Off-Broadway Reckoning

A pair of stars acting for the satisfaction of it, an offbeat Manhattan debut by a new talent, a musty, reclaimed grind house--Tiger-Typists (see col. 1) is theater of the kind that makes off-Broadway an absentee culture hero in conversation pits from Kansas City to Bombay.

Anyone with a slight touch of dissent in his makeup had better see at least half-a-dozen plays currently showing off-Broadway before getting around to the name-brand tranquilizers of the Broadway showshops. But he had better not go much beyond a half-dozen, for the major consequence of off-Broadway's startling ten-year growth has been to dilute its quality in a flood of vanity productions, vapid revivals and Art subverted by Commerce. Off-Broadway entrenched itself as an artistic rebuke to Broadway; increasingly, it is becoming a shoddy sibling rival.

Seedy Surroundings. Clustered mainly in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, off-Broadway's theaters exert the faintly exotic double lure of intellectual climbing and Bohemian slumming among asthenic men with beards and girls with Lady Godiva hairdos. The playhouses themselves are adventures, or misadventures; in these pleasure domes, a chair arm may fall off at the gentlest touch. But seedy surroundings cannot tarnish the bright promise that off-Broadway holds out and sometimes spectacularly fulfills. It gives new playwrights, directors and actors a voice. On intimate, semiround or full arena stages, old and neglected classics have been given fresh airings. When it sticks to what Broadway cannot or will not do, off-Broadway is most nearly what it ought to be--the probing, daring, dramatic conscience of the U.S. theater.

Off-Broadway's semiofficial date of birth is April 25, 1952, the day Brooks Atkinson's review of the Circle-in-the-Square's arena-styled revival of Tennessee Williams' Stimmer and Smoke appeared in the New York Times. Then there were fewer than ten off-Broadway theaters; in 1963, there are 40.

Young Turks v. Shubert Alley. The Young Turks of off-Broadway's lively decade have given the theatrical scene, including Shubert Alley's fearful fat cats, a healthy and creative shaking-up. Off-Broadway fostered the fresh and uninhibited talents of such playwrights as Edward Albee (The American Dream), Jack Richardson (Gallows Humor), Jack Gelber (The Connection) and Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad). Such playwrights as Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, Moliere, Pirandello and O'Casey --all banished from Broadway on the not unlikely ground that there isn't a theater party blockbuster in the lot--have been persistently tapped off-Broadway. Off-Broadway can also take substantial credit for spurring interest in two modern greats, Eugene O'Neill and Bertolt Brecht. When off-Broadway's greatly gifted Jose Quintero directed The Iceman Cometh, in May 1956, O'Neill's reputation was dormant. The remarkable six-year run of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys helped to detonate a Brecht boomlet that is finally exploding on Broadway with the March arrival of Brecht's best play, Mother Courage.

Off-Broadway's most precious asset is its receptiveness to new ideas, and the most provocative contemporary idea in the modern theater has been the bizarre, chaotic, deeply existential attempt to find the meaning of man in a world of no-meaning threatened with a nuclear apocalypse--the theater of the absurd.

Most of these plays are comedies of horrors, but all of them, in strange and curious ways, beat with a quivering sense of present-day life. The wave of off-Broadway excitement and support for such playwrights as Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape) and Genet (The Balcony) made possible the precarious on-Broadway beachheads of Pinter (The Caretaker) and Ionesco (Rhinoceros). Genet, who is less an absurdist than a perversely erotic symbolist poet of the theater, is a perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well over the 700 mark in performances, is probably the most satisfying work of art ever produced on the color question, an unsentimental depth probe of a labyrinth of hate-guilt feelings, in which blacks and whites literally mask but cannot hide their attitudes toward each other and themselves.

Avocational Therapy. All this success has led straight to a lot of disappointment. Off-Broadway is now big business; it loses more than $1,000,000 a year. Ten years ago, the off-Broadway season consisted of a dozen or so productions; in the '61-'62 season there were some 100 openings, 40 more than Broadway. Prices and costs similarly soared. Tickets began with a $3 top, have risen as high as $4.95. Yet no more than three or four out of 100 off-Broadway productions ever go into the black. The cost of putting on a play has rocketed. In 1953, a revival of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars was staged for $400. Today, it could not be duplicated for much less than $15,000, the current average production cost.

High costs curb artistic experimentation, but have depressingly little effect on the rash of vanity theater that is currently disfiguring off-Broadway with opening-night eyesores. Friends and relatives of Suzy Stagestruck, bent on giving her the Big Break, back non-plays with non-directors and non-casts. When the excrescence flops, the angels philosophically congratulate themselves on a tax loss--and another 15 grand always seems to be waiting in the wings.

A separate branch of vanity theater consists of hobbyists who are whacking plays together as a form of avocational therapy. Last season, off-Broadway saw the do-it-yourself dramas of a policeman, a dentist and a chiropractor, not to forget J. I. Rodale, a millionaire dietary fanatic who contends that a major source of evil in the modern world is an overconsumption of sugar, a condition he believes to be dangerously prevalent among drama critics.

Aspire or Expire. Off-Broadway is usually judged by its best efforts, while Broadway is often cavalierly measured by its worst. The present crisis of off-Broadway is that its best efforts are becoming rarer and rarer, and it is being swamped by its typical products, which are increasingly venal, sloppy, and predictable. For every promising Playwright Schisgal, there are a dozen silly spoofs of old movie musicals, or tasteless tours through neurotic junkyards of the mind, or criminal displays of self-ordained talent that might have lasted ten seconds before getting the critical gong on the late Major Bowes's Amateur Hour. Off-Broadway is frittering away the good will of the loyal audiences it has attracted during a goodly decade. If the present trend continues, off-Broadway will be a precocious casualty rather than a fabulous invalid. The choice that lies ahead is stern and simple: aspire or expire.

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