Letter to a Would-be Playwright

Author's Note: One does not write on theatre without receiving letters from playwrights. There is the playwright who tells me I have all the right ideas about drama and he has put all these ideas into a play – will I read it? There is the playwright who gets his attorney to write me demanding that every copy of my review of his play be removed forthwith from the market or he will sue me. Most ingratiating of all is the playwright who hasn't yet written a play and wants to know how to write one. I always feel that, if I really knew the answer, I would myself be the author of a list of plays at least as good as "Oedipus Rex," "King Lear" and "Phèdre." But one such "playwright" recently raised questions I can at least begin to answer – as follows.

Dear X:

So you have not yet written a play. One could wish some of our other dramatists had shown such restraint. But then, you tell me, you are still quite young. The temptation to write a play may well be on the point of becoming irresistible. Once it does so, all anyone can do is try to keep you from writing a bad play. It will not be easy. Many bad plays find favor in the great heart of the public, and most of them find favor in the heart, great or small, of their authors.

If you insist on writing a play, nothing can stop you from writing a bad one except the act of writing a good one. Can you learn to do this? Or, to give the question its classic form: can playwriting be taught? (continued on page 106)Letter to a would-be playwright(continued from page 103) You tell me a friend of yours says it can't. But you tell me this because you assume that I believe it can. But do I? Well, yes and no, and more particularly – while I am feeling needled by your reading of my mind – No! There is a lot to be said for the unteachability of any subject. As I calm down, though, I shall agree with you in seeing no reason why playwriting should be regarded as less teachable than other subjects. Oh yes, it is less teachable than reading, writing and 'rithmetic, but those are elementary subjects. Playwriting is an advanced subject, and at the advanced stage in any field a student has chiefly to work on his own. The point is that while the teacher, at this stage, may intervene less often, his intervention may still be valuable, even, in certain cases, essential. A coach of professional swimmers does not jump in the water and manipulate his men's limbs … A psychoanalyst does not interrupt his patient's every third word … In short, I would not exclude the possibility that a teacher might be useful to a playwright.

You tell me that even your friend who believes that playwriting can be taught adds that in practice it never is. Here my quarrel would only be with the word "never." I will grant you that most teaching of playwriting is ineffectual – if you will grant me that most teaching of everything else is ineffectual. Nature is said to be wasteful, but, if the art of education is anything to go by, art is even more wasteful. All these man-hours in classrooms – for nothing – possibly for that worse than nothing which is miseducation – the kind that has to be unlearned later, if indeed it still can be! And the pity of it, considering that the children being miseducated are not idiots! The energy of youth passes through our schools like so much unused water power. The years of opportunity between ten and twenty are thrown away on mere sociability, and, of late, sociability has led through boredom to unsociability, otherwise known as crime. How can anyone believe in Education, when the educators have provided nothing but awful examples of How Not To Do It?

But I hardly need to tell you what a mess education is: you are, after all, educated. Or does your being educated prevent you from seeing the facts of education as of everything else? How have you spent the last ten years? On higher things, I should judge, for your letter bears witness to your neglect of lower things, notably grammar, syntax, diction, not to speak of style. You cannot write English. You propose to write plays; but you cannot write English; and presumably you see no great contradiction here. You will tell me that English could always be learned if absolutely necessary but that, firstly, plays aren't written in the language of Shakespeare, they are written in that of the gutter and, secondly, plays aren't properly said to be written at all, they are constructed, a Wright not being a Writer but an artificer, artisan, or fixer.

The reason you will tell me this is that you know I don't agree. You want to hear what I will say because you smell a rat: you yourself don't believe the stuff you are parroting. After all, you have not yet taken that course in playwriting, and so you are as yet incompletely indoctrinated with the antiliterary philosophy of its teachers. I will let you into the secret that underlies this philosophy – a secret deduction which perhaps those initiates don't even confess to themselves. It is this: because what is good as literature may be bad as theatre, it follows that bad writing is the first step to what is good in theatre. That is not undemocratic, you will admit: for such a first step can be taken by any citizen of whatever color, creed or nation. Some citizens are even willing to pay tuition for the privilege.

