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Quest for New Creativity

The Disappearance of The R

The Avant Garde Answers
With Several Expressions
Of a Pessimistic World
By PATRICK CHESTER

The Radio City Music Hall
Is the Last Stronghold;
They Flourish in Europe,
On TV and in Nightclubs
By LAWRENCE KASS

ROADWAY is in a rut. Play
after play opens and folds be-
cause it cannot arouse the critics'
Imaginations. The only new cre-
ative elements are found in the de-
signers' spectacular and ingenious
settings.
- There is a prevalent feeling that
many plays are "hits" only be-
cause something has to be a "hit"
or because their stars command
such vast followings as to keep
the play running until it'breaks
even, if it does that at all.
Critics and astute theater-goers
are searching about for some signs
that new creativity may be begin-
ning to flow through the theater's
old body.
In the contemporary drama
scene, there are two new move-
ments of note which might revital-.
ize the theater-Britain's Angry
Young Men, with their most fa-
mous exponent John Osborne, and
a group often referred to as the
Avant Garde or the Sick Theatre.
It would not be correct to as-
sume that the playwrights in this
latter group-Beckett, Duerren-
matt, Ionesco, and Williams-are
a conscious brotherhood; but rath-
er they are put together, because
of their many similarities.
THE MOST sweeping generali-
zation about this avant group
is that they create a terrifying,
pessimistic world that can be ei-
ther very realistic or greatly re-
moved from conscious reality.
While not wishing to disparage
any of the individual creations of
the Angry Young Men, their dra-
ma of social protest .seems to be
firmly rooted in the Chekov-Ib-
sen tradition. They use already ex-
plored territory instead of striking
out in new directions like the
avant. These British playwrights
are experiencing something simi-
lar to what was experienced in
America during the thirties.
Unlike Britain, there seems to
be a trend away from this social
protest in America because of its
datedness. There is not the same
social tenor of agitation today as
there was during the Depression.
There may be protest in the
plays of the avant, but this isn't
their main intent. Rather, they
are interested in dealing with as-
pects of human existence broader
than just propagandizing for so-
cial justice through labor unions.
W ILIAMS, Duerrenmatt and
the rest, in their quest for new
theatrical expression of content,
provide horrors and passions of
monumental proportion. Because
there is such an intensification of
emotion, a distance is created be-
tween the spectator and the-actor

which allows the spectator to wit-
ness horrible events in a state of
relative comfort.
Experiencing morbid, depraved
drama is agreeable because the
playgoer vicariously experiences
what is forbidden to him by com-
mon sense and social norms.
In his "Sweet Bird of Youth,"
Tennessee Williams treats the au-
dience to hysterectomy, castra-
tion, and degeneracy. The audience
achieves a purging of the emotions
and; as the final curtain falls, is
drained and limp but happy.
"Sweet Bird" is undeniably a
shocker, but it is .not a "dirty"
play because Williams etches his
characters with compassion and
writes within the bounds of good
taste.
Each unpleasant element is in
the play because it is essential to
his purposes. Williams is not try-
ing to see what he can get away
with.
IN THIS DRAMA, Williams runs
true to form by creating fe-
male characterizations of the high-
est order. The aging actress, Al-
exandra Del Lago, Heavenly Fin-
ley, the daughter of a cheap South-
ern politician, and Miss Lucy, Boss
Finley's mistress, are all the types
of roles for which actresses pray.
Boss Finley, a slimmed down
Big Daddy, with his battle cry of
"Keep the white race pure in the
South," is cut up by Williams with
the slashes of a master satirist.
Although this play is three hours
long, once Alexandra comes out
of her alcoholic stupor in the first
scene, "Sweet Bird" has the pro-
pulsion of a super-sonic jet. It
never wallows in its tragedy as
does O'Neil's equally sordid "Long
Day's Journey Into Night."
The biggest valid criticism
against "Sweet Bird" and most of
Williams' work is that he creates
only a morbid, perverse world very
much like that of Shakespeare's
"Troilus and Cressida." No joy or
sunshine have penetrated Wil-
liams' gloom. He has not achieved
Shakespeare's versatility as found
in that joyous affirmation of liv-
ing, "The Tempest."
FREDRICH Duerrenmatt burst
upon the American dramatic
scene with the Lunts production
of "The Visit."
The Swiss writer's plot con-
cerns an elderly woman, Claire,
who revisits her native town to
bring vengence upon her former
lover. Many years before she had
become pregnant by her lover who
then bribed-two other young men
to swear in court that they also
had relations with Claire.
She was forced to leave the

