological materials, actual symbols. If you've read what's his name, F -R -E -U -D. Yes, I know. They have. That, of course, is one of the great problems to my mind of the contemporary drama, especially in a country that is so considerably psychoanalytically orientated as the United States, that it's very hard, after Freud, in the post -Froidian era of the 20th century, to write a play where one isn't somehow conscious of the psychological

theory that underlies it. It's not just William Shakespeare, of course, he knows intuitively the reactions of people, but nowadays, this intuitive knowledge is paired with a theoretical knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, and that makes things very hard. Well, now, what's that? Not the Glastonizer, the streetcar, loaded with it, loaded with the Freudian imagery, and yet you could see it without knowing anything of Freudian imagery, and like it, as you would like a Shakespeare play, just as doomed and damned as Hemp, as Othello was, but with all the, for instance, when she spent hours in the tub off stage, well, one that hadn't had to go very far into Freud to do work with that, and disappears in all of these, even Lillian Hellman, I mean, not even, this is, she's just a sophisticated, these other three, but she doesn't work them quite as strenuously, perhaps. Even Miller, in death of a salesman, which is possibly the most famous American play since the Second World War, does it?

He doesn't feel he can do without this peculiar Freudian involvement of Biff the Sun, with the fathers through another woman, and so on, though there is a lot in that play, it's really, I mean, it's the economic situation, Miller, is more interested than any of the others in economic and social situations as such, the economic involvement of man. Still, he has this, one might say, psychoanalytic involvement in that, too. Now, there's another point in here, and in not all of these, well, in all of these, I would say, Hellman, Miller, Williams, and Enge, or in other dramas, too. We have, for instance, the Adoptation of the Comrade Angel. We have one of the themes, which occurs, or one of the subjects, is this family situation, the family complex, the family rending itself, tearing itself apart by the antagonisms, the love and the antagonisms, the, what about the, don't you agree with that? Oh, completely, and

especially Williams and Enge, who, one might say, are acting out to a certain extent, their own pasts, maybe, or at any rate. Well, acting out. Oh, Leo, go back. Oh, Leo doesn't. Yes. There is a tradition for that, by now. There's a tradition for that, not only in the theatre, but in the novel, in the American novel. And it's a tradition that is peculiarly American in the drama, certainly. Because if you look at at the others, let's say the newest English tradition, the tradition of Osborne, John Osborne, look back in anger, and the ones that follow him, there is a whole slew of them now, who are writing in the post -Osborne time. They do not. They still are very much concerned with all matters of social position. They don't internalize, in the same way, as the American dramatists do. And the French certainly don't either. A newy is the only one who has really penetrated the American scene, very strongly, with a number of plays.

And well, he is, he does not take that particular approach. He has, he has the, especially in a thing like, what was it called, his last one, the fighting cock, all those plays about the generals. He has several about generals, and the general with the shrewish wife and so on. These are not the same kind of situation. You don't get the love hate in the same way that the kind of hold that, let's say a mother might have on a son, that you get from, look home with Angel from Kitty Frings adaptation of that play, or that you get in Angel's latest play, which did not succeed a loss of roses, or the one before that, that get the top of the stairs. You, you do not get that same kind of thing. You've had this hold that the tentacle of the family, which you're conscious of in the American drama, but not really, to that extent in, in the others. Now then, it takes such drama, this is Juro Dool and Anui, Anui, and they, they not only don't internalize so much, they don't even take

themes out of there, what we call their lives, their past, but they take say the Trojan War. They take, they take an old, an old play and redo it, antiquity by Anui, and so on. And they, in other words, they objectify. They, they're much more apart from their material aren't they? Well, they are working in their own tradition, too. The tradition of taking the Greek drama and reworking it in modern terms with its modern allusions and innuendos goes back to Kasin and Kornay in the 17th century. Like the flies by Sarp. The flies by Sarp, or the Antigone of Anui, or the Electra of Jiro Dool, or any of these, there are lots of them. But compare, they're redoing with Eugene O 'Neil, and morning becomes Electra. Why the world of difference? Well, the difference is that they, that they remain outside, that they intellectualize, the French drama, intellectualizes, the American drama, emotionalizes, but it's maybe that's going a little too far. That's very simple, but it's very good. I mean, it's one of the

