Drama in Transition

DRAMA IN TRANSITION

Crisis

The commercial theater in the United States reached a point of creative and financial crisis in the early 1970s. In a sense, theater as a vital and expanding art form had been on the wane throughout the 1960s, despite many excellent new plays and commercial hits. The finest American dramatists—Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in particular—had long since peaked (during the 1950s). Edward Albee, who had ignited audiences with his shattering confrontational dramas in the early 1960s, was having trouble sustaining that reputation. The heyday of the musical had passed, too; there had been few memorable musicals after about 1965. Theater in the late 1960s had been sustained by a public appetite for previously taboo sexual material and for absurdism, but the novelty had worn off by 1970. That year saw the smallest number of productions on Broadway in its history, and the situation barely improved as the decade progressed. Broadway shows were reported as losing more than $5 million during the 1972-1973 season. Film and television had increasingly become the arenas for new dramatic efforts, and many dramatic writers were working in those media. As the experimental fervor of 1960s drama faded and the youth counterculture began to disintegrate, there seemed to be no new subjects and no new forms. By the mid 1970s most big Broadway hits were nostalgic revivals of old shows.

Sondheim and Fosse

The most creative forces on Broadway in the early 1970s were director-choreographer Bob Fosse and composer Stephen Sondheim. Each was an innovator; each parted from traditional forms. Their efforts helped transform the modern musical into a form closer to concert than traditional story. Sondheim's Company (1970) was a loosely tied series of vignettes on marriage that had little plot. His challenge was to write songs that would unify the theme but not develop out of character or plot. His Follies (1971) was a study in memory and fantasy in which the action of the past, present, and "what if occurred onstage simultaneously. In A Little Night Music (1973) Sondheim experimented with a mix of musical and opera styles, with songs performed in waltz tempo. Fosse, by contrast, was a razzle-dazzle showman who used erotic dance numbers and costumes to create a decadent stage world. Pippin (1972) used illusion and humorous violence to explore the main character's sexual search for identity. Chicago (1976) used burlesque and vaudeville stylings to comment on the media and legal sideshow surrounding a murder. Danari (1978) celebrated Fosse's true theatrical passion, becoming the first musical made up exclusively of dance numbers. Fosse's choreography helped make a major star of dancer Ben Vereen, who won an Antoinette Perry award (Tony) for his work in Pippin.

Off-Broadway

Between 1969 and 1980 all but one of the Tony-winning plays and all but one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays were first produced Off-Broadway. A few of the best new dramatists (John Guare, Lanford Wilson) did achieve Broadway success. But the Off-Broadway theater, like the underground art and music scenes of the 1970s, became the place for new playwrights to try out and develop unusual and experimental work. Many new works were developed in improvisational workshops, with actors and directors acting in collaboration with dramatists. The 1970s became the era of the company, in which new shows could be tried out in Off-Broadway showcases for potential producers. The decade's biggest hit, A Chorus Line, developed in workshops out of interviews with and "confessions" of the cast members. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) was also written and choreographed primarily in rehearsal.

New Themes

In the 1960s major dramas tended to explore destructive and apocalytic modern forces that were symbolic of the era's turbulence: war, corruption, violence, crime, discrimination, and racism. Plays of the 1970s were equally representative of their times. Less confrontational and more introspective, the new works featured isolated individuals attempting to improvise life amid the fallout of a broken society. While drama of the 1960s tended to be a theater of ideas, 1970s drama became more mature, literate, and character driven. Characters frequently demonstrated apathy, indecision, regret, angst, fatalism, and a nostalgia for "the way things used to be." Playwrights experimented with shifts of time and focus, simultaneous action, improvisation, and audience participation. Political and social issues were still addressed, but with a greater sense of irony, acceptance, and empathy. Homosexuality, for example, was depicted less as a crisis or problem and more as an integrated fact of life. In Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July, Albert Innaurato's Gemini, Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box, and David Rabe's Streamers (1975), gay characters were presented without fanfare, and in Terence McNally's The Ritz and Martin Sherman's Bent they openly celebrated their identity and pride.

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

The 4 1/2-hour avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach was conceived after a performance of a 12 1/2-hour avant-garde piece, director Robert Wilson's Life and Times of Josef Stalin. Composer Philip Glass, long an admirer of Wilson, suggested the two collaborate on a musical work for the stage.

During subsequent meetings Albert Einstein became the indirect subject of the new work, simply because his image appealed to Glass and Wilson. They soon developed an unusual visual scheme to span their four acts: every scene would be focused around either a train, a trial, or a field with a spaceship.

While Glass worked on the complex musical score, Wilson choreographed the dances. Both saw the work as a "portrait opera" in which images associated with Einstein would gradually accumulate into a picture of him, without the use of plot or narrative structure. They wanted the audience to complete the piece by filling in gaps with their own ideas or preconceptions about Einstein.

Collaborating with Glass and Johnson was fourteen-year-old Christopher Knowles, whom Johnson knew as an unusual and visionary writer. Some of Knowles's writing was incorporated into the piece. Much of the writing and composing took place in workshops, developed to include performers' ideas. Rehearsals were grueling because the piece involved dance, music, and production effects and because of its unusual length.

