Critical Comment for Feb 06
Mention American theatre and everyone thinks of Broadway: the razzle-dazzle of the Great White Way. British critics, in particular, seem to think that a few blocks in mid-town Manhattan contain the nation’s creative heart. But I’ve got news for them, and everyone else: there is a world elsewhere. The more I’ve visited America, the more I’ve become convinced there is a vibrant, continent-wide, non-profit theatre that expresses the national mood.
The dream of a network of regional theatres is an old one. I’ve just been dipping into Volume Two of the Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, to be published shortly by Oberon Books. In 1945 you find Williams writing to a New York critic of his vision of a chain of subsidised theatres that would offer artists “attention in place of neglect, fellowship in place of embittering loneliness and isolation”. Williams goes on to say that “if there were such theatres as commonly as there are state universities and civic orchestras, think what a happy difference it would make for all of us and what we might be inspired to do and be!”
To some extent, Williams’ hopes have been realised. Even if federal subsidy is still pathetically small, most major cities now contain their own non-profit playhouse. Three years ago, I visited the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for the premiere of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues.
Although it was patronisingly treated by the New York critics, I thought it a robustly funny satire on America’s tendency to treat everything - even a possible Second Coming of Christ - as a marketing opportunity. I’m delighted that it’s now been picked up by the Old Vic; and even more thrilled to discover that the Guthrie, under Joe Dowling, will this June move into a new three-theatre complex of National Theatre proportions.
Two summers ago I also spent a week in Chicago where I discovered a fantastically lively theatre community. I saw Kevin Anderson and John Mahoney in a ravishing Steppenwolf show. I found King John packing out Barbara Gaines’ pier-based Chicago Shakespeare Theater (later this summer the company bring Henry IV Parts One and Two to Stratford-upon-Avon for the RSC’s Complete Works Festival). And I saw new plays at the Goodman and Victory Gardens as well as topical cabaret at Second City. Freed from the insane commercial pressures of Broadway, Chicagoans seemed to view theatre as a source of pleasure and enlightenment rather than potential profit.
My good impressions of American regional theatre were confirmed by a recent visit to Philadelphia. In the old days, Philly was simply a Broadway try-out town where artists would sweat through the night in hotel rooms re-writing the second act. Now, with endless New York previews replacing the old pre-Broadway tour, Philadelphia has come into its own. It not only boasts the nation’s oldest playhouse, the Walnut Street Theatre, it also contains a host of smaller companies offering everything from a puppet version of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van to something intriguingly called Menopause -The Musical.
I had a particularly good evening at the Arden Theatre, a newish 350-seat playhouse just a few blocks away from Independence Hall. The show I saw, Opus, was the premiere of Philly-based playwright Michael Hollinger’s new play about the tensions inside a world-famous string quartet. The violist had just acrimoniously departed, the first violin was a testy dominator, and the cellist had lately discovered he had terminal cancer. Even if the crises came together a little too neatly on the night of the quartet’s White House appearance, this was a fascinating play about the joy of music-making and the hidden dramas of group activity.
I met Hollinger before the show and learned that he was an Oberlin-trained violist who knew a lot about string quartets. I also discovered that he had been inspired by a famous case in which the first violinist of the Audubon String Quartet had been sacked and then taken his fellow musicians to court. But what really impressed me was Hollinger’s air of relaxation, even two nights before the scheduled opening. In New York, I suspected, everyone would have been fretting about the Times’ review. This was theatre being created in a civilised atmosphere in a playhouse with a strong subscription base. I also felt that Hollinger’s play would go down well in a similar London venue such as Hampstead Theatre or the Soho.
The next night, with snow swirling about, I trekked out to a site-specific piece called Gentlemen Volunteers staged by Pig Iron in the Armory at Drexel University. The audience promenaded around following the adventures of two young Yale men as they volunteered for the First World War and fell in love with French and British nurses. As so often in this kind of work, I felt the technique was superior to the content. But the acting was tremendous and I carried away wistful echoes of the song, “Everybody’s Doin’
It”, which hauntingly accompanied these doomed amorous encounters.
Philadelphia confirmed what I had already learned in Chicago and Minneapolis as well as in Louisville, Kentucky and Ashland, Oregon: that, beyond the maladies of Broadway, there is a rich, abundant life in American non-profit theatre. It just seems a pity that neither George W Bush’s discredited administration nor myopic British critics recognise the fact.