Why not learn the tricks of a trade that is nothing but tricks? Well, there is a reason why not, and it is that the path of foolishness isn't always simple. Bad taste has its pitfalls, just like good. For that matter, who has the courage of his puerility? The fool must perforce deny being a fool. It is even true, despite Machiavelli, that the knave must deny – even to himself – being a knave. Conscious knavery such as Machiavelli recommended is as much of a strain as virtue. For the price, one might just as well be good …

The teacher of playwrighting (despite Webster, it should be spelled that way) can start out cheerily enough with the declaration that the box office never lies, etcetera. The purpose of art is to please, etcetera. We aren't a lot of snobs, are we, etcetera. Just look what awful plays those highbrows write, etcetera. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is one of us, he took a course in playwriting from the horses outside the Globe Theatre, etcetera. Oh, those awful literati, those coteries, those cliques, I wrote a book once, and you know what was done to me by those awful literati, those coteries, those cliques, etcetera? In short, what we believe in is Democracy, and the people's choice is made known to eight newsmen at eleven-thirty every evening by a process which may be mystic but which is no less Real. Etcetera.

When the tumult and shouting die, you realize, I hope, that, of all the gods, the public is only a goddess and a bitch at that. La donna é mobile. If the public really ever had an opinion and stuck to it, one might at least be able to pay attention. But what is the public's decision on Abie's Irish Rose? As of now, total indifference. As of thirty-five years ago, ecstatic approval. Now tell me – and don't use your head, use your public – is that a good play or isn't it? Don't bother to answer, just draw this moral: teachers who wish to teach the successful formulas are faced with the disturbing fact that the successful formulas change. It would even seem that a pattern sometimes fails precisely by becoming a formula, and has at that point to be replaced by another pattern, which in turn fails when it becomes a formula, and so on.

There is a bag of tricks in any profession, and young people will always learn the tricks, may often be the better for learning them, and may never be the worse for learning them – provided they accept them at no more than their actual value. I am attacking – yes, now you have brought out the aggressor in me – the notion that a play differs from a poem or a picture precisely in being all tricks. No one ever put that notion forward, you say. Perhaps not, I reply, but the teachers imply its truth and not once or twice but all the time. Upon that sand they have built their theatres. Upon pure philistinism. Upon hostility to sensibility and imagination, not to mention thought.

This is the real reason why the books on How To Write A Play are so depressing. In many of them there's a lot of shrewd observation. What worked last time is offered to the tyro as what is likely to work next time and a thousand times thereafter. A list of the things that worked last time – this kind of exposition, this kind of curtain line, this kind of leading character, this kind of ending – is known as Dramatic Technique, is known as How To Write A Play.

In time the books on How to Write A Play became a joke. It was then that the total unteachability of playwriting began to be talked about. No one can help you because playwriting proceeds upon no principles! With the silly simple rules of the how-to books, these counter-revolutionaries throw out critical understanding altogether, falling back upon an extreme relativism – so many plays, so many rules – and an extreme subjectivism – each playwright a law unto himself. This philosophy, whatever its truth, is likely to be just as cramping as the how-to books themselves, for it gives the playwright nothing to lean on but Inspiration, a creature far too whimsical and elusive to keep him from the bottle.

Those who hold this view make the same mistake as those who hold the opposite: they conceive of playwriting as a thing apart, an art somehow exempt from the normal obligations of art. I want to start at the other end. The playwright is, first, an artist and, secondly, he (continued on page 112)Letter to a would-be playwright(continued from page 106) is a particular kind of artist – a writer. This would be an utterly uncalled-for formulation, were it not more and more assumed that the playwright is neither a writer nor an artist but only a manipulator.

Not long ago a playwright was summoned to the hotel room of a producer. The producer had read the script, and was proceeding not only to talk about it but to rewrite it as he paced the carpet. He redid the first scene on his feet, reciting all the roles. "You aren't taking it down," he then said to the playwright. "No," said the playwright, "I'm taking it in. I go home. I let all this rest in my mind. What I can't absorb evaporates. What remains gets into the play later – if I like it and know how to work it in. The play needs time for the absorption of the new ideas, the new material. These things must happen organically, sir." That playwright spoke as an artist and a writer. That producer spoke as a charlatan, not to say an egomaniac. The producer dropped the play on the grounds that the playwright didn't know his business. He meant, of course, that he didn't know his place. That place was the place of a stenographer – or shall we say an echo chamber for His Master's Voice? Anyhow, it isn't egomania I want to call your attention to but the failure to cope with the psychology of the artist.

