Birthday Mutterings

Abstract

ONE OF THE JOBS of the play reviewer is to send regular messages back from the artistic front, praising, damning, describing individual artifacts as they find their way to the stage. One of the duties of the drama critic is to impose order on disorder — to domesticate trends, to track the Zeitgeist to her lair, to be ever ready to explain where American drama is today. My own messages have become intermittent since I no longer review regularly and, although I have done a deal of pigeonhole stuffing in my day, my only impression of the current theatrical scene is that everyone is riding off in all directions. In a recent article in the New York Times Hilton Kramer explained that all the arts, drama included, are returning to conventional (classic) forms, and shortly after that Arthur Sainer reported in the Village Voice that the avant-garde is alive and occasionally well in Baltimore, where the New Theatre Festival brought companies from all over the country to the University of Maryland campus. One's sense of the way things are is further addled by Bicentennial obliquity. In what other year could one expect to find The Battle of Brooklyn and Col. Robert Munford's The Patriots cheek-by-jowl with Arrabal off-off-Broadway, or a play like Ann Hawkes Hutton's The Decision mounted in a real theater with a star of sorts - Hugh O'Brian (Wyatt Earp as George Washington). Hutton's play is a compendium of cliches of the Paul Green-Kermit Hunter school of outdoor drama; at least, the first act is. I left at the intermission because the reviewer I was with, bound to his seat by duty, said he would never speak to me again if I stayed.