The American Theatre Reader

Essays and Conversations from American Theatre magazine

Staff of American Theatre Magazine

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781559366182
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

In celebration of American Theatre ’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the editors of the nation’s leading theater magazine have chosen their best essays and interviews to provide an intimate look at the people, plays, and events that have shaped the American theater over the past quarter-century. Over two hundred artists, critics, and theater professionals are gathered in this one-of-a-kind collection, from the visionaries who conceived of a diverse and thriving national theater community, to the practitioners who have made that dream a reality. The American Theatre Reader captures their wide-ranging stories in a single compelling volume, essential reading for theater professionals and theatergoers alike.

Partial contents include:

Interviews with Edward Albee, Anne Bogart, Peter Brook, Lorraine Hansbury, Lillian Hellman, Jonathan Larson, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Joseph Papp, Will Power, Bartlett Scher, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard, Luis Valdez, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, and others.

Essays by Eric Bentley, Eric Bogosian, Robert Brustein, Christopher Durang, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler, Eva La Gallienne, Vaclav Havel, Danny Hoch, Tina Howe, David Henry Hwang, Naomi Iizuki, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Kristin Linklater, Todd London, Robert MacNeil, Des McAnuff, Conor McPherson, Marsha Norman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Hal Prince, Phylicia Rashad, Frank Rich, José Rivera, Alan Schneider, Marian Seldes, Wallace Shawn, Anna Deavere Smith, Molly Smith, Diana Son, Wole Soyinka, and many others.

THE ESSAYS

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PURGING THE CITADEL

By W. McNeil Lowry

October 1984

Those who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s have seen both the most rapid and the widest expansion of theatre institutions in our history. What is more interesting is that the youngest in this field are—or at least seem to be—unaware of that phenomenon. They take the burgeoning of audiences, the proliferation of companies and groups, for granted. They are of course right to start from where they are, from their own generational vantage point.

But there are reasons for keeping the evolution clear in our minds, and the reasons are perhaps critical. Unless we understand the sweep of the past 25 years, we shall not easily identify the roots of some of the most acute issues threatening performing arts groups. For many of them are the direct results of the rapid growth of institutions, in some part perhaps the penalty of success.

If we think of institutions in their maturity, what are the differences over the past generation?

Twenty-five years ago artistic directors and actors were more or less on the same side, if I may put it that way. If there were ever a referee involved, it was Equity, and only sporadically. If there was a manager who was more than part time, he or she was the right hand of the artistic director rather than of the board. It was the creative head—the artistic director—who both expressed and symbolized the short- and long-range goals of the group.

The sources of financial support beyond the box office were fewer in number, chiefly private individual patrons and the private foundations just beginning to act more nationally in the arts. This was both bad and good; good only because it was easier for patrons and foundations to respond directly to the artistic personality. Already, perhaps, a few private patrons reacted because they wanted “good theatre” in their city, but most hopefully wanted a particular company to be good and match its professed aims with developing standards.

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The proliferation of the ’60s and ’70s, we are all aware, had manifold effects on theatre. What I should like to observe is that the most telling of these were experienced through seismic shifts or even tremors in the structure of companies. Though institutional crises often seemed to be crises in funding, or at least to begin that way, they were actually crises in governance and motivation. (Parenthetically, if our subject were dance, symphony, the art museum, we would find this equally true.)

I suppose it is in most general terms positive that membership on the board of a theatre group has come to confer prestige, either in one community or more nationally. This obviously is another sign of a changed national climate for the arts. But what climate it is changing to we may not yet have fully encountered. Already, however, we have often seen dilution of leadership within the enterprise, sometimes to the clear deterioration of standards.

The use of performing arts trusteeships for personal status might be affordable in and of itself. It is when interlocked with other more tangible changes—economic, social, political—that governance and motivation become the central problems, the authority of the artistic director abridged, and new tensions felt between the artists and the company. One of these changes of course was the advent of governmental support. The National Endowment for the Arts may never have approached the categorical and long-range commitments made by the Ford Foundation to many key groups, but in its dispersal of financial resources, the Endowment was unparalleled.

The reading given to this by boards of directors changed many signals and many motivations, particularly after the possibility of challenge grants appeared. And the first shoots of corporate support visible in the ’70s contributed to additional strains on relations within a performing arts company and on its governance. Public funds in the arts made the arts look more like other agencies in the community perhaps. And if corporations were ever to share significantly in contributed income to theatre (even to date they have been fairly slow to do so), then the manager might be more than equal to the artistic director, and the businessman on the board superior to both.