The artist has learned his craft but is never content to be a craftsman. The craft serves the art or, as Goethe put it, one only writes out of personal necessity. The endings of plays, for example, are not a gamble on the audience's response. They are a matter of what the playwright feels to be necessary. They cannot be open to discussion. Discussion with whom anyway? A work of art springs from its author's nature. No one can tell him what that is. Nor can he guarantee that any play he is working on will turn out well. That is where he differs from the craftsman. Craftsmanship can be perfected.

Consider what is happening when we take a work of art with a bad ending and stick on a good ending supplied to us by a craftsman or play-doctor. It can be true that we are perfecting the imperfect. I imagine a good craftsman could improve on the ending of Chekhov's Ivanov. However, from an artistic point of view, Chekhov's bad ending is necessary. The play could be fixed up externally with an ending that is neater and more logical, yet I don't think anyone could find a new ending that would grow organically from the three preceding acts. If anyone could, he would be Chekhov's true collaborator – Beaumont to his Fletcher – and not a mere mechanic. It seems more likely that Ivanov is an impasse that can never become a thoroughfare. In Ivanov we have three superb acts from which there is no way out. When this sort of thing happens, an author writes another play. As for the public, it must settle for three great acts and accept one act that is less than great.

If you have ever wondered why the newspaper critics often have more to say against the great writers than against the currently fashionable craftsmen, the example of Ivanov may make the reason clear. A craftsman can achieve perfection because his work is the rearrangement of known elements – the solution of jigsaw puzzles. The artist's material is that greatest of mysteries, human nature. He feels his way in the dark. In philistines such things create anxiety and defensive resentment, but for anyone in the audience who has an inkling of what art is about, and an ounce of sympathy for it, there is more enjoyment in the imperfection of an Ivanov than in the bright, shallow perfection of the craftsmen.

Yet mustn't I get to know the theatre, you ask, grease paint and gelatines, spots and teasers, flats and wings – that celebrated other world behind the footlights which is so notoriously "not literature"? I think you must. Or I would think you must if your own letter did not suggest that you already know that other world better than this one. You certainly know more of theatre practice than of literary practice. I think you should be urged to restore the balance.

"Shakespeare and Molière …" you begin to retort. I know. I have reason to know because I've been told so often: Shakespeare and Molière were actors. Molière was even a good actor. May I tell you something about them which I can guarantee you have not heard a thousand times before? They both managed somehow to see a lot of the world outside the theatre – of the two worlds outside the theatre, in fact, the direct experience they had of human living and the indirect experience of it that is acquired through reading. Molière learned a lot not only from clowns but from Jesuits.

We have no certain knowledge of what Shakespeare was doing in the crucial decade of young manhood, his twenties. There is an old tradition to the effect that he was a teacher, though not of playwriting. This tradition has been discounted only because people haven't wished to believe in a possibly erudite Shakespeare. Yet the plays themselves prove that he had studied and absorbed the whole culture of his day. He was steeped in the thought of his time as Thomas Mann, say, was steeped in Freud. Freud, you tell me, is known on Broadway too; he's even the only thinker who is. Ah yes, but to be steeped in Freud, as Mann was, is one thing, and to have dabbled a little in Freudianism is to have acquired the little knowledge that is worse than none.

Is there time, you ask, is there time to read more than a little? Life is real, life is earnest, and one ought to be seen a good deal at the Algonquin and the Plaza. The smoke-filled room cannot also be thought-filled.

For at my back I always hearTime's wingèd chariot hurrying near …

And Time is as nothing compared to The New York Times. The young playwright will be glad of the help of more practical heads (arms, legs?) from the Theatre. They can rewrite him, right there in the hotel – in various hotels, changing with the stage scenery, New Haven, Boston, Philadelphia …

To this, the answer is that more time would be left, if less time were wasted. Every time-saving device from the telephone to the airplane ends up as a timewasting device. The speeding-up of playwriting that takes place in hotels is a slowing-down of playwriting – in fact a complete stoppage. Of course, it is true that playwrights must learn the art of the theatre, and above all its central art: that of acting. I would complain that most of them don't learn enough of it, partly because acting is a hard thing to learn about and very few people are specially sensitive to it, partly because the theatrical life generally consists in anything but the pursuit of essential theatre. It will be time to tell you to spend your days and nights with theatre people when theatre people spend their days or nights with the theatre art. At present, the injunction to be practical and get to know the working theatre is an injunction to squander the best years of your life in agents' offices, producers' offices, hotels, the right restaurants – or anywhere else in telephonic communication with these places.

