Oldies but Goodies

After a recent performance of the current Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979, two audience members left arguing the play’s merits.

One man asserted it was a profound examination of how, when a new person comes into a family, secrets must be unearthed and re-sorted and reexplained if a new family is to be formed.

The second man completely disagreed. To him, the play’s depiction of emotional repression and its consequences was old news, Freud reheated. But he continued to passionately discuss the play for two more blocks, where he and his friend almost rammed into two people wondering aloud about similar family dynamics in “A Delicate Balance,” Edward Albee’s 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning absurdist drawing room drama, also playing on Broadway.

Finally, and once again, everyone on and around Broadway seems to be talking about plays and musicals. And it hardly seems to matter that most of what’s sparking their debate is decades old.

For years, Broadway revivals have been the whipping boys of the American theater. Starting in the early ‘80s, when a flood of musical revivals hit Broadway (remember Donny Osmond in “Little Johnny Jones,” anyone?), pundits began pinning the ever-imminent death of Broadway on the fabulous invalid’s clear preference for remounting old shows. Further, the preponderance of revivals--particularly musical revivals--was taken as de facto proof that Broadway was nothing but a theme-park for empty-headed tourists.

At the same time, theater professionals continued to fantasize about a National Theater, a protective institution that would lovingly present the classics and somehow solve the ills of our peculiar commercial theater. This has been a recurring dream since the Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration attempted to create a nationwide federation of noncommercial theaters called the Federal Theatre Project. Since then, heads of prominent resident theaters, such as Robert Brustein at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and Lloyd Richards, former head of the Yale Repertory Theatre, have argued that we already have a national theater--in the exchange of work and artists among nonprofit theaters throughout the country--but artists as disparate as Peter Sellars and Tony Randall have made attempts toward some kind of national institution.

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Who could have seen that the call for a national theater and a batch of revivals would intersect in such a satisfying way? Now, at the close of its 1995-96 season, Broadway is full of revivals of both musicals and plays, and the choices for ticket-buyers are many and varied. You can see a beautiful production of “The King and I” at the Neil Simon, in which Donna Murphy makes you feel as if you are hearing the songs and understanding the plight of the British expatriate Anna, schoolmistress to the children of Siam and confidante to the King, for the very first time. One block over, at the Plymouth Theatre, you can see a superbly acted production of “A Delicate Balance,” with Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard and Elaine Stritch, directed with poetic clarity by Gerald Gutierrez and played out on a stunning John Lee Beatty set.

Then there’s the savagely funny Steppenwolf Theatre production of “Buried Child” at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, in which the excellent actor Terry Kinney wanders onstage in dirt-soaked overalls that have to be seen to be believed, with a heaping armful of corn--an indelible image that seems to sum up his character’s complete confusion and heartbreaking tenderness. Meanwhile, the Roundabout Company offers a chance to see a plum from Tennessee Williams’ overripe period, in a production of “Night of the Iguana” at the Roundabout Theatre that this critic found wrongheaded, but many found fascinating. And at the St. James Theatre, Nathan Lane takes the mantle from Zero Mostel as the funniest man on Broadway in a re-staging of the first musical for which Stephen Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

This season it seems that Broadway, or the 37 theaters it still represents, is becoming our own national theater, a living theater museum, a showcase in which many of the best of our directors, actors, lighting and set designers can lavish their aesthetic intelligence on our own dramatic treasures.

And why not? A knee-jerk aversion to revivals is inherently counterproductive. Theater needs to be experienced live to be understood, and there are new people to experience “The King and I” and “A Delicate Balance” and “Buried Child” for the first time, not to mention Oscar Wilde’s sparkling “An Ideal Husband,” performed exquisitely by London’s Peter Hall Company at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

With tremendous financial pressure attendant on every Broadway opening, tried-and-true works may just constitute the wisest use of the most expensive theatrical real estate in the country and perhaps in the world. Very few new plays can stand up and be heard on Broadway, amid the oppressive hype and the often high-pitched production values. On the street of dreams, artists must do their work while pretending they don’t see six or seven or 12 producers anxiously measuring the grosses against the nut every week.

In fact, you can almost hear those abacuses clicking under the music at two new musicals created for the Broadway stage this season--”Big” at the Shubert and “Victor/Victoria” at the Marquis. Much more soulful is a musical written far from the madding crowd: “Rent,” the most talked-about new musical--or show--of the year, was in fact written for a small off-Broadway theater. Now at the Nederlander Theatre, “Rent” got to Broadway, you might say, by way of popular and critical demand.

Perhaps that’s not such a bad method for new works to find their way to Broadway, haphazard though it may be. It’s survival of the fittest, which makes sense in an age when we’re likely to lose even more of what little federal funding nonprofit theaters still get.

New plays still land on Broadway--in fact, quite a few good ones landed this season. The four nominated for Tonys this year are all by well-known writers: August Wilson (“Seven Guitars” at the Walter Kerr), Terrence McNally (“Master Class” at the John Golden), David Hare (“Racing Demon,” formerly at Lincoln Center), and, yes, “Buried Child” (the producers successfully argued that the 1978 play had been revised). All of these productions had some seasoning time playing in other cities (all but “Buried Child” played in Los Angeles, for instance). The point: new plays need to be seen and fixed and seen again before they are ready for the kind of scrutiny and financial pressure of Broadway.

Mounting a revival doesn’t ensure a success, of course. But revivals minimize financial risks by removing one variable: the work itself, whose worth has had some time to sort itself out.

What seems to work best is a kind of revival that some people call “revisals”--perhaps best represented by Stephen Daldry’s 1993 production of “An Inspector Calls” now at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre, or Nicholas Hytner’s 1992 version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “Carousel,” a production of the Royal National Theatre, which will open at the Ahmanson in July. Both of these productions were hits in London and on Broadway. These directors have re-imagined an older piece of theater, making it fresh while retaining its essence. Their productions are the antithesis of stiff revivals that carefully replicate eras past, illustrated recently by the umpteenth revival of “Hello, Dolly!” that passed through Orange County, Pasadena and San Diego on its way to Broadway last year.

In “Fifth Row Center,” British critic Benedict Nightingale’s memoir of covering New York theater in the depressed and depressing season of 1983-84, he recalled walking around a Broadway still plastered with marquees of shows that had already come and gone: “Merlin,” “A View From the Bridge,” Albee’s tragically terrible “The Man With Three Arms.” “The presence of all those vast multicolored tombstones,” wrote Nightingale, “only emphasizes the extent to which Broadway is, in fact, a cemetery.”

This year, rather than a terrible new Albee play we have a gloriously vibrant old Albee play. Most of the marquees are lit, and the streets feel reinterpreted and alive. Broadway is a commercial creature and it has been since the beginning of the century. We may just need to embrace that fact instead of decrying the commercial theater’s inability to sustain innovative new work. This season, at least, Broadway has made the best of the situation by offering up its own glittering past, which may just be the key to its glittering future.