Review Of American Theatre In 1962

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30092, 28 March 1963, Page 5

Review Of American Theatre In 1962

NEW YORK. The professional theatre in the United States was enriched in 1962 by a large selection of stimulating new plays, sparkling musicals and revivals of classics. Playwrights, displaying their fall creative powers, probed current social conditions with revealing insight, humour and an occasional barbed tongue in both light and serious drama.

Audiences were as selective as ever. The 1961-62 Broadway season opened with 45 plays and by mid-season 26 had closed. Outstanding among those that survived the acid test of box office success was the musical “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying,” by Frank Loesser. It starred Robert Morse, who, like many Americans in real life, rises from a humble job to an executive’s position. The play won the Pulitzer Prize and was voted the season’s best musical by the New Yoik Drama Critics Circle. Edward Albee, a 34-year-old playwright, was praised as a “new Eugene O’NeUi” after his first full length play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” opened on Broadway. The “New York Times” commented that the evening of his arrival “may eventually become a historic occasion in the American theatre.” His four-character play, widely praised as brilliantly original, deals with the marital difficulties of two college professors and their wives, and presents a sometimes bitter, sometimes humorous, lament over man’s incapacity to arrange his private life so as to inhibit his self-destructive compulsions. Voted Best Outstanding among new creations by established dramatists was Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” a sensitive story about four disillusioned people who summoned the courage to face life. Starring Margaret Leighton, Bette Davis and Patrick O’Neal, it was voted the season’s best American drama by the New York Drama Critics Circle.

Paddy Chayefsky’s imaginative biblical play "Gideon” humanized God too much, but Frederick March, as God, and Douglas Campbell, as Gideon, were praised for liieir superb acting. As God, March was baffled by humans in a wrathful, compassionate and majestic way. Campbell, a Canadian, was bumbling, vain, capricious and humble. Together they drew a dramatic portrait of man seeking answers about himself and the universe.

The best foreign play, in the judgment of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, was Robert Bolt’s “A Man For All Seasons,” a British drama based on the life of Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded after his long dispute with King Henry VIII. The play is a study of the conflict between public duty and individual conscience.

Other foreign plays also had successful runs on Broadway. They included “TchinTchin” by Sidney Michaels of Great Britain, based on a French play by Francois Billetdoux; “A Passage to India” by the Indian woman novelist, Santha Rama Rau, based on a novel by E. M. Forster; “The Affair,” a dramatization of the novel by the famous British writer C. P. Snow; “The Aspern Papers” by Michael Redgrave of Great Britain, based on a story by Henry James; “Man is Man,” written by Bertolt Brecht and adapted into English by Eric Bentley; and “Romulus,” another German language play, written by Switzerland’s Friedrich Dtierrenmatt and adapted by America’s Gore Vidal.

“Beyond the Fringe,” a satirical revue by four British actors, was a highly popular offering, sometimes described as “the funniest show in America.”

Among distinguished foreign theatre grows which were welcomed to the United States were the Old Vic and D’Oyly Carte companies from Great Britain, the Foo Hsing Theatre from the Republic of China, and the Duesseldorfer Schauspielhaus company from Germany, Successful new American plays during the year included “Night Life” by Sidney Kingsley, winner of a Pulitzer drama prize for his “Men in White” nearly 30 years ago, and “A Gift of Time” by Garson Kanin. Henry Fonda gave a moving performance in the role of a journalist who learns he is near death from cancer and faces up to the news with quiet courage. The play was based on a book, “Death of a Man,” by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, telling a true story of her husband’s last days.

A successful musical comedy was “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” starring Zero Mostel as a comical Roman slave in a farcical adaptation of plays by Plautus. Eleven of the 1962 plays were by authors whose works were making their first Broadway appearances. Most of them had previously written for off-Broadway and other theatres.

