The Public Arts: Drama's Electronic Renaissance: I.

Drama's Electronic Renaissance: I. Teaching drama has suffered severe handicaps for the past century. When cheap print democratized literature, it seemed to give drama as big a break as it unquestionably had given the genres of poetry, essay, and fiction (the last of which it made dominant). A text of the play, however, nowhere near approximates the dramatic act in the sense that a poetic text is itself sufficient stimulus to artistic understanding.

Acting is the essence in theatre, and we have been hobbled in our efforts to teach the drama partly because we assumed that if we had the text, we could simulate the intensity of drama in the classroom. This assumption may have cost us dearly: we stuck faithfully to our Shakespeare and produced several generations with an almost compulsive dread (part guilty conscience, part arrogant lowbrowism) of the most popular playwright of all time. Happily, the public arts of TV, film, paperback, and LP now provide us powerful resources to bring to reality our earlier impossible dream of democratizing great drama for the popular audience.

BROADCAST
Ironically, TV seems the place to start in our efforts to bring the treasury of world theatre into our curriculum. Within the new medium's useless wastes of prefabricated mediocrity, there are two useful areas of programming: original teleplays and adaptations of classic and Broadway plays. The original teleplays, since they are closer to the sensibilities and moral contexts of our students, are a more natural point of departure than the classics. To our great advantage, more and more printed materials are available to make teleplays teachable. Take the growing literature by and about Paddy Chayefsky. Simon and Schuster has published six of his plays, first in hard covers, and, more recently, in paper ($1.50).

Chayefsky's illuminating essays on the problems of his craft precede each play. The scenario for his new movie, The Bachelor Party (Hecht-Lancaster Production), is a February Signet release (New American Library, S 1385, 350). Literary Cavalcade (33 W. 42nd Street, New York 36) prints The Printer's Measure with Chayefsky's notes on its construction in the March 1957 issue. Gore Vidal's collection of Best Television Plays (Ballantine, 350, and a Teen Age Book Club selection) contains Chayefsky's The Mother as well as representative plays by authors some of whom also have complete collections in print: Robert Alan Aurthur, Horton Foote (Harcourt, Brace), J. P. Miller, Tad Mosel (Simon and Schuster), Reginald Rose (Simon and Schuster), Gore Vidal (Little, Brown), and Rod Serling. (Simon and Schuster will soon publish a volume of his plays and movies with the author's commentary on the problems of translating from one medium to another, an approach that will make this volume most useful in English classrooms.)

Unhappily, these hardback volumes, with the exception of Chayefsky's, have not sold well, surely only because English teachers are unaware of their existence; the support of our profession alone could make the publication of such volumes profitable. Henry Maloney has prepared a series of literate, imaginative study questions for the Balla- tine paperback collection that should persuade English teachers of the feasibility of teaching teleplays in print (Clearing House, March and April 1957).

Another teacher's perspective on Chayefsky appears in the same magazine's May 1956 issue; a scholar's appraisal of the Bronx realist appears in the Winter 1955 issue of the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television. But teaching teleplays in print is no better in the last analysis than teaching Shakespeare by print alone. After a great deal of badgering, the network producers of teleplays are finally providing this writer with advance scripts of promising TV plays: for my teaching suggestions, see the weekly column "Listenables and Lookables" in Scholastic Teacher.

Programs that seem consistently important to me: "Matinee Theatre," during school hours (see producer McCleery's invitation to English teachers and their students in Teacher, February 1, 1957); "Playhouse 90"; and the weekly hour- long dramas, Alcoa, Kaiser, "Studio One," Montgomery, and Kraft--a play a day, Sunday through Thursday, ideally timed for followup class discussion. The drama section of the Sunday New York Times and the TV" Guide list all the plays; "Listenables" has space only for those plays that seem teachable, and for which scripts arrive before my deadline.

FILM
The publication of Lewin and Frazier's Standards of Photoplay Appreciation, including a "Photoplay Approach to Shakespeare" (the Gielgud-Mason-Brando Julius Caesar), in a limited (2,000), expensive ($4.75 for 160 well-bound, high-gloss pages) edition reminds us that Lewin and others have for a generation spearheaded the kind of critical approach to movies that we urge for television drama. Lewin makes the point that, through 16 mm release of Hollywood features, schools can now do a "much better job of utilizing children's natural interest in movies."

He might have added that television's use of a much greater backlog of feature films puts the English teacher in an entirely unexpected and remarkable position to teach the history of the sound film: WOR-TV, for example, made arrangements with the New York City schools to distribute a free study guide for Abe Lincoln in Illinois while the TV station showed that old feature.

We hesitated to teach the films when they were new because we couldn't require a class to pay admission; now the same features will be showing free on local TV stations. Lewin's backlog of "Photoplay Studies" may in many cases provide us with ready made critical points of departure (available from Educational and Recreational Guides, Inc., 10 Brainerd, Summit, New Jersey; current guides are available by subscription for $3.00 a year, $5.00 for two years).

"Photoplay Studies," although not of uniformly high quality, do provide the teacher with useful approaches to current entertainment films. The general editor, William Lewin, has himself written a particularly good one on The Barretts of Wimpole Street, starring Jennifer Jones and John Gielgud. The cost of this illustrated guide for those who do not subscribe to the entire series depends on the number of copies purchased (under twenty-five copies, 30 each; in 5,000 lots, 60 each).

Dr. Lewin's excellent summaries and suggestions in this particular study guide should prove very effective for teachers who want to use the handsome color and wide-screen film to motivate reading of the Brownings' poetry. As he points out, Caedmon Records (277 Fifth Avenue, New York 16) have two excellent recordings to provide classroom follow-ups for student patronage of the movie: James Mason's reading of three dramatic monologues; and Katharine Cornell's reading of Elizabeth's sonnets, backed by the three famous love scenes from the original Besier play. Another source for study suggestions on current entertainment films is the series of study guides on the reverse side of The Green Sheet from Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films.

Dr. Joseph Mersand's Committee has recently provided teachers with free guides to War and Peace, The Friendly Persuasion, The King and I, Moby Dick, Lust for Life, and A Guidance Program in Film Appreciation and Taste. Write to Dr. Mersand at Jamaica High School, 168th Street and Gothic Drive, Jamaica 32, New York; he welcomes requests for these and forthcoming selections. Hecht-Lancaster, the producers of Marty, have engaged Kenneth Macgowan, editor of the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, to compile an educational manual about the making of that firm's current production of George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, starring Sir Laurence Olivier.

Designed for college courses in movie appreciation and production, this complete, illustrated report on the making of a movie from inception to finished picture will also have value for the upper grades of high school, just as Lewin's Standards of Photoplay Appreciation is a worthwhile book for the lower grades and terminal students. Lewin's inclusion of a study guide for the widely anthologized Julius Caesar will appeal to teachers who know that the 16 mm MGM film will help them teach the play more successfully.

As a matter of fact, next month, in this department, we will explore how the media of recordings and print make our task of teaching the classics more rewarding in the same way that broadcasts and films have enhanced our explication of contemporary drama.