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As for Williams, his The Seven Descents of Myrtle was a bits-and-pieces montage snipped and pasted together from past works. Old dogs doing old tricks is nostalgically acceptable from performers like Maurice Chevalier or Marlene Dietrich, but coolly and perhaps cruelly rejectable from major playwrights. With eloquence and gallantry, Williams introduced to U.S. drama the previously inadmissible evidence of the emotional outcast and the sexual invert and made the stage vibrate to the heartbeats of the violated and the vulnerable. Himself a masterly creator of characters, Williams could not confer that gift on his disciples. An entire secondary echelon of playwrights—men like William Inge, Robert Anderson and Paddy Chayefsky—became Freudian scholastics. They invented the look-through character long before the appearance of the see-through dress. But to explain a character is to explain him away, and through the general permeation of Freudian concepts, an audience can do that almost faster than the playwright.
The dramatists plowing the Tennessee soil forget that Oedipus did not have a complex but a fate. Once analysis of motivation supplants action, the result is soporific drama, as exemplified this season by Anderson's I/ Never Sang for My Father and Chayefsky's The Latent Heterosexual. In contrast with the look-through transparency of these playwrights, Harold Pinter maintains a tantalizing and fascinating opacity in his characters. They are inexplicable and unpredictable as people in real life often are.
The hope of the American theater has sometimes been placed in off-Broadway: in terms of sustained achievement this amounts to wistful thinking. Of the several playwrights who got their start off-Broadway, only Edward Albee has remotely fulfilled his promise. But since Virginia Woolf, his work has persistently dwindled in strength or substance. For one thing, Albee has developed a galloping case of adaptationitis, culling plots, characters and even dialogue from other writers' novels and plays. More surprisingly, he has lost the forked tongue that contributed so much to the venomous delight of Virginia Woolf. Albee unquestionably is the finest talent fostered off-Broadway, but he remains a dramatic sapling who threatens never to become an oak.
Rumpus Room. The children's rumpus room of the U.S. theater is the off-off-Broadway café house—usually an operation that is long on valor but considerably shorter on value. Typical of this arena is Collision Course, a show consisting of eleven short plays, most of them by café-nurtured playwrights, presented last week at Manhattan's Café Au go Go. All were esthetic stillbirths. Alternating between juvenile temper tantrums and thumb-sucking private reveries, they dwelt on the tried-and-trite themes of alienation, lack of communication, male-female hostility, the nausea of being an American, and the pending nuclear apocalypse. In terms of the development of first-caliber playwrights, off-off-Broadway is still a dramatic pygmyland.