Bleak House

What the U.S. needs is more and better repertory theaters. The Lincoln Center Repertory Company opened in 1964 with great expectations but it has been a bleak house.

Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead, its first directors, lasted one season. Then in 1965, the center brought in Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, two professors who had founded San Francisco's highly touted Actor's Workshop.

Their first production, Danton's Death, was nearly their own, critically speaking. Afterward, when Blau was asked if the reviewers were out to get the new team, he replied: "Nonsense. The knives are always out for you. The only way to deal with it is to be powerful in your art." Last week, five productions and long knives later, Blau admitted that his art had had a total power failure.

Blau and Irving had tried too hard with too little. Their company (including their own wives) was unseasoned, their stage--an apron affair--was too difficult, and their repertory (Brecht, Sartre, Lorca) too demanding. By last week, with all of their efforts widely panned, Blau resigned, wrote the center's trustees: "The climate is no longer right for me to do what I came to do. Perhaps my going will clear the atmosphere so the theater may move freshly in whatever course of action it must take now." Irving will stay on as sole director at least until the end of the season, but probably no longer than the expiration of his contract in 1968.

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