The Public Arts: Drama's Electronic Renaissance: Part II

Last spring we examined the new dimensions that film and TV were bringing to the study of the theatre in the English classroom. The suggestion was made that the art of drama had been at a hidden disadvantage in relation to the "private" arts of essay, poem, and fiction. Only now, with the movies and TV democratizing patronage of the stage, are we able to do as effective a job with that genre as we have been able to do all along with the less public forms. It remains to explore the new possibilities that print and recordings are bringing to classroom study of drama.

These media extend our effectiveness in two ways--by making the entire history of drama more accessible to our best students and by widening the spectrum of tastes appealed to in the curriculum. It seems to me there is a danger, with the present justified concern about the fate of the superior student, that we will forget that it is just as essential to increase the effectiveness of our contact with the run-of-the-mill student. Intelligent exploitation of the newer media permits us to achieve both ends.

One way of helping young people understand the precarious and difficult achievement of a national theatrical tradition is to take them back in our history to the time when we hadn't yet achieved much. Grace Overmyer's America's First Hamlet (New York University Press, 1957, $6.50) is very useful for gaining that kind of background. This biography of John Howard Payne (1791-1852), more famous as the lyricist of "Home, Sweet Home," describes in detail the troubles that beset a man who wanted to be an artist before many Americans were too interested in the arts. First of all, there was his counting-house employer in New York who wanted the teen-aged Payne to stay on the job until eight o'clock, well after the 6: 30 p.m. curtain. (There were theatrical double features in those days.)

At fourteen, however, Payne became the rage of polite society along the Atlantic seaboard, when he somehow managed after a twelve-hour work-day to write and publish Thespian Mirror, the city's first journal of the theatre. A few months later, now a mature fifteen, he both shocked (with the word "damn") and thrilled the New York literati with his own sentimental melodrama, Julia: or the Wanderer. The moralistic nationalism of the critics tells us much about the origins of the theatre in our country.

Payne went on to eke out a precarious existence as a maturing boy actor, translator of French melodrama for the London stage, a crusader for Indian rights back in America, and finally as American consul in Tunis. Just as Samuel F. B. Morse turned from painting to telegraphy, so Payne gave up the theatre for the diplomatic service. Institutions did not support the ambitions of our first artists. It is hoped that the newest anthologies will use Miss Overmyer's scholarship to reveal how much standards of criticism, styles and themes, modes of patronage, and conditions of life for writer and actor have changed in the American theatre.

Until the facts are assimilated into headnotes and introductions, teachers will find the book interesting and rewarding. It is a pity, however, that the volume is so repetitive, long, and expensive. For example, Frederick B. Tolles' James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Little, Brown's Library of American Biography, 1957, $3.50) is every bit as scholarly, much more vigorous and economical in style, and half as long and half as expensive. It might be noted in passing that scholars ought to use their own special mass medium-the book-as imaginatively as they ask TV and film artists to use theirs.

The Library of American Biography, edited by Oscar Handlin, has already amply shown that scholars can be both brief and authoritative. Teachers curious about American cultural history will enjoy the Logan biography as well as Oliver Larkin's Samuel F. B. Morse and American Democratic Art. Louis B. Wright's volume in the New American Nation Series, The Cultural Life in the American Colonies, 1607-1763 (Harper's, 1957, $5.00) is another good example of efficient scholarly communication that has value for the teacher of American literature.

Prime example of extraordinarily expert communication of special knowledge about American culture is the Ford Foundation serial, Perspectives, USA, now complete at sixteen issues. (Available at Marboro Book Stores, 222 Fourth Avenue, New York City, for about $8.00, one-third the subscription price.) Ironically, this series was intended to interpret American cultural life to foreigners, but most Americans have found to their surprise and dismay how little they knew about the situation of the creative arts in contemporary America. And, just as Grace Overmyer's book deepens a student's sense of his cultural past, so essays on the theatre in Perspectives, USA, sketch in the details of the contemporary American theatre.

Especially useful is Alice Griffin's "New Trends in the American Theatre," in No. 14, an analysis of the renaissance off-Broadway and in the regional theatres in local communities and colleges. Miss Griffin's notes on the regional theatre in the Theatre Arts monthly provide students with additional sharp images of how they can help bring a living drama to their own localities.

The vitality of such indigenous theatre is probably our ultimate goal anyway in the teaching of dramatic appreciation. For mature students, the complete text of a new play in each issue of Theatre Arts provides further incentive for a native theatre; and so do anthologies reprinting popular summer-stock plays like Brooks Atkinson's New Voices in the American Theatre (Modern Library, $1.45), which contains Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba, and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.