A first play by 27-year-old Herb Gardner, “A Thousand Clowns,” became one of the year’s biggest hits. The conflict between conformity or noncomformity to social standards was ably and humorously presented by Jason Robards, Jr., and Sandy Dennis, a fresh new face. Thornton Wilder returned after a six-year absence from the theatre, in an off-Broad-way offering called “Plays ■For Bleecker Street,” consisting of three one-act plays. They were: "Infancy,” a fanciful, semi-farcical sketch of infants seeking knowledge; “Childhood,” a fantasy about three children at play; and "Someone from Assisi,” a flash-back to a man’s youthful passion. Off-Broadway

Two new off-Broadway hits were “Who’ll Save The Plowboy,” an incisively written study of disillusionment by a new playwright named Frank D. Gilroy, and “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Bad,” by Arthur Kopit. The latter was hailed as a highly promising new American playwright. Off-Broadway also remained a place where theatre- goers were exposed consistently to important works of the past by Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov and O’Neill. French talent on the New York stage included Clayton Corzatte, who revealed versatility in the off-Broadway productions of Chekhov’s “Sea Gull,” and “The School for Scandal.” The Negro actor, Godfrey Cambridge, won acclaim in the longrunning social drama about race relations in the South entitled “Purlie Victorious.” He was described as having turned “the Unde Tom stereotype of Gitlow Judson . . . into a vastly genial, satirical and winning figure.” Experimental Works

Small off-Broadway theatres, bom after World War H, continued during 1962 to provide playwrights with an outlet for experimental works, including “absurd” dramas which seek to express themes obliquely through suggestion. “Absurd” plays by lonesco, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and others have been the main avantgarde fare of off-Broadway theatres. A new Beckett play, making its debut in 1962, was "Happy Days,” a drama alluding to “the lifetime of one man and one woman.” Theatre enjoyed a good year outside New York. Washington’s new theatre-ln-the-round, the Arena Stage, presented eight American and foreign plays in the 1961-62 season, and will offer eight more this winter. Particularly noteworthy on last season’s schedule was the world premiere of “The Burning of the Lepers,” by the young American, Wallace Hamilton. In Boston “The Affair,” the Snow drama about academic freedom on the university campus, had its premiere in September before moving to Broadway. Several new little theatres opened in Boston during the summer.

Philadelphia theatres presented four Eroadway-bound plays in one week. Milwaukee’s largest theatre, the Pabst, played to capacity audiences when a touring company presented “My Fair Lady,” Broadway’s longest-running musical, which ended its New York stay in September after 2717 performances. An outstanding example of Community financial support for the stage came in Milwaukee, where the city’s first civic repertory theatre—the Fred Miller Theatre—installed a permanent professional repertory company. Supported financially by members of the community and bolstered by a Ford Foundation grant, the new project was hopefully viewed as a significant step in the artistic progress of the Mid-west Many other cities gave increasing support to community theatres. Some estimates put the number of nonprofessional theatres as high as 30,000. New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre opened its 1962 season in the new Delacorte amphitheatre in Central[Park, hTa largely financed by city funds. There was no admission charge. Thousands of

New Yorkers attended the dedication performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” starring George Scott as Shylock and Nan Martian as Portia. Later offerings during a popular two-month season were “King Lear” and “The Tempest” The American Shakespeare Festival established in 1956 at Stratford, Connecticut attracted nearly 200,000 spectators in 1962 to its summer performances. The theatre opened in June with “Richard H” and “Henry IV, Part I.” During the year, the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and eight other nonprofit repertory theatres in the United States received extensive financial aid from the Ford Foundation for new buildings and other purposes. The foundation noted that the grants were given with the specific intention of strengthening “the resident theatre as a significant American cultural resource.” Within the context of the foundation—already the biggest patron of arts in the United States—the grants constituted a new dimension of subsidy. In the past, the foundation limited itself to making grants to individual artists and specific experiments.

Colleges and universities bolstered the theatre arts in 1962 by constructing new buildings as components of cultural centres. Dartmouth College dedicated an impressive centre for the performing creative arts, which included a 450-seat playhouse and a smaller experimental theatre. University Contract In 1962, the University of Michigan became one of the first colleges in the United States to inaugurate a professional theatre programme. A company of Broadway actors took up residence on the campus under a contract calling for eight plays. The first, “The School For Scandal,” was presented in October.

Thousands of college and secondary school students attended performances put on by professional touring shows in 1962. These companies, rare a decade ago, numbered 15 in 1962. One was the National Repertory Theatre Foundation, completing its first season before 250,000 persons in 60 cities. (U.SJ.S.)