We hear of the playwright's need of the theatre, but what of his need, equally real, to keep his distance? Henrik Ibsen "got to know the working theatre" as a young man, and that sufficed. To write plays he went away from the theatre, nor did he return to see them through rehearsal. The most eminent of American playwrights, Eugene O'Neill, got his bellyful of theatre in childhood (maybe that's the best time), and considerably before middle age he felt the need to put a healthy distance between him and the gentlemen who know all about it. Even Bernard Shaw, who was sociable, and who liked to direct his own plays, took up residence, as soon as he could, out of reach of bus and train. Every morning, as long as he could walk, he went down to his garden hut. To write. In solitude.

Does that sound rather grim? If you think it does, then we are making an interesting discovery: that you are not a writer. You may want "the theatre," but what you do not want is to write. Either it must be some other theatrical job you are cut out for, or it is not even theatre you want: it is prominence or parties or la vie de Bohème.

A writer, qua writer, does not "need the theatre." He only needs a typewriter, a table, a chair, and, surrounding these objects, four walls and a door that locks. Even a hotel room will do, if the lock is a strong one and the phone is out of order.

Lonely? But isn't loneliness the modern writer's favorite subject? Should he bely its importance? Then again, what about "the lonely crowd"? It is visible enough on Times Square, and in all public buildings adjacent thereto. Solitude in fact can be borne only by those who suffer least from loneliness, or at any rate by those who feel that their solitude is amply peopled. Writers are such persons. Their philosophy is that of Pirandello: people exist for you insofar as they have been taken into your thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings stay on after the "people" leave the room. Amazing to think how crowded was the solitude of a Tolstoy or a Dickens! At the opposite pole, we have people whose solitude is a terrifying emptiness; it even hurts them that Sardi's is closed on Sunday.

Think about this when next you hear that some so-called writer is a "real man of the theatre." He may just be gregarious: solitary work makes demands and he cannot meet them. Doubtless you remember Shaw's quip: those who can, do; those who cannot, teach. It requires but slight adjustment to our theme: those who can, write; those who cannot, write plays.

And those who cannot write plays, write television plays. The writer who cannot write is an institution nowadays, and makes more money than the writer who can write. Otherwise, why would he devote so much time to his non-writing?

Do you want money? No, don't say anything. It really doesn't matter what a person says to that question … There are few persons who cannot be tempted by money. A poet is only a person whose temptation to go after money is swamped by the temptation to write poetry. The poet has a simpler time of it than the dramatist: he makes a vow of poverty and leaves it at that. The dramatist never knows what will happen next. He may suddenly find himself as rich as the rich; but he cannot count on it. The situation is not easy on the nerves. Could your nerves stand it? And, if you did get rich, would you survive the experience as an artist? I am not assuming that you would wish to join the international set. I am thinking (among other things) of the following archetypal experience in Twentieth Century America.

A man is born in the slums of Brooklyn or the Bronx. His writing is his response to that milieu. Broadway and Hollywood enable him to move to the East Sixties. It's only half an hour by cab from where the folks live, but, humanly speaking, it might as well be in outer space. His small-time wife has to be replaced by a wife in the big time. His small-time life is replaced by a life in the big time. After all, he has achieved Success … Perhaps guilty conscience dictates a play saying how awful are the inhabitants of the East Sixties? But this play is not a good play. None of his plays are good plays any more. The theatre is now "hailing" a goodish play by a younger man – from Brooklyn or the Bronx – who is already in the taxi moving to the East Sixties …

I am (yes, you're right) only saying that, if you're going to be a writer, you will need a sense of identity. A firm one. Otherwise, "that undisturbed, innocent, somnambulatory process by which alone anything great can thrive is no longer possible." I am quoting a writer. He continues: "Our talents today lie exposed to public view. Daily criticisms, which appear in fifty different places, and the gossip that is provoked by them among the public, hamper the production of anything that is really sound … He who does not keep aloof from all this and isolate himself by main force is lost." The author of Egmont and Faust is describing what would later be called the alienation of the intellectual in modern society. The creative process, he is saying, must not be disturbed, must not be deflowered. It must be a form of sleepwalking. Now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was as worldly as any poet could afford to be. He spent much time on love affairs, and probably even more on affairs of state. But as for the world of the press agents and the press, he says: keep aloof or you will be lost.

Perhaps you are a stronger man than Goethe?