At the very least, in contrast to the scene in the ’60s, the manager has become the right hand not of the artistic director but of the board. In a few instances, as in some museums and many orchestras, a paid lay president is brought into the structure with a strong delegation from the board over both management and art. Artistic directors are in that event consultants to the president, in the illusion that in times when fundraising is a full-time pursuit and chancy, the business of theatre is business.

I do not want to suggest that we can never tamper with relationships between the board and the artistic leadership. But never can this be done without anticipating carefully the consequences, the many cans of worms that can be opened, the clash of self-serving positions. All these take both an artistic and emotional toll. Slowly you may discover that the institution exists only for itself, that even artistic directors and actors begin to lose contact with it, can no longer feel where it is or whether it has a focus.

Somewhere in the analysis of this shifting scene, there arises the obvious question of whether the business or corporate leaders in the community are really the best acquisitions for the board. In the ’40s and ’50s, few of these had been strongly recruited, unless as thousand-dollar annual givers to a symphony or opera company. Trustees were chiefly private patrons or professional men in the community, people with some education or exposure in the arts, who understood, as President Kennedy said he did, that “far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, art is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.”

I assure you I am not anti-business in my commitment to strengthening artistic and academic resources. Indeed, I have to confess, because there are many who could testify to it, that I often worked personally, one-on-one, to help convince individual businessmen to commit themselves to the goals of a significant performing company. My only defense is that at the time the individual businessman professed to be responding to one artistic personality and a collective of performers sharing a personal vision.

The onslaught of the Reagan Administration on the motivation for government participation in the pluralistic support mechanism for the arts has been more injurious than that Administration’s largely unsuccessful efforts to halve the level of government arts budgets. When Rep. Sidney Yates and his allies in Congress frustrated the budgetary slashes, the Administration created a special commission to push voluntarism, chiefly by corporate officers or their staffs, as a substitute for official support. Thus the illusion that business is the business of theatre is superseded by the delusion that voluntarism is for free when in truth everybody’s business becomes nobody’s. In this country, founded and nurtured on the dualism of public and private, official and voluntary, “not-for-profit” has perversely been twisted into a pejorative. In the ’70s, looking at the conflicts over governance, we felt a growing fear that the tail might begin to wag the dog. But as a museum director said recently, already too often the tail is the dog.

It is all too reminiscent of a far earlier time when actors and directors were thought of as feckless artistic types indulging themselves so long as someone else paid the freight, when one of the most influential trustees of a large and commanding institution asked Alan Schneider one night: “What do you people do in real life?”

There are always new problems. Frequently they arise on top of or out of our greatest achievements. There may well be a time for shaking down in the next 10 years. But I shall risk the prediction that the struggle for survival will not be largely financial. Survival will go to those willing to bring the most focus to bear. If there is a Gresham’s law in money, that bad money drives out good, there is not one in art or in ideas. Bad theatre does not drive out good; it ends only by exposing itself.

My proposal is that however bitter and disruptive the toll, creative leaders in theatre reassert control of their own institutions, purging the citadel of its enemies, whether they be inside or outside the gates; yes, even of those who come making promises and bearing gifts.

W. McNeil Lowry, who died in 1993, worked at the Ford Foundation from 1953–74, serving from 1964 till his retirement as its vice president for the humanities and the arts. Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet, called him “the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced.” For this article, adapted from remarks delivered at a Dance/USA national conference in San Francisco, the author substituted “theatre” for “dance” in an argument which Lowry believed applied equally to both fields.

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HOW FREE IS TOO FREE?

By Eric Bentley

November 1985

A great deal has been published lately about translation in the theatre. So, in all this literature, I ought not to have been surprised to come upon a not wholly favorable reference to my own work—“the often inspired (if at times too free) Brecht texts of Eric Bentley.”

Too free for whom? Just this critic? Everyone? Too free just here and there? Everywhere? Let me open up some broader questions. The first is that of inevitable imperfection. Your perfect translation could only be made by God—because only He would know both languages perfectly and have a perfect gift of expression in the language translated into, so that everything in the translation would work on readers or spectators exactly as the original worked on them. Such is the ideal goal—though to reach it, God might have to perform other miracles, since, in transferring a work from one country to another, and/or from one era to another, there are problems other than the purely linguistic . . . .

The merely human translator is seldom even fully bilingual. If, for example, he has been brought up in the one country and has then moved to another, the way he knows the second language will be very different from the way he knows the first. The second language will carry no childhood associations, nor will it carry the signs of having been learned in the natural, organic way in which infants learn languages. As for the first language, he will probably speak it as it was spoken by the previous generation. He will lose contact with its development and thus with its living reality at the later moment.

