The Seven Best Playwrights?

Sidney Homan

Eighteen years ago, at a public meeting in Changchun City in the People's Republic of China, a wonderfully earnest actor asked me, "Homan, why is Shakespeare eternal?" An impossible and also a profound question, I thought to myself, and one we seldom, at least I seldom ask myself. After all, Shakespeare is&… well&… Shakespeare. But there must be some qualities in Shakespeare that make him "eternal," and so three hours later, before an audience comprised of what Tom Stoppard would call "theatricals" as well as academics and party officials, I gave my answer, forced by this well–intentioned actor to identify just what qualities made Shakespeare our benchmark playwright.

A few days ago, an actor friend, with an Irish name that smacks of delightful overkill, Shamrock McShane, asked me, "Who do you think are the seven most important playwrights of our day?" He generously allowed me to extend that list back a few centuries so as not to exclude Shakespeare. Once, again, an actor forced me to consider something we tend to shy away from—the issue of quality. We latch onto playwrights we like, read or stage their works, but seldom ask ourselves: why do we like him or her? But quality is, has to be an issue. Neil Simon is a fine playwright, a master of the well–made play, simultaneously witty and heartwarming as he places all too familiar characters before us, but surely he lacks the stature of, say, Harold Pinter, who can also be very funny. I suspect Simon doesn't want to be a Harold Pinter: he's doing just fine as Neil Simon. But why is Pinter the better playwright, the corpus of his works more significant? This is behind my friend McShane's question.

So, the normal disclaimers before I offer my seven. And right there is the first disclaimer: they are my seven but will not be everybody's seven. That there are no women or minority playwrights, no African–Americans on the list says something about our history in dealing with what literary critics call "the other," about the unleveled playing field that has existed both in the theatre and in our culture for far too long. My own pathetic ignorance excludes non–Western playwrights from the list. When that actor asked me to discuss Shakespeare's eternality, I was in his country as the so–called "foreign expert," the bearer of good news about our modern theatre, but I was all too painfully aware of the fact that the Chinese theatre existed for five thousand years before Shakespeare. Who was the expert?

My three general criteria for the best playwrights are: the skill with which the playwright practice the craft; the degree of innovation or of influence of the playwright, recognizing that often innovation and influence are inseparable; and—for want of a better phrase—the depth of the playwright's vision, not only into character but that larger world encompassing character. No Greeks are on the list, but that is only because Sophocles and Aeschylus are everywhere, omnipresent as the " mothers" of our modern theatre, their presence always implicit or, as Shakespeare would say, deeper than did ever plummet sound each time one invokes the name of a modern playwright. I also "cheat " in a few instances, using the name of one of the chosen to usher in playwrights related by style or approach, or those who served as sources or springboards for the artist in question.

Of course, Shakespeare makes the list. He is our standard, and here I recount the several reasons I gave that Chinese actor for thinking Shakespeare eternal, reasons I paraphrase from a chapter in a recent book, Directing Shakespeare. Shakespeare is eternal because:

1. he gets to the very soul, the deepest impulse of his characters, and thereby assists those enacting them onstage;

2. his language is full of pictures, symbolic and metaphoric in the best sense of those words, never lapsing into abstractions, always stimulating the actor or audience to respond both visually and verbally as he or she searches for the character's subtext;

3. he is a complete person of the theatre, aware of the significance of set, costume, props, and general design and thus encourages these charged with creating these vital non–verbal dimensions of a production; and if he were writing in our time, he would similarly encourage lighting designers;

4. his dialogue is always taking unexpected, albeit logical twists and turns, is always new, never falling into an easy patterns, foisting surprises on us at every corner;

5. he has what a colleague calls "open silences," moments when he invites the actor or director to chose among options that complete a scene or character, as when we decide, in the absence of any clear evidence one way or the other, whether Gertrude knew or, let alone had anything to do with her husband's death;

6. Shakespeare plays with the audience, never letting them slide into an easy interpretation of a character—the very quality that Bertolt Brecht (who will soon appear on the list) so prized, both in Shakespeare and his own "epic" theatre;

7. Shakespeare stretches the audience's sense of reality and thus justifies the theatre itself, as A Midsummer Night's Dream does when the forest challenges Theseus's reductive definition of "what is," his too facile dismissal of the lovers' stories as dreams, or as happens when the actor playing Cleopatra converts two pieces of rope into poisonous asps and further metamorphoses them into a lover pinching her in foreplay and—astonishingly!—a child nursing at her breast.

