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Most of the regional plays that get to Broadway deserve to be there: their subjects touch the mainstream audience; they deal with life-and-death themes in what Papp way calls "a nice, Elephant Man, cerebral, Children of a inoffensive Lesser God, Fifth of July and The Shadow Box bring eloquence and some caustic wit to TV-movie topics: disease, deafness, disfiguration, dying. But they can hardly be said to occupy the theatrical avantgarde, once the exclusive terrain of off-Broadway. Now that is the liberated space where JoAnne Akalaitis' Mabou Mines mix media like a Molotov cocktail, where Robert Wilson stages all-night hypnotic ballets and Charles Ludlam scrambles sexes, genres and audiences' minds.
If there is one playwright who straddles the abyss dividing the radical theater and the more accessible regional fare, it is San Francisco-based Sam Shepard, 38. Shepard is the most ambitious and powerful dramatist in the U.S.; his plays cut to, and through, the heart of outlaw America. And outlawed they seem to be: Shepard has never been represented on Broadway—not with Buried Child, which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, or with his best play, the ferociously poetic The Tooth of Crime (1972), which never even made it to off-Broadway.
The same artistic politics that dominate the U.S. theater, characterized by conservatism on Broadway and moderate liberalism in the regionals, can be found in the commercial and subsidized theaters of London. But the time when Americans suffered spasms of cultural inferiority toward the mother country has long passed. "Except for the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company," Jacobs argues, "theater in Great Britain is a disaster." Adds Mason: "We're in much better shape over here. Only the Royal Court Theater in London has a system for creating new plays. The U.S. is where it's happening. Go to Germany, to Rumania —they all want American plays."
It is true that there is a new balance of trade between the theatrical nations. Ten of the 45 shows in New York are British; six of the 30 shows in the West End are American. Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue have become two-way streets. The ruck of English popular comedy can be every bit as disposable as last year's Broadway sitcom. But when British theater is good, it is very good indeed. The best Broadway play (Amadeus), the best Broadway musical (Evita), the best new off-Broadway play (Cloud 9) and the best off-Broadway revival (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) are all of English extraction.
Then there is Nicholas Nickleby. Says Elizabeth McCann, one of the producers of the show: "The great lesson to be learned from Nicholas is that New York desperately needs a large scale subsidized repertory company. Our producers must depend so completely on the ticket buyer —rather than on a partial subsidy—that we must produce what the largest number of people want. I suppose the old saw is still true: 'Theater must succeed as a business, or it will fail as an art.'