Saturday, November 09, 2019

Good question …

… Where Are the Classics? - WSJ.

 On the one hand, it’s desirable, even necessary, for theater companies to do new plays. If they don’t, theater as an art form will gradually lose its vitality, as well as its ability to engage younger, more diverse audiences. Yet it’s also a mistake for those same companies to ignore the classics. To cut yourself off from tradition is to make it impossible for audiences—as well as the rising generation of playwrights, actors and directors—to learn from the still-vital masterpieces of the past. If you’ve never seen a production of a rarely staged large-cast play like, say, William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba, ” your sense of what is theatrically possible cannot be widened in the same way that Inge’s own sense of the possible had in turn been widened by his having seen and learned from Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
I'd go to the theater more often if I had more opportunities to see Pirandello, Anouilh, Girardoux, Andreyev, Noël Coward, John Osborne, Enid Bagnold. So many new plays seem to me to be just dramatized op-eds.

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