town, found refuge in a brothel, I
and later married an extremely
wealthy man. Upon his death she
became one of- the richest women,
in the world.
She returns to the depressed,'
dying town and buys the death of
her former lover, now a shabby
shopkeeper, for one billion marks
and departs with his corpse in an
elaborate coffin.
In remarks printed at the end
of the German text, Duerrenmatt;
says that his play should be ac-
cepted at face value and the
vengeful Claire is not the alle-
gorical representation of the Apoc-
alypse, America, the Marshall Plan
or anything else.
DUERRENMATT implies that
sine there is no particular
application, a general one may be,
implied.
A general application is easy to
find. In having the townspeople
succumb to the temptation of
money and abandon the shopkeep-
er (one of the town's best liked
citizens), Duerrenmatt is saying
that men really are base and solely
motivated by personal gain.
This cynical defeatist attitude
runs smack against the typical
sense of cheery optimism and be-
lief that man can achieve a happy.
beautiful life.
We can only guess whether "The
Visit" would have succeeded at the
box office if stars of lesser magni-
tude than the Lunts were in it.
Many people did not like the
play -- "It was so unpleasant." -
but they did see it and Duerren-
matt did communicate with them,
most likely causing them to think
(something most people hate to
do).
THESE FIRST two playwrights
of the avant garde group are
fairly conventional in their use of
theatrical space and time. Their
plays have beginnings, middles,
and endings and tell distinct
stories.
Samuel Beckett and Eugene
Ionesco, on the other hand, choose
to toss the rule books to the wind
and make up new guides as they
go along.
Beckett's "Waiting For Godot"
was presented in an excellent pro-
duction by the Drama Season last
year.
This play is about two tramps
who are waiting for someone or
thing known as "Godot." During
their wait they meet a cruel mas-
ter and his slave; in the second
act the slave and master return,
the former being dumb and the
latter blind. At the close of each
act a boy arrives and tells the

The Chairs-lonesco

THE BROADWAY musical revue
has vanished from the Ameri-
can entertainment horizon. Aside
from occasional collections of sat-
irical sketches entitled "revues,"
the musical revue as such as gone.
Let's decide what we mean by
revue in the first place. A revue
is not a musical comedy-it is not
drama. A musical comedy is a
story with appropriate musical in-
terludes. Its characteristic feature
is its unity; a recognizable plot is
developed, and the musical num-
bers are used to best advantage
when emphasizing some particular
and important part of the plot.
The revue's characteristic is its
lack of unity; it is essentially a
collection of various musical num-
bers, comedy or novelty sketches,
and spectacular choreography. It
is a succession of elaborate tab-
leaux, each complete in itself.
Spectacle is the hallmark of the
revue.
The musical comedy gives us a
highly unified musical experience;
not as powerfully cohesive as
opera, perhaps, but by its nature
musical comedy presents us with
a story.
A REVUE is different. By defini-
tion and disconnected. Yet this
lack of unity satisfies our love of
variety. In a musical revue, such
as the Ziegfeld Follies, there is a
succession of disconnected spec-
tacular scenes--whatever unity in
the production is created by the
fact that we see it all at one
sitting with possibly the same per-
former twice, and with the same
orchestra providing the music.
Even the music of a revue is not
unified primarily because several
composers have contributed to it.
In an edition of the Ziegfeld
Follies, for example, the songs may
have been written by Irving Ber-
lin, Walter Donaldson, Harry Von
Tilzer and many others--the mus-
ical revue is a joint effort of many
musical minds, rather than of one
composer.

