MOVES TO THE LEFT

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 16, 20 January 1936, Page 4

MOVES TO THE LEFT

THE AMERICAN THEATRE

VITAL PLAYS PROPAGANDIST

CLIFFORD ODETS

There are three theatre movements in America, the box-office theatre, which shuffles sedately to the right, crab-like; the theatre of the left, •which leaps ahead with great bounds that land it in the most unexpected places; and the burlesque, or theatre undressed, which remains continually, in the same place, but. is never still—the movement of the danse dv yentre or the black bottom, writes Paul Arming in the "Cape Times." : The box-office, or Broadway, theatre is supported by audiences that seem to be in a state of constant coma. There is some excuse for sleep, for most of the plays are dull, poorly acted, and are put on in uncomfortable theatres in which a man may not even smoke. He is usually permitted to slink downstairs into Ye Olde English Lounge where smoking is allowed but spitting is the popular pastime. No boiled shirt or Tuxedo (dinner jacket to you) is to "be seen in all the stalls of New York. The one thing to be said in favour of these - theatres is that- the programme is given away, which saves the irritating fumbling for fourpence peculiar' to London play-going habits. The movie theatre, with its recent addition of a full; vaudeville progranimej lias almost' killed ■ the reactionary legitimate theatre. The crowd begins to realise that when it wants entertainment the combined screen-vaudeville shows give the best value for money. So the old theatres are closing down, and becoming rewired and air-cooled to cater for this public that demands comfort as well as. entertainment; - During July and August, ■ the summer vacation period, only six houses managed to keep breathing arid the largest audiences "were" to be found at an extreme play "spilt byer :'from the theatre of the left -^-"Tobacco Road"—a dramatically perfect but grim picture of sin and sloth among the "poor whites" of the 'Southern States. -■-.-. SENTIMENTAL COMEDY. ■•:'For./the. rest there "was "Three Men on ;a -Horse,"- slapstick- farce about a little man who could not help picking winners on the race track, and a nice sentimental American-Italian domestic comedy, "Moon Over Mulberry- Street." Among the other plays that called for no intelligence on the part of the audience were the foot and mouth, all singing, all dancing, musical plays like the big and dull "Great Waltz" of Johann Srauss, a blaze of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the very amusing entertainment of "Anything Goes" with Cole Porter's lyrics about the Louvre Museum and the Coliseum, Mickey Mouse and a symphony by Strauss, Mahatma Gandhi and Napoleon Brandy, and what have -you? The same show runs most successfully chez Cochran in London, but the words of 'the songs have had to be changed—the' English may know the steppes of Russia but they know little about the pants of a Roxy usher, while the American dress by Sak's has become a dress by Patou to rhyme in a porterly way with an Epstein statoo. ; This box-office1 theatre, then, exists only in New York and is nearly % dead there. It provides a pint or two of anaemic life blood for a small band of touring companies carrying Broadway successes to .. the outer world. During the summer months, and to an increasing extent throughout the year, unemployed Broadway actors attach themselves to stock companies barn-storming up and down the country, and especially in the holiday resorts to the north of New York, with Shaw, O'Neill, Robertson, Priestley, Wilde, and the like. CHEAP AND NASTY. The crowds, when they want entertainment of a type not sufficiently personal on the. screen, go to the bottom, that is, to the Burlesque show. Burlesque is cheap and nasty, it is of no artistic significance, but it must be mentioned because it plays so large a part in the bright light life of the larger cities. A few of Burlesque's stars have turned respectable and have become well-known entertainers; Mac West is one of these. The shows are non-stop from noon to midnight, and the audiences consist .of old men and boys and girls under .the age of twenty. : The show is inexhaustibly vulgar, .the humour is all below the waist "line, and the old shows from Paris <back streets are quite out-moded by these exhibitions, which have the , advantage of displaying complete 'nudity in the American language. A f patriotic, attempt to let the public >:"See America First." The chorus .work is undrilled and ugly, the sing■'dng shrill and hideous, but the ladies iiwho are suitably described as "strip.pers1' ensure that full houses are the iorder all the time. In Hollywood Burlesque has 'become sophisticated •and "Life Begins at Mirisky's" is attractive, slick,- and funny;,the,humour is on the'level of the number sung by a young;^brunette ~whp, 'together with six lovely; and restless, blondes, has "Gotta see a man about a dog." THE WORKSHOP THEATRE. There is a very different atmosphere ;and colour about the workshop theatre of the. social stage. The lighting of these many small theatres may be deep red, and the audience-may be a curi(»us mixture ■ of ' intellectuals, with *»anual workers and artists'on relief, but the plays produced are alive and vivid. . Thisf group *is chiefly in the hands of the literary and political leftists, and it occasionally discovers something sp : good, like Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty," that a hearing is obtained on Broadway. Most of the work is tod. thoughtful) too stark, for the delectation of audiences asking only for a "night out" entertainment. Odets's play is the most significant dramatic event of the year. It deals immediately with the social and economic position of a taxi-driver and his fellow-workers, and more broadly with the rising tide of bitterness, against capitalism, depression, and nationalism. It is ah- invocation to the use of the strike weapon, to militant trade unionism. Banned by the police as "unAmerican" or immoral in several towns, it won the 1935 Yale Drama Tournament and now drives through the land.like a torch. The small-town mentality of those officials and citizens who, through an ignorant fear of what they call "Communism," have sought to suppress this play has only served to fan the rising tide of interest in the extreme left theories and in this play in particular. The United States have still to appreciate the wisdom of those fathers of the nation who included freedom of speech and thought among the primary constitutional rights of the individual.

Odets has had three other plays produced this year—"Awake and Sing," "Paradise Lost," and "Till the Day I Die" —the last-named about anti-Nazi underground activities in Berlin; not one of these has the dramatic force of Lefty. He remains, however, the most important dramatic author in America since Eugene O'Neill reversed, in his own life, the story of the Great God Brown

by allowing the dreamer O'Neill to capitulate to the Babbit O'Neill in his recent "Ah, Wilderness." MODERN PLAYS. Such a Little Theatre, to mention one out of many, is Le Petit Theatre dv Vieux Carre in New Orleans, an amateur group with professional manager, stage manager, and secretaryModern plays of the advanced theatre in.French and English are given here in a house that is a fine example of the local French architecture of the eighteenth century; .the rehearsal and j workroom used many years ago to be a j bar—Le Veau gui Tete—used by the Creole pirates as their headquarters; and in the centre of the building a lovely courtyard, flagged and green with vines, jasmine, spider, lily, olive, myrtle, and banana trees. Every American town seems now to have its little theatre or its branch of the group theatre movement. The spirit underlying their activities is that the commercial theatre is dead, but the workers' theatre—poor but passionate, eloquent but factual—is increasingly alive. \ The Negro Peoples' Theatre arises as a part of this rebirth of the active theatre. It breaks away from the old minstrel show conception of the negro to produce plays of real life, and plays of social protest. Paul Green, with "In Abraham's Bosom," made a start towards the realistic rather than the paternalistic approach to negro subjects, and Wexley's "They Shall Not Die"-.has been followed by "Scottsbro, Scottsbro," "Lynch," and "Black is Only a Colour" dealing with the acute unrest that: today follows the lynching, the segregation, and.the economic depression affecting negro life in America. The new- movement of the theatre in..the United States-. tends towards propagandism, and this may ultimately prove, to :be.its artistic weakness. It .may. and does, give rise to anxiety,'-out 'it gives every proof of being capable., honest, and alive.