PLAYWRIGHT VS. DIRECTOR: WHO HAS THE LAST WORD?

There’s nothing better for the theater’s intellectual health than a scandal--of the proper sort. Not the sleazy kind where Miss Z is arrested for using controlled substances, or where Mr. Y has to explain what he did with the grant money. I mean an old-fashioned artistic cause celebre , where the onlooker is forced to do some hard thinking about the principles at issue.

The best example in years was the recent clash over the American Repertory Theatre’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” in Boston. On the one hand, we had playwright Beckett claiming that director JoAnne Akalaitis had distorted his play so outrageously that he wanted the production immediately killed--either that, or his name taken off the program.

On the other hand, we had ART’s head man, Robert Brustein, defending Akalaitis’ loyalty to the spirit and, in general, to the text of the play. Beyond that, in the spirit of a famous Brustein essay, “No More Masterpieces,” he defended Akalaitis’ right to present her vision of the desolate world of “Endgame,” even if it didn’t jibe with Beckett’s.

The issue was settled out of court, and it may be that Beckett was working under false assumptions in bringing it up. (He lives in Paris, didn’t see Akalaitis’ production himself and may have received a inaccurate report from his American associates.) Nevertheless, the incident brought to roaring life such smoldering questions as:

How much of a theater script has to be followed to the letter? What are the director’s interpretive rights? How far can the director bend an interpretation of a script before it becomes a violation? Who is the basic visionary in the theater, the playwright or the director?

Theoretically, and legally too, it’s the author’s play. The director is only the facilitator, the midwife. That’s the theory. In fact, the director in today’s theater takes a far less humble view of his role. Not only is he, in Harold Clurman’s phrase, “the author of the production.” When it’s a new play, he’s often had a great deal to do with shaping the script as well.

We saw that process in Mark Medoff’s “The Hands of Its Enemy”--a director forcing a new playwright to face her past and write a true account of it. In real life, the director-playwright collaboration isn’t usually that intense. But it is a collaboration, not a matter of merely finding out where the writer wants his script to go. The director will have his wants, too.

The modern director has other reasons for considering himself a co-creator, rather than a mere mechanic. There’s the notion that classical plays fall flat without the overlay of a director-devised “concept.” There’s the image of the director as guru (Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Grotowski, even young Peter Sellars).

And in the 1980s, there’s an absence of playwrights with the clout to make the director fall into line. The last playwright to chide an important director in public for strong-arming his text was, I believe, Edward Albee, in regard to William Ball’s florid staging of “Tiny Alice” for the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. That was 16 years ago. Nowadays, most playwrights are too grateful that their script is being staged at all to complain (for the record) about how it’s being staged.

It was time, then, for a playwright of stature to speak out in defense of the text. But when you look at Beckett’s specific objections to ART’s “Endgame” production, you wonder if he doesn’t demand more allegiance to the text than it’s in the nature of the theater to allow--more than would be healthy even if the theater could allow it.

Beckett’s major objections were these: Akalaitis had changed the play’s setting from the high-windowed room described in the stage directions to an abandoned subway tunnel; she had used incidental music by Philip Glass, where Beckett hadn’t asked for music; she had cast black actors as two of the four characters in the play--Hamm and his father Nagg (with white actors playing Hamm’s servant, Clov, and Hamm’s mother, Nell).

The last, it was claimed, introduced a note of “miscegenation” to the play that the author hadn’t meant to strike at all. Similarly, if Beckett had wanted to set the play in a subway tunnel, he would have done so. And if he had wanted music, he would have called for it. These innovations made this “Endgame” a play Beckett didn’t recognize--somebody else’s story.

ART patrons could read these criticisms in an insert that Beckett insisted be tucked into the theater program. (This was part of the out-of-court compromise.) They could also read Brustein’s retort that “strict adherence to each parenthesis of the published text . . . threatens to turn the theater into a waxworks.”

Without having seen the production (which closed last week), how can an out-of-town critic judge whether it served the play or not? One has to resort to principle. The first principle is that the most sacred part of a play is the dialogue. Tinkering with the dialogue of a writer with Beckett’s ear is not only hubristic, it’s dumb. Akalaitis apparently did do a certain amount of this. Bad show.

The second principle is that the where of a play matters much less than the what of a play. That’s especially true of Beckett’s plays, which are all set in purgatory, no matter what the ground plan is. A director does have leeway here, and ever since “Endgame” came out in 1957, directors have interpreted Hamm and Clov’s quarters in various ways.

The “Endgame” that played the Mayfair Theatre here a few months back presented the room and the windows and the ladder pretty much as Beckett wanted them. It was a fine setting, but no more expressive than that a college production of “Endgame” seen in the early 1960s. The audience sat onstage, with its back to the stage wall, while the actors worked against the black void of the auditorium, lit with green “EXIT” signs.

It was “Endgame” at the very edge of the universe. Similarly, it’s not hard to imagine Hamm and Clov finding refuge in an abandoned subway tunnel after a nuclear blast. “We’re down in a hole,” Hamm says at one point. Why insist that every production of “Endgame” look exactly the same, if the sense of desolation is there?

And why rule out the idea that Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell could be of different races? If this introduces a new element to the play, does it nullify an element essential to the play? I remember a production of “Waiting for Godot” where one of the partners was played by a woman. That changed the color of the relationship. But it was still Didi and Gogo trying to get through the day.

As for Glass’ music, it might indeed be distracting. It also might further the mood of obsession and repetition. It would, in any case, make this “Endgame” a different experience than the last “Endgame,” and theater is about that. Its aim is not to produce endless reproductions of the playwright’s ideal staging. That’s the way of death, as illustrated by what happened to the D’Oyly Carte company, which followed W.S. Gilbert all too authentically.

The way of life is to think of a play as an unstable compound, an equation: the script + X = the experience. X stands for everything that this particular director and acting company, working in this particular space, at this particular time, brings to the script. Intelligence, passion, skill, respect for the material, a desire to make discoveries about the material--all that.

It’s not the same as getting-off at the expense of the material, which has a paradoxical way of making the director, not the material, look like the fool. Anyone who plays games with a Beckett script is up against a tough opponent. I remember an “Endgame” that made Hamm into a an old Hollywood director like John Ford. It didn’t work. Perhaps Akalaitis’ production also ended up with its concept all over its face.

But it should have been allowed to hang itself, without help from the author. A playwright gives his play to the world, and has to be ready to take what the world makes of it. A play is the author’s story, plus somebody else’s . Not even Beckett knows all that is latent in one of his scripts, given this or that X. Theater’s “endgame” goes on forever.