Of course, there are millions of people in the world who habitually use two languages. It is another question whether they use either of them well—and, even if they do, they may still not make good translators. Familiar as they are with the language translated into, they may not write it well, either in a general sense or—which is our interest here—in a theatrical sense. For the stage, one must translate into language that passes (what used to be) the footlights. One must be able to create what Jean Cocteau called poetry of, as against poetry merely in, the theatre. One must have a histrionic sensibility.

The language translated into. I stress that language, because of the two languages in question, that is, for the translator, the more important one. He is writer first, scholar-linguist second. This is clearest in the theatre. If the play is not in the language it’s supposed to be in, there’s no play. That the translator may have perpetrated some howlers is a secondary matter. All the best people perpetrate howlers. Those who believe the English Bible was written by God must believe that even God perpetrates howlers, because there are quite a few in the only really great translation, the King James version. I am told that the same is true of Florio’s Montaigne. Are the best translations perhaps the ones with the most mistakes? No reason why not. The primary criterion is what a text amounts to in the language it is (now) in. Florio and King James’ clergymen made great books—as well as lots of mistakes. We have translators today who make few mistakes, perhaps none, and who make bad books, bad plays.

It’s always a matter of what a given context needs. At a certain point, a scene in a play may be in desperate need of a joke. The audience has to be made to laugh at all costs. Good. The playwright has brought it off. What shall the poor translator do when he finds his accurate rendering isn’t funny? Give a little lecture on the obligation of accuracy? Shall all those years of study go in vain? They’d better. At this moment, he has to be Woody Allen, not Ralph Manheim.

But humor is only the extreme case. What applies to the funny applies also to the beautiful—or, for that matter, the ugly. No use to come up with what the dictionary, backed by the Académie Française, says is exact. What you have to come up with is the quality that has the desired effect. Make the audience laugh. Make them cry. Make them see a point clearly. Make them see stars. Make them feel good. Make them feel sick. But make them.

In his Molière translations, the poet Richard Wilbur has come close to producing (so far as I can judge) the same effect that the French produces on a Frenchman. But even he can’t get all the way there. Language itself imposes barriers no human can overleap. Take rhyme. Poets in both French and English have used rhymes. The problem lies in the fact that English poets have used rhymes differently. It was, I think, impossible for Wilbur to write all those rhymes without making most of them sound clever. “Why, he’s even funnier than Molière,” I have heard offered him as a compliment, whereas the fact is that rhyming couplets, in English, not in French, have wit built into them. Yes, I know a vast attempt was made at one time to write Heroic Tragedies in English rhyming couplets. It failed. Failing to be funny, those couplets just sound silly, and thus it comes about that while Wilbur can be surprisingly close to Molière, he is often unsurprisingly closer to W.S. Gilbert.

A perfect translation of a work of art cannot be made by human hands because one language does not offer exact aesthetic equivalents of another. You can translate science, but you can’t translate poetry. Poetry is (Frost said it) what gets lost in the translation, and under the heading “poetry” I’m placing the whole aesthetic dimension: everything that makes for “effect,” an effect of beauty, ugliness, delicacy, indelicacy, funniness, lugubriousness . . . and on and on. Rhythm alone erects terrible barriers. Rhythmically, Shakespeare in English can sound rather like Shakespeare in German—but in French? I enjoyed Jean-Louis Barrault’s Hamlet very much. It was probably the first time I could follow what was going on. That was because it was not Shakespeare but Gide.

Still, we try, we translators, and we are proud if we think we do even half as well as, say, King James’s clergymen, for surely the Bible has been enjoyed as literature by persons with no Hebrew and Greek and we can’t give all the credit to the translators. Stubbornly we insist on assuming that some of the beauty of those Psalms has come through from the original, and that Robert Frost must have been partly wrong.

Which is not to deny that there may also be works in which a major part of the poetic labor has been done by the translator. Scholars who know Persian tell us that there’s more Fitzgerald than Omar in that famous Rubaiyat. In which case, we should count it a great English poem, not a great translation.

Is that what Robert Lowell meant by “imitation”—Fitzgerald’s being a Victorian “imitation” of an original one could not get really close to?

Finally, then, I come to the liberties I’ve (sometimes) taken with Brecht. Did I have an acceptable alternative? Other translations I’ve read do not always convince me that I had. In the theatre, we meet with at least four different phenomena all called (by someone or other) translations:

1. The rendering that is so meanly literal that Arthur Miller has used the expression “Pidgin English” to describe its vocabulary and style. (Translations made in language classes to show the teacher one has used the dictionary properly...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Foreword
• THE ESSAYS
• THE CONVERSATIONS
• INDEX
• Notes on the cover images from American Theatre
• Copyright Page