The Year Ahead: Hope Tempered by Reason

ON or off Broadway, September is always the month that most nearly resembles Dr. Johnson's definition of a second marriage--"the triumph of hope over experience."

For the ordinary theatergoer, the new season brings the hope of reliving some enchanted theatrical evening of the past. For the actor, the new season holds out the hope of a breakthrough to fame --after which he tends to abandon the theater like a Brando or a Burton. The producer nourishes the hone of a croupier to rake in the chips. The backer, that garishly garbed seraph who roots for his cash on opening night with cacophonous enthusiasm, hopes for some sort of glittering new social credential and the consolation prize of a virtually guaranteed tax loss. The critic approaches the new season like an Israelite at the edge of the Red Sea--perhaps the surging waters of mediocrity will part.

In the season that is starting, hope must be tempered with reason. At the present time the U.S. theater is in a drastic dual crisis. The obvious one is money. In 1956, My Fair Lady was put on for $400,000; last May Dear World lost its backers upwards of $750,000. The theater's angels, who customarily take their temperatures with a Dow-Jones thermometer, feel distinctly chilly after a sustained stock-market decline. The result is that while 33 new plays and 45 musicals have been announced for the season, only seven plays and four musicals are definitely scheduled to open between now and Jan. 1. Indeed, this may be the year of permanent transition to heavy off-Broadway production, which rose from 37 new plays and musicals in 1966-67 to 80 this past year.

A less tangible but far more profound crisis is the lack of a commanding dramatist with a compelling vision. Half of today's plays seem to be written in some dusty attic of the past and the other half in some apocalyptic junkyard of the future. The shock fads of homosexual, lesbian and sado-masochistic themes, the vogue of nudity and participatory theater may well continue, but they cannot mask the lack of substance. They are frames without pictures, devices without a purposeful direction. This is a theater that is severely pinched for both means and ends, but at least it has a hope chest to peek into labeled Anticipatory Theater.

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