Let's assume you are strong enough to be a writer. That lonely room to which you are strong enough, and interested enough, to commit yourself, must not be peopled exclusively with your personal memories. Young as you are, you must not sit down and go to work without more ado on The Great American Play. Many have. And some of them have made a lot of money. What they have not made is The Great American Play.

In addition to memories, you need culture, all art being a crystallization of personal experience and second-hand experience. America is probably the only country in the world where a young person who wants to write a play (poem, novel) can imagine he is all set to go ahead on the basis of personal experience alone. (How many American short stories are but slightly more sophisticated renderings of the high school theme, written in the autumn: Something That Happened To Me This Summer.) Everywhere else there is Culture, which at its worst means: find out how it was done a hundred years ago and do it again, but at its best means: a sense of tradition.

A sense of tradition implies respect for the Masters. When the French actor Jean Vilar spoke in New York recently, many were surprised at his repeated allusions to "our fathers" and what they have left us. Where many Americans think they can "do it themselves" and deserve praise for trying to, your Frenchman unashamedly lives on inherited cultural wealth – without necessarily omitting to invest it properly and add the fruits of his own enterprise. Other Americans spend a good deal of emotional energy envying France. There is no need to: the Masters belong to all mankind. Among musicians, even in America, that fact is admitted. In the drama, as in all literature, there are language barriers. Yet have these stopped Balzac and Tolstoy being an inspiration to novelists? Per contra, drama written in English – by Shakespeare – has inspired writers all over the world.

Why do the classics matter? They certainly do not perform all the noble and world-bettering functions that people have been pleased to assign to them. One could easily defend the thesis: The Classics Don't Work. They are nothing, or they are a fount of inspiration, especially to artists.

A few of the classics at a time, that is. For the artist is seldom a man of catholic tastes. Indeed it is doubtful if anyone really has the kind of taste which Higher Education supposes that he has: equally receptive to all kinds of greatness. If you are looking one way, you cannot be looking the other way; and a proper education would just help you to see, without claiming to give you eyes in the back of your head. To the artist, anyhow, the Masters are not a row of marble statues of equal size and ranged in unalterable formation. Groupings and relationships change. Sometimes the artist must rebel against a particular Master, as the son against the father. There was Shaw's long campaign against Shakespeare. What one would deplore in a playwright would be indifference to Shakespeare, not hostility to him. (In any case, Shaw was really attacking the public's attitude to Shakespeare rather than the man himself.) Brecht later had to fight Goethe and Schiller. All that these things prove is that you can't have healthy religion without a certain amount of blasphemy.

The playwright's interest in the Masters is different from the scholar's interest. The scholar is concerned to place and appraise them. The artist is concerned only with what he can get out of them for his own practical purposes. His disrespect for information about them puts him at the opposite end of the scale from performers on a quiz program. But his need of the Masters is greater than anyone else's. They are his food. Goethe revealed to Eckermann that he could not let a year go by without reading some Molière.

It is hard, I think, for the aspiring American playwright to acquire such an attitude. I call your own letter to witness. "How," you rhetorically ask, "can one possibly imitate the classics today?" Who asked you to? Why so defensive? Stravinsky doesn't imitate earlier music. He makes legitimate use of it. And you might give a little thought to Bertolt Brecht's use of The Beggar's Opera – except that it is not so much the direct exploitation of classics that you need to know about at present as their subtle, indirect, pervasive, fructifying force.

It is not just a matter of the Masters. It is a matter of the relation between the playwright and the whole past of the art he serves. That relationship is always important and in our time has become even more so.

The last hundred years have seen the attempt to create a new kind of theatre that is the reverse of classic in any of the accepted senses of the term. The aim of the new, nonclassic theatre has been to present on the stage the illusion of ordinary life. The audience looks through a keyhole at the private life of its neighbors. A play is praised for the accuracy of its reporting and photography – "accuracy" here meaning the absence of exaggeration, interpretation, or even accent. Sometimes the severity of this formula has been relaxed, and a little democratic good will or Christian sentiment was admitted. I am speaking, as I trust you recognize, of the naturalistic play, still very much with us in the form of what Boris Aronson calls "the play about one's relations." At the time when I was reviewing Broadway plays and saw them all, I was surprised if I ever got to see anything on stage besides the middle-class American home. An American designer only needs one set for his whole repertoire. It consists of an American house, shown inside and out, and possibly upstairs and down. Such is the richness and variety of naturalistic design. What is called in this country The Method in acting is largely devoted to creating on stage the illusion of ordinary behavior. And the word "ordinary" receives a push downwards. According to this philosophy, a belch would always seem more real than a song. Such is the richness and variety of naturalistic acting.