Einstein on the Beach made a six-country tour of Europe to overwhelming response. Strong word of mouth brought it back to the United States, where it debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976. A Met administrator who seemed baffled by both the opera and its eclectic audience was told by Glass: "You'd better find out who they are, because if this place expects to be running in 25 years, that's your audience out there."

Critics hailed the work as visionary and Glass as a gifted composer. Originally recorded in 1977, a multialbum recording of Einstein on the Beach was reissued by CBS in 1979, again to considerable acclaim.

Source:

Philip Glass and Robert T. Jones, Music by Philip Glass (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

Minorities

Some plays by black dramatists tended to be more militant. Ed Bullins was committed to a harsh depiction of the black experience. Bullins won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Jante (1974), which depicted the rape of a white woman by a black man. Steve Carter's Eden (1975) explored the prejudice of one black man against another in a stark ghetto setting. Charles Gordone won the Pulitzer Prize for No Place to Be Somebody in 1970, and Joseph A. Walker was awarded a Tony for The River Niger (1973). Lonnie Elder III, Leslie Lee, and Charles Fuller also contributed major plays on black themes. Many of these works were produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, which became the representative black theater company in the country. To expand further the dramatic opportunities for minorities, the New York Shakespeare Public Theater established black and Hispanic Shakespeare companies. Black productions helped Broadway pull out of its musical slump as well; hits included Ain't Misbehavin' Purlie, The Wiz, Raisin, Bubbling Brown Sugar, Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, and revivals of Guys and Dolls and Porgy and Bess. Women also found strong dramatic voices in the 1970s, writing plays that expressed self-knowledge and self-determination. The best-known work was Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in which women heal themselves and each other by finding God in their own image. Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer's feminist musical I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road opened on Broadway in 1978. Susan Griffin, Eve Merriam, and Marsha Norman were other major feminist playwrights.

New Voices

The strongest new dramatists to emerge in the 1970s were Sam Shepard, Rabe, and David Mamet. Shepard evoked a sense of myth in his plays, which usually depicted outcasts and cultural burnouts in sinister, nightmarish situations. In plays like The Tooth of Crime (1973) and Curse of the Starving Class (1978), action and plot were incidental; Shepard used imperfect structures and unresolved endings to heighten character development. His plays were considered too unconventional for Broadway, although he did win a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child (1979). Rabe's plays explored social guilt complexes that developed in the late 1960s over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The military plays Sticks and Bones (1972), The Basic Training of Pavio Hummel (1971), and Streamers all became Broadway successes. Mamet developed his skills as a playwright in the Chicago theater, where Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) attracted critical attention. American Buffalo (1977), which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, displayed Mamet's ear for tough urban dialect and his trademark use of language as a form of violence. Other major playwrights included Lanford Wilson (The Hot Baltimore, Fifth of July), who used disparate characters to create collages of American life. John Guare specialized in farces of insanity and murder such as The House of Blue Leaves (1971), while Christopher Durang experimented with satires and burlesques.

Papp's Influence

Producer Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York had long been a testing ground for future Broadway dramas and musicals. Papp had an unusually sharp eye for potential in Off-Broadway works. In 1954 he established the annual New York Shakespeare Festival, which came to be known as "Shakespeare in the Park." Since he was also a Broadway producer, Papp shrewdly used the festival not only for Shakespeare plays but also for promising new productions he could transfer directly onto Broadway. By 1974 Papp had built the festival into the largest nonprofit theater company in the United States. His festival discoveries included Jason Miller's That Championship Season, which eventually won a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for best drama; For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf; the Tony-winning musical Two Gentlemen of Verona; and Sticks and Bones, which won the 1972 Tony for best play. Papp's real paydirt was A Chorus Line (1976), which he sponsored in its original workshop then premiered at the Shakespeare festival. It went on to become the longest-running show in Broadway history.

Revitalized

The success of A Chorus Line revitalized the Broadway musical. It was still running, along with new hits such as Annie (1977), Evita (1979), and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (1979), as the decade ended. Because of Papp, Broadway producers learned to use Off-Broadway theaters as a source of potential talent. After Fosse's Pippin broadened its success with television advertising, other plays began using television to market themselves. Producers learned to package new material for sale to film and television and to transfer London hits (such as Evita ) to Broadway. Meanwhile, serious prizewinning dramas such as The Shadow Box, The Gin Game, and The Elephant Man became major hits. By 1977 Variety reported that Broadway plays had set box-office records during the 1976-1977 season, and the 1978-1979 season showed profits of more than $40 million. The theater crisis of the 1970s was over, ready for a commercial boom in the 1980s.

Sources:

Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theater Across America 1950—1980 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982);

Helen Krich Chinay and Linda Walsh Jenkins, Women in American Theater (New York: Crown Publishers, 1981);

Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., Broadway: Song and Story (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985);

Errol Hill, ed., The Theater of Black Americans (New York: Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1980);

Ted Hoffman, ed., Famous American Plays of the 1970s (New York: Dell, 1981);

Ethan Mordden, The American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).