nice statements that can start a discussion about our, our worth, having just, just started a discussion with. Yeah. Well, now if you got the, if you have these themes, say the family, the psychology, the ego, the super ego and the id, the mother, son, and so on, what about the techniques to accompany this new material? There have to be new techniques for the new bottles, new, new why, new bottles. Well, again, the American scene is a technological scene, to my mind, very largely, and that certainly shows in the drama. They have, these authors, except maybe Helen, who works in a much more conservative medium, had added immensely to the, to the technique of the drama in general, especially Williams and Miller, also Inge. Both, well, Williams has written a film, maybe it all,

and Mill Inge tells me he's writing a film right now. And so without thinking of stage without stage, without the stage, they are writing films just as much as stage plays. They consider it the film has arrived, in other words, in the same way as the stage play arrived, let's say 200 years ago. Now, they use filmic techniques, filmic setting, this broken upsetting of death of a salesman, for example, a multi -level stage where only areas light up, as they are needed, and they are more suggested than anything. The breakdown, in other words, of the standard realistic drawing room stage that you had throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Now, modern technology has brought us back to the much more fluid state to the Elizabethans, although we keep some of the additions of the technology. We still put more stuff into it, but we are fluid, the stage is fluid, and Williams, for example, likes to use pictures, and

film and television on stage, he has things light up symbolically. I remember, as another example, recently seeing the ballad of baby dough, the opera, by Moore, a new American opera, and one of the best written, and it uses between scenes, pictures of Ledville and Surroundings, Colorado, 1890s, where the 1890s, really, where the opera takes place, and it's enormously effective. There's use made of all kinds of media now that weren't used before. A sweet bird of youth by Williams, right here in Chicago at this very moment, in the... In the last act. In the last act, speaking offstage, the camera shows his speaking. And it wouldn't be effective without? No, it wouldn't. It couldn't be done without. So, this is a technology working in here. Also, technology of actual stage machinery, isn't it? Oh, yes. It doesn't make effect. Well, it only has to read the immense upheaval caused in Moscow, just

now, by my fair lady. I mean, my fair lady is a beautiful musical, and it's staged like many other musicals in this country. Very well, very accomplished with these suggested sets moving in and out, or the open stage, that's another thing that has happened, and it is peculiarly American. You don't close the curtain anymore on scene changes necessarily, and that's a very good thing. Now, my fair lady was transported to Moscow and caused major upheavals, because they didn't know what to do without the equipment, tons and tons of it arriving. They didn't know how to handle it. The stage was not equipped for it, and they learned a great deal from the technological accomplishments of American staging in that manner. Which you'll introduce is a slightly digressive subject, but speaking about not the drama, but the American theater, for the moment, isn't really an uncontestable contribution, and may have its two -piece sides, the musical comedy. We have achieved the form of musical comedy that's unique in the world. Oklahoma is our Pacific, my fair lady.

It is a unique form, and in fact, it is the one really indigenous form. The drama is, the American drama is indigenous in the sense of its themes, its uses of characters, in the writing in general, but it is still drama. It is still basically along the lines of sequence that the Western drama in general has gone through in the last 400 years. Well, in Oklahoma, actually putting in a threatening character. Who is medicine? Judges. Yes, putting him in there is amazing. Oh, it goes further than that. You almost don't have a Roger's and Hammers -Dine musical without one of the major characters dying, and that certainly wasn't there in the old operator. Nothing comedy about that? I have no answer. I wouldn't have touched that. Strauss wouldn't have touched that. I mean, a character dying, the seriousness of certain problems that enter into it. The things they treat, for example, are managed between people of different or entirely different origins, such as in South Pacific, the French planter, who is an older man, and

the young nurse from Little Rock, I think, and all these things that have spread the musical immensely further than it used to be. Well, now this wasn't so digressive. All this is happening also in our four great authors. That is happening to them, too. Yes, Miller isn't writing anything, but at the moment he hasn't written a play. In fact, it's amazing on the immense reputation the man has, based on what is essentially four plays, and that's all he's done. Inj, who started later, has written five, and four of them have been successors, and of course Williams is writing a great deal, one or two a year. His latest one, incidentally, I understand, the one he has just completed, which will be put in New York, in Puton in New York, in the fall, a period of adjustment, is a comedy, and it's supposed to be very charming, and that may be a relief after... People will know what they're seeing, they're going to be expecting to see three, well I won't name the things they expect to see, because this is their family program, but still.