But mark this paradox. Although naturalism is the dominant mode of modern drama, all the leading modern dramatists have tried to get away from it. They have one and all tried to get back to that classic theatre in which the figures are larger or smaller than life but never of average size. For the classic theatre does not present the illusion of ordinary life; it presents a vision of life both better and worse than the ordinary. Life is caught at its magnificent and its terrible moments, and so we are taken out of the banal moment in which we find ourselves, caught in a swifter rhythm, a heightened mode of existence. We do not go to the classic theatre in order to recognize the familiar – "just what my uncle George always says" – but to be astonished at revelations of the unsuspected. And though it is a long way from Uncle George's frame house to Macbeth's blasted heath, a classic drama could be set in Uncle George's frame house if the playwright were able to see through the familiar to the unfamiliar, beyond the cliché to the archetype… .

There is no important modern dramatist who has not tried to do this, and it is surprising how many of them, in their search for the classic, have hit upon the classical in its historical sense – the Greek. What is attempted in Mourning Becomes Electra is not, it seems to me, entirely achieved, but the nature of the attempt is clear and right. It is an attempt to remove the clutter of naturalistic irrelevance and get down to a classic base. In order to arrive at a classic drama of American life, O'Neill used a classical Greek story. In that instance, I believe, the Greek cargo was too heavy for the ship, and the vessel sank, yet it sank nobly, with all on board singing an older and finer song than Rock of Ages.

A more recent case is Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. The play was improved by the removal of explicitly Greek elements. Greece remains the inspiration of the play or, rather, Greece is what helped Mr. Miller several steps along the road from naturalism to classic drama.

Even the so-called "masterpieces of naturalism" turn out when looked at more closely to be departures from naturalism. Take Strindberg's The Father, a play usually assigned an important part in the naturalistic movement. The fact is that Strindberg had been pondering the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and had come across the theory that it reflects the struggles leading to the creation of the patriarchal family. In The Father he had in mind the breakup of the patriarchal family and the threatened return of matriarchy. He thought of The Father as his Agamemnon. Here is another play that is not only classic but classical.

Even the man who made the word Naturalism heard all over the world – Emile Zola – did not champion the tame version of it that has been its main manifestation, nor did he let his own theories limit his creative writing. It was his pleasure to invoke science. Nonetheless, when he uses the idea of heredity, we are less close to any scientific genetics than we are to Moira, the Greek Fate. From Zola's hereditary criminal of La Bête Humaine, it is only a step to hereditary disease as treated by Ibsen in his Ghosts; for although critics bred in the naturalistic tradition continue to speak of syphilis as the subject of this play, and some even add that the play is obsolete now that syphilis can be cured, the real subject is the curse on the house of Alving. It is not accidental that in approaching a Sophoclean subject, Ibsen resorts to Sophoclean technique: the truth is forced out in a swift series of catastrophic discoveries.

In comedy there is a similar story to tell. Our only great modern master of comedy, Bernard Shaw, always described himself as an old-fashioned playwright, explaining that he went back over the heads of his contemporaries to Dickens, Fielding, Molière, the commedia dell'arte, for his methods. Though he belonged to the same generation as Stanislavsky, and had in his friend and colleague Granville Barker a champion of naturalistic staging, he himself reserved his praises for what he called the classical actor. And he maintained that only classical actors could do his plays, because he had revived in them so many features of the classic theatre, and notably the tirade or long, set speech which the actor has to articulate for us with the cool clarity of a musician performing a Bach suite.

By about 1920 the permanent crisis of the modern theatre reached a new stage. What Ibsen had done to the naturalistic theatre might be called boring from within. He had accepted its conventions and its stage. The generation of 1920 refused these concessions. The work of Cocteau, Brecht, Meyerhold, meant the rejection of the established type of theatre altogether. A new start was proposed. From zero, one is sometimes told. Yet no movement ever goes back that far, because – as I was saying – no artist draws solely on his own experience: he always asks some support from tradition. And when one tradition lets him down, or he chooses to reject a tradition, he does not – whatever he may say – operate without tradition. He falls back on some other tradition. Even painters who have rejected all Western history end up, not as "original" in the sense which the man in the street gives to the word, but as neo-African and the like. Rejection of tradition usually implies nothing more than the rejection of recent traditions in favor of earlier ones. In the more interesting drama of the Twenties we find that, while the naturalistic approach of the immediate past is taboo, every other avenue is open. Brecht explored the Spaniards of the golden age, the English Elizabethans, even the Oriental theatre. It was again a search for the classic in dramatic art, and again the Greek note was most often struck. I've mentioned O'Neill. I'm thinking also of Cocteau's Antigone and Orpheus.

