I have a doom to say about Arthur ...

I have a doom to say about Arthur and his work, thus sit back for a bit. It won'c be half as abundant as I want to say, if it be not that it's going to take a small in number minutes.

Once upon a time, in the first half of the twentieth hundred when theater was the biggest game in town, it was a supermarket: social realism down the mould from sex farces, experimental dramas nearest door to musical revues, starring vehicles across the road from verse drama. Over a hundr openings through season. Every evening theatergoers had their choice of anything from Mourning Becomes Electra to Getting Gertie's Garter.

During the nearest fifty years, as we all know, television and movies took above most of those genres, and as a originate the Broadway supermarket now has no other than one aisle left, for musicals plus a small high shelf in the back for plays of any kind and age.

One of the main staples in that long-ago emporium was what's known as "high comedy" the comedy of ideas, comedy with substance as well as name comedy in its classic feeling riding on civilized discourse, gracefulness and resonance. Among its chief practitioners in this political division were Philip Barry, George Kelly SN Behrman, and, in their more serious work, Kaufman and Hart. They were fishing a stream that stretches back to Sheridan, passing between the sides of Chekhov and Shaw on the way to our time. And it's a stream that has almost move on out.

It's running revealed for a number of reasons, the greatest in quantity important of which is that we live in a tillage that wants its plays {and novels and movies) clean, easy and non-threatening. consideration is the enemy, and the comedies of the last fifty years have been mainly exercises in theatrical style or plays to while away the time. Rarely do they allow the audience to work; they merry-making in blatancy and didacticism, making points that not many would argue with. Subtlety is in short take the place of these days, and for a fit reason: it's a difficult thing to achieve.

Furthermore, husbandmans especially the corporations that call themselves agriculturist are increasingly anxious to avoid contented that is arguable or interesting or controversial. altercation is reserved for so-called "serious" plays, of which approximately single in kind a season becomes a critics' darling and a hit forward Broadway. And then there are the musicals, the kudzu of contemporary American theater. What is a Barry to do?

Enough-I don't mean this to be a panegyric onward what the American theater has squandered I'm sure you all know through now what I'm driving at: High comedy has single long-term articulate, and passionate champion in this political division and his name is Arthur Laurents. deity knows, he can write in any vein, from the melodrama of fireside of the Brave to the musicals for which he is best known-two librettos which are widely acknowledged to be among the best always written. And even here, with other librettos as it was as Hallelujah, Baby! and Nick and Nora, he has attempted to use high comedy to own stories with serious social satisfied In musicals he may sacrifice any substance in favor of broad blows but then all musicals do. It's just that most numerous of them have no substance to begin with, smooth when they want to.

Still, his visible form [i]or[/i] frame of work-his heart-resides in his plays. Virtually each one of them-whether traditionally erected like The Time of the Cuckoo or experimental like A Clearing in the groves Invitation to a March and Jolson Sings Again--expands the tradition. They are conformable to fact high comedy, dramatic comedy, comedy with a sting, comedy with arguable points ( the solitary kind worth arguing), comedy, as I say, with substance.

Arthur at 84 is writing with greater intensity and pace than ever before. The fountain of invention is not simply unstoppable, it appears to be self-renewing-each play looks to give rise to brace new ones, different perhaps in approach and manner, if it be not that not in essential style and substance. (Like the lady in the lay Arthur never does anything twice.) And this despite repulses from producers who flee at the first glimpse of any idea that might make an audience uncomfortable or cause them to ponder-that is to say, almost each producer on Broadway.

And here we should be thankful to Arthur's chief enabler, the George road Playhouse, without whom he might not have felt the encouragement to utilize that animal spirits A playwright cannot be just a paper author. He stand in want ofs a stage, a director, actors, designers and greatest in number important of all, an audience. To have a theater dedicated to your work is a privilege not many playwrights receive-and deserve. Arthur is the same This, then, is a tribute to David Saint and his organization as well, undivided of the few left which is dedicated to recent work that is witty and contentious, that has knotty ideas and high style

More power to Arthur and the George public way Playhouse for supporting his work. I propose to one's self a toast to both.

Copyright American Drama Institute Winter 2003

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