FOR the fourth time in six years, the Pulitzer committee last week gave no prize for an American drama. The committee is correct. No American play of the 1967-68 season merited an award. While it may pique national vanity, an esthetic dry spell is no novelty in the long history of drama. The sands of mediocrity have sometimes silted over the theater for 2,000 years—for example, between the titans of Greek tragedy and the genius of Elizabethan England. The lackluster quality of contemporary U.S. playwriting and the dearth of substantial new talent are simply a gap rather than an omen. The conventional and obvious scapegoat is Broadway, but this is pure fallacy: Broadway, with all its faults, has presented, honored and sustained every major U.S. playwright.
The current plight of American drama reflects attrition of imagination rather than Philistine commercialism. The leading playwrights are faltering or repetitive. Films, TV and advertising have lured away young potential dramatists, thus giving volatile intellectual fashionmongers an excuse to depict the theater as enervating or backward. One barometer of the theatrical weather is the latest work of the best U.S. playwrights. For more than two decades, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams have dominated the American stage in much the way that Hemingway and Faulkner once dominated the novel. Miller is dramatically the descendant of Ibsen and socioeconomically the child of Marx. Williams is dramatically the descendant of Chekhov and psychologically the child of Freud. At present, they seem to have depleted their inheritance.
Old Dogs, Old Tricks. Miller's latest play, The Price, is a problem drama calcified in the technique and mentality of the late 1930s. Underlying all of Miller's thought is the conviction that if society is changed, man is redemptively altered and restored to respect, purpose and value. But the catastrophic events of 20th century history have shattered the presumptions of the problem play. Man's ineradicable genius for evil has reduced the doctrine of social engineering to puny tinkering. Playwrights like Beckett, lonesco and Genet have abandoned admonitory Ibsenite finger-waving for a nerve-shattering look into the abyss of existence itself, which in their view is stingingly futile, innately unjust and thoroughly absurd. In the future it may be said that they held a broken mirror up to the nature of the age, but for now they have rendered Miller obsolete by altering the central focus of theater from sociology to metaphysics.