The New Philistines

The violent theater of Tennessee Williams and his imitators is not, as it is often hailed, daring and nonconformist. It is, on the contrary, the expression of a new philistinism. So says Alfred Kazin, latest of many critics to speak out against what is dehumanized and degenerate in the Broadway theater.

All-round man of letters and longtime teacher (Harvard, Smith, Amherst, New York University, etc.), Critic Kazin admits to a "highbrow's disdain for Broadway" but also to a plain ticket buyer's irritation with the whole atmosphere of the present theater. "What I object to in the image of man on Broadway," says Kazin* "is that it is concerned largely with 'psychological man,' the man who looks at nothing but himself, his own emotional wants, his own sexual satisfactions, none of which is now news to any of us, and may for once, please God, be considered boring to other people. I am tired of love and love and love. And when I see a play like Suddenly, Last Summer or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I recognize that its chief appeal to those of us in the audience who are not homosexuals is that it offers a touch of 'rebellion' or 'depravity' . . . The philistines at the play used to be moral; now they demand sensationalism at any price."

Another side of this sensationalism is "Westport comedy," as exemplified in The Marriage-Go-Round, The Tunnel of Love,

The Seven Year Itch, etc., all "b~sed on adultery by intellectuals. Unlike French farce, it is essentially smug. You have to be able to live in Westport. You know all about Freud. You have to be able to af ford the slightly Bohemian reconverted barn in which the artist for The New Yorker, that safe citizen of our times, works."

Critic Kazin blames both Tennessee sensation-mongering and Westport comedy on a secret hunger for wickedness and bohemianism found in a rich, middle-class society. But he also blames Broadway's frightened, money-grubbing drive to achieve hits at any cost. "Suddenly, the theater, born, they say, of ritual, becomes a hideous bore. All that enormous effort, all those lights, all that beauty, all the pulls to make us believe in the artifice --all suddenly frantic and mean. I went to the theater to discover another world, the true world of imagination, but I saw only my own bad world, coarsely admired . . . How rarely on the stage do you see people who think thoughts, who make political decisions, who are not asking merely to be loved. If the theater is a mirror of our society, then the only revolutionary act left in American life is to be a thinker.

"To be a 'rebel' is very easy. To grow a beard, to be sexually brave, to take dope even to kill--all these are understood experiences of 'nonconformism.' The one thing you cannot do is think, i.e., to build on your private definition of the world, and so to enjoy what Thomas Mann called the 'wealth of the mind'--that which makes a writer feel that he has a world in his hand ... I insist that in present terms, the theater of perversion, of 'sexual frankness,' of open violence, moves us farther away from the authentic things we want and have got to say. Imagination may on occasion be forced; it can never be simulated. And the fuel of imagination, right now, can only be an enlarged voice of our human possibilities, and a smaller one for our tiresome little sins."

*In a lecture originally delivered at the Yale Divinity School and broadcast last week over Hartford's WTIC.

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