But there again, the opening up of the theatre in terms of the subject matter, not merely themes, but subject matter, the horrors that we introduce in... They are quite different from the horrors the Gonginiol introduced in France in the 19th century. They are the horrors, actually they are the internal horrors, rather than the external horrors. Your Greek theories have finally been released and put on this stage, and... Yes, and they have put on, I think, as you once said to me quite rightly, they have become... Hell is internal. Hell is internal in the American drama. Every man is his own worst enemy, and that is being brought out. Now, well, that is a good state of affairs or a lasting state of affairs, of course. No one knows. No one knows. You can't say that now. At any rate, it seems fairly clear that the American dramatists are looking into themselves, and much more than any other dramatists are likely to. That obscures, by the way, I think. It obscures

some of the larger issues, which they are also trying to deal with. But the larger issues, let us say that Osborne is confronted with social status in England, the change of middle -class society, the coming up of a new class of people on the fight about it, or the whole Giro du... Giro du's problems of the beautiful and the ugly and what is possible for a man to do. These things are obscure to a certain extent by this considerable pre -occupation with the self that emerges in American drama and may not be the best thing in the long run. It's also tied up with a very healthy social. That is your deal with race riots with everyday things. There's a superficial realism, which is very strong and a lot of this drama. The superficial realism, for instance, of... Well, maybe I'm not... I don't know. I don't know whether we are dealing with so much

there, except for an occasional thing like a raisin in the Sun, Hansbury's play. That dealt with a large issue, of course, but then it dealt also with a group of people who, by the nature of their position, were very much interested in large issues, rather than personal issues. What about the handling of going to another point? What about the handling of symbolism in these... symbolism is certainly not an American institution, although everybody's gone symbolic in a big way in the arts. It goes back to France and so on. But what about our handling of symbolism? Say, Williams are in. Well, Williams, an interesting mind -minder over doing it, I think, is too anxious to put his points across. And I think Williams is always used to sledgehammer rather than anything else to put his symbols down. You know, neon lights and all kinds of things. Glass figures. Glass figures, yes. All kinds of things he uses in a symbolic manner. Again, the

technicality of the symbolism has been increased, especially in Williams. Because these are even people who have been analyzed as... Oh, yes. A psychoanalysis plays a considerable part in some of their lives, that there's no secret, and some of them don't make a secret of it, but it has. It is playing a considerable part in it. And I'm sure I know that one of these four knows that he is acting out some of that in his plays. Psychodrama. You know, this has become a very important thing in psychiatric treatment. Psychodrama is being facetious, but there is a relationship. Yes, there is. Though I think it is very important to realize that these men transcend that. Oh, they have a complex nature of the drama. And that what they are doing with these materials is still artistically very valid. Well, I wouldn't hold up on Broadway if they didn't do the other. No. We can't. Psychodrama has only a very prejudiced audience watching it. But I'm sure that these plays do have certain

therapeutic effects. And also, of course, on an audience that is increasingly interested in those problems, too. Yes. The audience, after all, we mustn't forget. The audience is just as occupied with the psychiatric as the actors. They're not writing about some strange creatures from space ships. They're writing about you and not you, but me and other people. Don't exclude me. They do. And that, of course, brings it back to the fact that they are writing American drama. They are writing in the areas of thought, in the areas of preoccupation of their audience. After all, drama has to be written for an audience. It is not anything that can build over the decades and centuries like poem. It has to be written for the here and now. And the here and now is what they are writing about. It's very important to them as well as to the audience. They are therefore really quite in touch with the audience and with the wishes of the American audience. That's one reason why they're so successful at this. Yes. Very American, intensely American.

And which shows us that America is a very complex and not a simple minded thing concept to make us aware of that. Well, we've had a discussion of four great American dramas with Henry Nepper from Illinois Tech. And thank you very much, Henry, for coming and talking about this subject.