Our interest in the revue lies in
the continual expectation of what
the next sketch will be like-and
hence, how it will satisfy our crav-
ing for variety.
REVUES OF the Ziegfeld, George
White and Earl Carroll era are
no longer offered in this country
today. Nor are they presented in
the motion picture. One of the last
musical revues was Broadway Mel-
'ody in 1940. But this is the case
only in America.
In Europe last summer, several
musical revues were given, indi-
cating that the musical comedy is
not the chief form of popular
musical drama.
In London, Jack Hylton pre-
sented the revue, Clown Jewels.
This revue is the twenty-fifth an-
nual production starring the same
group of performers. There are so
many requests for tickets that the
performers perform in .two shows
every day except Sunday.
The most amazing part of the
show is the "Crazy Gang," the
stars of the show - all seventy
years of age! Their comic antics,
and the spectacular choreography
and choral work in the revue has
made the Hylton show the most
popular musical production in
London.
CLOWN JEWELS is a succession
of disconnected scenes, some
of which feature the Tiller Girls,
the London counterparts of the
Rockettes. The songs are written
by at least six composers.
Musical comedy in London is
not the characteristic form of pop-
ular musical entertainment. West
Side Story and My Fair Lady, both
of which are currently playing in
London, are indeed box office suc-
cesses. But the typical English
playbill for a week will rarely fea-
ture more than one or perhaps two
musical comedy dramas out of ap-
proximately ten revues.
The same holds true in France.

tramps that Godot is not coming
today but will come tomorrow.
As the curtain falls, both tramps
tell each other that they must
part, but instead they stand per-
fectly motionless, rooted to the
waiting place like statues.
EVEN TO THE most uninitiated
it is easily apparent that
Waiting For Godot is a somewhat
difficult drama but its complexities
have been overrated. The playgoer
As the curtain falls, both tramps
word and sentence ror its own
particular meaning.
Instead, he should just loose
himself in this zany world of "Go-
dot."
This play is an anti-Sartrian
existentialistic drama which
means it is Ma Perkins for the
advanced. Like this soap opera
heroine, the play proclaims a doc-
trine that life will be beautiful
and things will improve in due
time. Godot-which may be in-
terpreted as God, science, an ethi-
cal system, money or whatever you
will--is coming to improve the lot
of mankind.
Two other Beckett plays have
been produced in the Broadway
area-Endgame and Krapp's Last
Tape.
ENDGAME TAKES place after
the end of the world and has
four characters - a blind man
and his servant and the blind
man's parents who have no arms
and legs and live in separate gar-
bage cans. Next to this play, Godot
is a virtual nursery rhyme.
Beckett's latest effort, Krapp's
Last Tape, is a one man tour de
force In which an old man makes
an annual tape recording of his
thoughts and hopes during the
past year. While making the new
tape, the old man listens to one
he made when a youthful idealist
and enthusiast.
People are complaining that this
playlet is too obvious in its
straightforward presentation of
the disillusionment that comes
with old age. Obscure or apparent,
it would seem that' Beckett just
cannot win.0
Bringing up the rear of the out-
er guard is the Rumanian Eugene
Ionesco who writes in French.
Three of his plays have been in
the Speech Department's labora-
tory series and one, last spring,
was given by the Dramatic Arts
Center, which plans to give The
New Tenant this spring.
IONESCO IS the Charles Addams
of the avante for although his
plays are dark and sometimes quite

sinister, often they are also quite
comical.
Like most of the audience that
saw Victims of Duty in last year's
lab show production, I found the
play to be most hilarious. This
play, in addition to being great
entertainment, contains what may
be the basic idea behind this
whole avant group of playwrights.
An ordinary man and his wife
are reading the evening newspa-
per at the beginning of Victims.
The man remarks that 'there is
nothing new under the sun'; all
plays, since the Greeks, have been
mystery plays so that especially
in drama there has been nothing
new.
There is a knock at the door and
a shy young man enters looking
for 'Malot with a "t" (can this be
a spoof of searching for Godot?).
Suddenly, without provocation, the
caller turns into a brutal inter-
rogator and browbeats the hus-
band.
The wife becomes the husband's
mother and then a femme fatale.
A seedy poet arrives and proclaims
his artistic doctrines. A strange
woman materializes in the room
after a blackout and the husband
regresses into his infancy.
THE POET'S artistic concepts
were somewhat obscured be-
cause of the bedlam.
He believed that dramatic char-
acters should be able to drastically
change during the course of the
play. Time and space should also
be flexible as to allow the play-
wright to break away from the
rules of unity of character and
intent.-
So with this play, Ionesco de-
monstrates his theories and shows
that there can be 'something new
under the sun,' at least dramati-
cally.
As his plays are produced, Jean
Genet probably will be increas-
ingly identified as a member of
this new group. His first work to
be produced in New York is The
Balcony.
Kenneth Tynan, the New York-
er critic, said that this play creat-
ed the most electric sensation ex-
perienced by London audience
since Ibsen's Ghosts with its reve-
lation to the Victorian world of
the existence of veneral disease.
Today, Ghosts is no shocker be-
(Concluded on Page 14)
Patrick Chester is a senior
in the speech department and
a member of The Daily re-
viewing staff.