With all this goes a technical change that some people think the most important change of all. The dramatists are no longer writing for a box-set hidden behind a proscenium arch. The proscenium arch may still be there, because the buildings can't be made over in a hurry, but it is ignored, canceled out, defied. The box-set has been carted off stage forever. What the new generation clamors for is some sort of Open Stage, possibly Elizabethan, possibly also a Roman circus or a Greek arena. Whether such a physical change is the most important change or not, it is one that implies the others. The different shape and functioning of such a stage implies a fundamentally different technique of drama and, with that, a different view of art and life. Take one feature alone, the relation of the action to the eye of the spectator. In the Nineteenth Century theatre, the spectator is asked to peep through a little door, like Alice, into an illuminated garden; in the Twentieth Century theatre, the actors are brought out to him. In the one, the spectator is a voyeur; in the other, the actor is an exhibitionist. Here too, in the demands they make on the physique of the stage, the more alert modern playwrights have been searching for the classic theatre. The naturalistic theatre offered a peep through the keyhole into the room across the way. The classic theatre provides a parade ground for passions and thoughts and for the human beings above or below life size who experience them …

Since this is what has been going on, you would, from the artistic point of view, be wasting your time to write the kind of play that one generally sees on Broadway. If you have talent, you should join that pursuit of the classic theatre which is, paradoxically, the search for a truly modern theatre. A great future will be born, if at all, from the fruitful union of our present with such a past.

What do you want, actually? It's your wishes that carry the weight. Not what you tell your friends are your wishes. Not what you sometimes think are your wishes. Not what you habitually assume are your wishes. But what you finally find to be your wishes. Your real wishes.

Emerson warned us against wishing, really wishing, for things – because one is likely to get them. If your real wish (concluded on page 120)Playwright(continued from page 116) is to become a prostitute, you will become one; in the theatre, it will be quite easy; and you will never live to regret it; even your old age will be provided for in articles you can write on What Made Me What I Am Today. Your letter to me suggests, rather, that you wish to be a dramatist. If you do, you will have to try it and find out. Time will show if you really are one. Meanwhile, see yourself as a writer and, hence, an artist.

Even if you are a dramatist, you may not "succeed." That will hurt your feelings very much, especially when you see your non-dramatist friend becoming The Successful Dramatist. An artist wants success. He does not, however, insist on it. His failure to insist on it, though a source of glee among those who exploit him, stems from strength in the artist himself: success is something he can do without, if with difficulty. His pride clamors for satisfaction even more than his vanity; he is a serious chap; he will buy lasting reputation even at the price of immediate fame.

As for you, young sir, if you find you are not a dramatist, and Broadway agrees with you, you will try something else willy-nilly; if there are agonies, they will not be agonies of choice. If you find you are not a dramatist, but Broadway finds you are one, the inducement will be considerable to change your mind and become convinced of what you know is not true – a common type of conviction nowadays, and one which is the tie that binds the two most famous streets in America: Broadway and Madison Avenue. If you find you are a dramatist, and Broadway agrees, try to stay a dramatist; it will not be easy. If you find you are a dramatist, and Broadway doesn't agree, that will not be easy either; but you will stay a dramatist; you won't be able to help it.

Can playwriting be taught? You have just been the would-be playwright and I have been the would-be teacher. Have you learned anything? Not anything, certainly, that comes between the rise and fall of the curtain. We have stood all this time outside the theatre wondering whether to go in, and I have said: "Do you wish to enter? Then enter – tentatively. Do you have talent? When you know, decide whether to stay." Which is all very preliminary. But then you are barely of age. And I have met "students of playwriting." Their average age seems about ninety and probably is over twenty-five. Few have explored their wishes (or notable lack of wishes), their talent (or remarkable lack of talent). So perhaps they missed that first lesson, which had for theme: To wright or not to wright? You have just had it.

Sincerely yours, Eric Bentley