Word: off-broadway
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Most of these plays are comedies of horrors, but all of them, in strange and curious ways, beat with a quivering sense of present-day life. The wave of off-Broadway excitement and support for such playwrights as Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape) and Genet (The Balcony) made possible the precarious on-Broadway beachheads of Pinter (The Caretaker) and Ionesco (Rhinoceros). Genet, who is less an absurdist than a perversely erotic symbolist poet of the theater, is a perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well...
...disappointment. Off-Broadway is now big business; it loses more than $1,000,000 a year. Ten years ago, the off-Broadway season consisted of a dozen or so productions; in the '61-'62 season there were some 100 openings, 40 more than Broadway. Prices and costs similarly soared. Tickets began with a $3 top, have risen as high as $4.95. Yet no more than three or four out of 100 off-Broadway productions ever go into the black. The cost of putting on a play has rocketed. In 1953, a revival of Sean O'Casey...
High costs curb artistic experimentation, but have depressingly little effect on the rash of vanity theater that is currently disfiguring off-Broadway with opening-night eyesores. Friends and relatives of Suzy Stagestruck, bent on giving her the Big Break, back non-plays with non-directors and non-casts. When the excrescence flops, the angels philosophically congratulate themselves on a tax loss-and another 15 grand always seems to be waiting in the wings...
...separate branch of vanity theater consists of hobbyists who are whacking plays together as a form of avocational therapy. Last season, off-Broadway saw the do-it-yourself dramas of a policeman, a dentist and a chiropractor, not to forget J. I. Rodale, a millionaire dietary fanatic who contends that a major source of evil in the modern world is an overconsumption of sugar, a condition he believes to be dangerously prevalent among drama critics...
Aspire or Expire. Off-Broadway is usually judged by its best efforts, while Broadway is often cavalierly measured by its worst. The present crisis of off-Broadway is that its best efforts are becoming rarer and rarer, and it is being swamped by its typical products, which are increasingly venal, sloppy, and predictable. For every promising Playwright Schisgal, there are a dozen silly spoofs of old movie musicals, or tasteless tours through neurotic junkyards of the mind, or criminal displays of self-ordained talent that might have lasted ten seconds before getting the critical gong on the late Major Bowes...