Nearly 60 years have elapsed since James Agate, the London theater critic, quipped, “The English ceased to be playgoers as soon as there was anything else to go to.” On Broadway, the American solution has been to guarantee ticket sales by casting celebrities. The cause of Agate’s complaint, as well as our Band-Aid solution, are...

It’s only too easy to be cynical about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, and particularly about the excess and emptiness it stands for. While lavish money and attention have been spent on all aspects of this $8.5 million production—in ways that are guaranteed to impress the child in every adult—its packagers forgot the...

Lanford Wilson is consistently given the respect reserved for “great” American playwrights, but the distinction is a dubious honor at best. Each Wilson piece is overly scrutinized and judged ultimately as being a notch below what it might have been. Revivals of earlier neglected works become causes for celebration, but here too, there is always...

There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience. There has been a problem, of course,...

The avant-garde, according to those who are supposed to know, has been entering the mainstream, but the commentators busy cataloging this development for future art historians seem to have forgotten that “avant-garde” and “mainstream” are mutually exclusive terms. Once our present has become past, it may become clearer that the greatest artists of this period...

A year or two before Ann Beattie’s breakthrough second novel, Falling in Place, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing a crowd of people, dressed in evening gowns and suits, drinks in hand, milling around what looked like an outdoor cocktail party with nearly all of humanity in attendance. The caption read simply: “Woodstock:...

A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the...

While Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig are desperate to find, if not manufacture, a “female aesthetic,” it fails to emerge from their Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights; in fact, most of the 30 represented playwrights deny either its existence or its relevance. Liliane Atlan (French) claims, “I don’t look for the masculine or the feminine...

As one sign of Chekhov’s greatness, his very name is invoked (in adjective form) to assess the work of others. But even while Chekhovian has been called into service on numerous occasions—in recent years, for example, to epitomize such disparate playwrights as Lanford Wilson and Beth Henley, or a bit earlier to position Lillian Hellman...

During the ongoing, international celebration of Samuel Beckett’s 80th birthday, which commenced last spring, much is being said, written, and done to reiterate unequivocally his position as the preeminent playwright of our century. There is no debate, really, so much as an affirmation and an exploration of his unquestioned significance. The irony, of course, is...

As if he still had somewhere to get to, Neil Simon finally arrived in 1986: 25 years after his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, opened on Broadway 1 or 18 plays and four musicals later. With more than a third of the decade remaining, Time magazine had the audacity to proclaim Broadway Bound “the best...

Tucked away in one of 2.3 Diary entries, Ned Rorem suggests that “inside every artist is a banker struggling to get out.” Though Rorem was merely penning another one of his inversions-for-inversion’s-sake, the particular aphorism he derived here seems curiously relevant to Spalding Gray. In his evolution (some would call it his “perfection”) of the...

In the 1980 film Atlantic City, Burt Lancaster, portraying a has-been racketeer, turns to a young companion while they’re walking along the Board walk and exclaims, “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in the old days.” According to Louis Malle, the film’s director, the producers wanted to cut that line: “They said it didn’t...

“A morality which has within it no room for truth is no morality at all” —Flaubert ” . . . But the thing is, you know, let’s face it, there’s a whole enormous world out there that I don’t ever think about, and I certainly don’t take responsibility for how I’ve lived in that world....

“Who can keep up with anything these days?” —Denis Donoghue, The New Republic, 3/10/86 “If a National Theater is to be in only one city, it should, of course, be in New York, the center of the country’s cultural life and the fount of its theatrical traditions. That’s where the acting and directing talent would...

Poor Zoe. Poor William. Poor Lillian. As if it were a conspiracy to compensate for what they deemed a distortion of the facts, the critics seized Zoe Caldwell’s one-woman show Lillian, written by William Luce, as an occasion to say more about Lillian Hellman than to discuss the biodrama they were offered. The most prevalent...

“That ever recurring topic, the decline of the drama, seems to have consumed of late, more of the material in question than would have sufficed for a dozen prime ministers . . . “ —Edgar Allan Poe, 1845 “[The 1922-1923 Season is] the first season in a generation not to have been described as the...