The Folies Bergere, the most pop-
ular musical revue in Paris, has no
plot-it is a succession of elabor-
ate displays, and its very mediocre
musical numbers are composed by
many different people.
Operetta is also very popular in
France: But it is very different
from the American musical com-
edy. The recent French operetta,
Rose de Noel by Franz Lehar, has
a very thin plot. The attraction
of the show was its succession of
elaborately constructed sets and
spectacular costuming.
The music was composed by one
man. But the variety which each
"tableau" achieved was consider-
able; the show included a scene of
a gypsy camp as well as the throne
room of a king. The expectation as
to what the next scene and the
next song would be rather than in
the outcome of the story itself,
appeared to be the dominant in-
terest.
T[ODAY, the revue and the oper-
etta remain the major popular
musical entertainment in Europe.
Since revue is apparently popu-
lar abroad, why did it disappear
from the American stage in the
middle thirties? Of course there
are small skits today which con-
sider themselves revues, such as

The Crazy Gang-now in Londt

New Faces, but the spectaculars
revues of yesterday are gone.
The success of the French im-
port La Plume de Ma Tante in the
United States makes one think
that a skillfully-produced revuet
will continue to draw crowds in
this country.
Why, then, are no revues being
written by Americans?
Let's take a look at the enter-
tainment scene of the middle thir-t
ties. Revues at that time were on
the way out. The Ziegfeld produc-
tions were losing popularity. Earl
Carroll was having his final fling
at the spectacle, and George
White's Scandals were beginning
to fade. Big revues began to come
out less and less often. Instead of
a production every year, producers!
began to stage editions of their
shows every two or three years. j
THE FINANCIAL situation of the
Depression helped to herald the
demise of the spectacular revue.
The huge cast and many compos-
ers required great expenditures of
money, which the depression-
racked entertainment industry just ,
did not have. The American public
in the thirties was more eager to,
fulfill the basic necessities of crea-I
ture comfort than to attend an
expensive revue.
The movie revues also began to
wane in the middle thirties. Be-
fore 1933, major studios without
exception produced a lavish movie
musical revue almost every year.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came out
with its highly successful Broad-
way Melody series, Paramount
with Paramount on Parade and
the Big Broadcast series, Fox with
Movietone Follies. The motion pic-,
ture industry as well as the stage
was providing the public with re-
vues with in middle thirties.
Operettas too began to dwindle:
Friml, Romberg, and others pro-
duced a few shows in the thirties.
Interestingly, the heyday of the
operetta coincided with the heyday
of the revue in this country.
ODAY WE have neither.
The modern musical comedy,
began to grow in the place of re-I
vues and operettas in the United'
States. In the twenties, the musi-
cal comedies as they were called
then were actually revues, not
really musical drama.
The DeSylva Brown and Hen-
derson shows, such as Good News
were essentially revues with sparse
plots; the same holds true with
many of the early Gershwin shows.
But after 1931, the musical comedy
began to grow in importance and
really develop a form of its own.
Of Thee I Sing, the great Gersh-
win show, was the first musical
comedy to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Although Showboat preceded the
Gershwin show it is an opera es-
sentially. Of Thee I Sing had a
tightly-knit story a political

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THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE

Y ERadio City Music Hall Rockees
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1960