The Theatre Gap

In a normally dull Broadway season the Moscow Art Theatre's month-long stay last February may have been as momentous as its first visit, 42 years ago. The Russians have shown the city's brassy, bankrupt show business world the advantages of a mature repertory company.

On its first American tour, in 1923, the company performed four plays, including Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. It returned with those two dramas, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, and a new "realistic Soviet" play, Kremlin Chimes, all of which were warmly praised by the newspaper and magazine critics.

Dead Souls, which opened over intersession, was the company's first offering. When I saw it I was awed by the precision and unity of the cast. No expression was wasted, and even the smallest movement was related to the entire scene. The acting was carefully controlled yet emotionally convincing, and each actor presented his character with a few clear gestures, making room for an endless variety of Gogol's cynical caricatures.

But what fascinated me even more than the company's easy skill was the sight of a living tradition. The production followed Konstantin Stanislavsky's original staging. He first presented Dead Souls in the early 1930's, and several of the actors that were then with the company played with it in New York. Alla Tarasova who played Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, portrayed the young Anya in the same play when the Moscow Art made its 1923 tour. The entire cast seems secure in a form which they have developed, working together first as students and later as a repertory company.

This form was given to the Moscow Art by its founder and first director, Stanislavsky, and became famous as the Stanislavsky method. It was born with Stanislavsky's disgust with the "ridiculous habits of the time." Actors declaimed or hammed, deeply intoning their lines and taking bows after particularly well-received speeches. Costumes, sets, and direction were the same for every production. An author could not see the wardrobe and make-up before the first performance, and the director could not silence the ushers during a play. Stanislavsky "declared war on all the conventionalities of the theatre, wherever they might occur." His method for an actor preparing a role combined physical training (speech and dance) with mental conditioning. Each actor immersed himself in his part and learned the thoughts and feelings of his character so well that, using his own emotions, he could give that character life.

By the 1920's the method was being taught to actors both in America and in Europe. But while stable repertory companies continued to develop in Europe, America's theatre world became ensnared in the wealth and glamor of Broadway and Hollywood. Producers in the legitimate theatre relied on big hits to make their killings, and film makers built their companies around big name stars.

In spite of the efforts of the Group Theatre in the 1930's, the hit mentality and star system continued to govern Broadway. Rising costs increased the risk of producing a Broadway show and decreased the number of successful (profitable) ventures. Shows in the fifties had to be bigger money-makers than before to cover their expenses, and to insure large audiences producers would seek out more popular stars (regardless of whether or not they could act). Despite this subservience to popular taste, profits declined as costs rose still more, tickets became more expensive, and New York theatre attendance dropped.

In the 1960's, musicals must run for almost a season before they begin to earn a profit. Producers try to prevent great losses by making large advance ticket sales, usually through the drawing power of a big name star. But occasionally a show will collapse without even beginning a run. A recent Broadway disaster was the musical Kelly, which opened and closed last January and cost its backers over $650,000. Most Broadway producers now search for "first-class" musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof and Luv, which blend small doses of serious concern with large amounts of enjoyable humor and song.

With the visit of the Moscow Art Theatre, critics have begun to talk of the "theatre gap" between Moscow and New York and to point out the artistic advantages of repertory. Such a company can devote more care to the preparation of a play and use its best talent for an ideal casting of every part. It can present a new play one week and a classic the next, and it need not rely on the big hit or the star for financial success. The Moscow Art this season, with a company of 140 actors, is running 33 productions, of which 11 are contemporary Soviet plays, 14 are Russian classics, and 8 are foreign works. In contrast, all of Broadway has only 25 shows, including the three at the city's own repertory company at Lincoln Center.

The Lincoln Center Theatre is at present not much better off than Broadway. It began its first season on the wrong foot, when its producers built Arthur Miller's After the Fall into a Broadway-type hit, and the play's female lead, Barbara Loden, into a Broadway star. Of the theatre's other productions, O'Neill's Marco Millions and S.N. Behrman's But for Whom Charlie were coolly received, and The Changeling was disastrous. Because of The Changeling, the Center's Board of Directors decided to fire Robert Whitehead, the theatre's artistic director. With him went Elia Kazan, the director, and Arthur Miller, who will withdraw After the Fall and Incident at Vichy from repertory after this season.

Theatre is artistically flourishing outside of New York, in Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Boston, which all have growing repertory companies, and especially at the San Francisco Actors Workshop. Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, the workshop's co-directors, will soon take over the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, and Michael O'Sullivan, one of the San Francisco's leading actors, is now starring in Lincoln's production of Tartuffe.

No one insists that repertory companies are the cure-all for Broadway's ills. Repertory companies will not end the theatre's competition with radio and television, and they cannot promise financial security. But in the past season New York theatre people have seen the work of a great repertory company. They realize that nothing in New York can compare to it. And they have been asking, "Why don't we have something like the Moscow Art Theatre? What has happened to drama in New York?"