Television Theater

Television this year will put on more plays, hire more actors and spend more money on drama than all the producers and backers of Broadway.

TV's ten top dramatic shows are now investing a total of $300,000 a week. Celanese Theater flew Actress Pamela Brown from London to New York for a single performance in Susan and God. Robert Montgomery Presents plunked down $10,000 for one use of the TV stage set of Victoria Regina; the Playhouse of Stars cheerfully handed Helen Hayes $5,000 for 60 minutes' work in a trifling comedy called Not a Chance.

What are the advertisers (and their customers) getting in return? TV drama is so big and ravenous that it is already running out of material. Newcomers find that almost everything available has already been done by such veterans as Kraft TV Theater, which last week put on its 234th play. Many plays belong to Hollywood; others require involved copyright negotiations with estates, literary agents and assorted claimants. Some shows can be presented on live TV, but not on film or kinescope. Some were written by authors like Bernard Shaw who, to TVmen's dismay, frown on any cutting, editing or tampering with their lines.

As one happy result of the script shortage, desperate TVmen have dipped gingerly into the classics and come up with productions-of Ibsen, and Rostand, Pirandello, Chekhov and Shakespeare. Studio One pioneered with adaptations of Turgenev's Smoke, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Sholom Ansky's The Dybbuk, and has also done a modern-dress Julius Caesar and a Grand Guignol version of Macbeth. Other shows dramatize news stories, historical anecdotes, biographies.

But for all their pains, television producers are still far from mastering their medium. TV drama varies enormously in quality from week to week. And for mysterious reasons of network policy, the major drama shows are bunched together. There are three on Monday nights, four on Tuesdays and none on Thursdays and Saturdays. Some of the best appear on different networks at the same time.

But the future of TV drama seems limitless. This week, in his fourth annual TV survey, California's Gordon Levoy announced that sponsors, TVmen and advertising agencies, given a choice of 14 different types of programs, voted overwhelmingly in favor of live dramatic shows.

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