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One notion that animates the patrons of culture centers across the length of the U.S. is that regional theaters will revitalize American drama. It seems to be almost an article of faith that the hinterland is teeming with mute dramatic Miltons who will be brought to full and glorious voice with a foundation grant. What is the hard news and dispiriting fact? Not a single new playwright of any magnitude has, to the present moment, been unearthed by the regional theater. Indeed, the number of new plays produced by the overwhelming majority of the regional theaters in any given season compares unfavorably with the pedal extremities of the two-toed sloth.
A Vaulting Image. The basic truth, ignored by optimists who lavish their creative hopes on a regional theater, is that never in history has great drama been lodged or nourished in the provinces of a nation. All the world's a stage, but only the great culture capitals, such as Paris, London and New York, are large enough worlds for a playwright. The city imbues him with conflict, crisis, tension. The city moves at a kinetic tempo; drama catches the beat. Like an opulent genius of creation, the city sketches a hundred finely shaded variations on a common human type, stages a thousand impromptu confrontations from dawn to dawn. All this is the adrenaline of drama, and in the U.S., only New York provides it.
No account of the state of the drama can ignore the society around it, since the theater is the most social of all art forms. Drama of sweep and scope makes large statements about the nature of life and refracts the temper of the times. All the great ages of theater have possessed a vaulting image of man, and an absorptive, undeviating concern with his destiny. "In apprehension, how like a god" is not casual Elizabethan rhetoric, but the supremely assured recognition that man is the noblest, grandest creature that walks the earth. And what does contemporary U.S. society say of the stature of man—how like a naked ape, how like an irrational id, how like a punch card in a computer? In the vertiginous distance between those views, one can read contemporary U.S. drama's petition in bankruptcy.
That there is plenty of petty rubbish onstage no one will deny, but the current abdication of audiences is indicative of a far subtler melody—they are rejecting the most intensive contact that can exist among human beings outside their private lives. As opposed to those who play it cool, the theater at its passionate best plays it nothing but hot. With molten fury it welds mind to mind, heart to heart, skin to skin, and soul to soul. Whenever the theater is weak, it is because man is denying man and shielding his feeblest self from the pain, power, majesty and glory of existence. But this is the only language that great drama ever spoke, and will again speak in a great theatrical age.