Best American Plays 5. [antikvár]

PREFACE The present collection covers another five-year period in the professional American theatre and is concerned with the plays that went into its hopper to become successes or failures—mostly, as usual, failures. As usual, too, no sharp distinction is made here between Broadway and so-called off-Broadway items so long as they are full-length plays and were professionally performed. Nowadays, moreover, it is possible to say that a number of the off-Broadway plays would have been presented on Broadway, and more likely to its credit than discredit, if fallible but rarely reckless producers had felt they could take the risk. The most unusual aspect of this publication is that it represents a recent period in which opinions of the American theatre's performance and estimates of its prospects were exceedingly low. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the depressing details after noting that shortly before we started going to press The New Yor^ Times printed a front-page report to the effect that never before had Broadway sustained greater losses than during the 1962-63 season, and the League of New York Theatre countered with a heated repudiation of the Times statistics. The rebuttal may be viewed with some scepticism, but it does not follow that the local jeremiads are conclusive either. The fact that it has been possible to compile the present volume and to supplement its contents with the list oL plays at the end of the book may not satisfy rigorous critical standards but can be accepted as a counterweight to the direst reports of Decline and Fall. To me the plays in this collection suggest that the course of American drama remains about par. We have merely had in the past some exceptional seasons and occasional discoveries of new plays or playwrights that boosted critical estimates and raised extravagant expectations. In his green and impulsive years, incited by having read as a professional playreader hundreds—nay, thousands!—of commonplace playscripts, the present editor once trumpeted that "The bourgeois theatre is dead." That was almost thirty years ago, in the mid-thirties, and the obit was based not solely on American drama but on plays that reached me regularly from half a dozen European countries, not excluding Soviet Russia, which had become as bourgeois as any other modern nation in its tastes and values. I have had little reason to retract this generalization since then. But, as in the history of all art, there have been degrees of deadness, and in the case of competent stage productions the corpses have had a way of giving some lively twitches, even if these have hardly amounted to a resurrection. And it is likewise true that not all the plays of recent decades have been "bourgeois" in the sense of dealing with the concerns of petty people as observed by petty temperaments and small minds. I do not of course expect to convince everyone that we have not been denuded of tolerable drama during the past five-year period. Scholars accustomed to dealing almost exclusively with literary masterpieces, except where their special research interests are concerned, will remain scornful toward the theatre. And the gifted young Turks of contemporary criticism, whom I find so stimulating when they are malcontent, will be properly unimpressed by the harvest offered here, and even by the harvest that could have been offered if it had been possible to obtain all desired clearances from the original publishers.* 1 am not sure that I am impressed myself by the over-all record of this short period, and the word "best" in the tide of the volume continues to give me twinges of embarrassment; I have had them ever since this title was decided upon by the publishers a quarter of a century ago. But I trust * Jack Gelber's The Connection, which was withheld by the publisher despite the author's interest in being represented, will be found in Seven Plays of the Modern Theatre, Grove Press, 1962. Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun and Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic, withheld by Random House, will be found in Modern Library and Vintage collections. See Four Contemporary American Plays, Selected and with Biographical Notes by Bennett Cerf, Vintage Books 1961. i ^i.'i. a