Two places are reserved for Brecht and Beckett, the twin poles of the modern theatre. Brecht was the innovator, insisting that the audience be more than passive voyeurs in the darkness of the house, that they be active participants in the production to the extent that he would keep the house lights on during performance. There his ideal audience could actually think, examining the characters, extrapolating from the "world" onstage to the political, economic, and historical conditions offstage, making application to real events outside the theatre. Similarly, his actors would be simultaneously inside and outside their characters, at once engaged in creating the illusion of a real person even as they saw that illusion as a product of forces in the daily life teeming around them. In this fashion, Brecht would replace what he dismissed as the theatre of illusions, the comfortable two–hours traffic of the stage where the audience could forget themselves, taking pleasure in a story whose beginning progressed logically to a satisfying conclusion. Instead, he championed the "epic theatre," where surprises abounded, where character was not monotonously consistent or predetermined.

Against Brecht's large canvas I place the deceptively small canvas, the minimalist theatre of Beckett—two little men lost in a flat landscape boasting only a tree and a rock; a self–centered character confined to a wheelchair and attended by a single servant, with the outside visible only through two narrow, vertical windows upstage; the lonely rooms of characters with generic or parodic names like Joe, Krapp, A, or Voice. Beckett's theatre is as interior as Brecht is exterior, yet in his concern for the solitary individual or the couple lost in a bleak world where the absent Godot never appears, he is never romantically obsessed with that individual at the cost of a larger environment. And he succeeds in a variety of media—radio, television, mime, even a film called Film.

Brecht was the hard–worker, the laborer hammering out his epic theatre, driving from the stage what he saw as a decadent illusory theatre, even replacing Shakespeare's Falstaff with his own Mother Courage, or rewriting his predecessor's Coriolanus. Beckett is the genius, his works pouring out of him as if by nature, his absurd and little worlds a spontaneous response to the discrediting of the larger social world as a result of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Both set the boundaries for our modern theatre, Brecht for the theatre of social protest, for Arthur Miller and August Wilson, among others, Beckett for the unrelenting psychological portraits of Albee and Mamet—among others.

A place surely goes to Bernard Shaw—and here I try to cheat, since Shaw carries Ibsen with him—because, after centuries of self–indulgent theatre, one in which issues were either non–existent or, conversely, obvious and pedantic, Shaw made the theatre a place where life was first imitated—Hamlet's "mirror&… up to nature"—and then subject to serious inquiry. His is truly a theatre of ideas and problems: the inheritance of syphilis, the double–edge of martyrdom, the battle of the sexes, the realities of war, prostitution, marriage and adultery, the rights of women, revisionist history, charities as a con game, the social classes. And the list goes on.

I also include Chekhov for his marvelous delineation of character, his portraits of very ordinary people, often petty whether they be aristocrats or servants, men and women examined as if under the physician's microscope. And yet these portraits are set against the background of a changing society, fanned by the winds of the Russian revolution, always just offstage, but heard in the sound of the cherry tree being chopped down to make way for a new order whose break with the past is both inevitable and vulgar. With Chekhov we feel as if his characters lead the fullest possible life within the confines of his stage, as if they were "alive" (to use that word so often tossed carelessly about when praising a playwright's skill). Chekhov is seductive in this sense, his self–sufficient microcosmic stage world threatening to obscure the real–life macrocosm outside the theatre. And it is this very insularity which at once confirms the unique quality of his portraits even as it dooms the characters, for they too fight vainly to preserve their insular, familiar world against time and change

Harold Pinter is here because he is the master of silence, the pause, the sub–text that is there just underneath dialogue which often seems light, frothy. Pinter himself calls this sub–text the weasel under the whiskey cabinet. We go to the cabinet to take out a bottle; the action is mechanical, physical, without meaning except that it will assuage our thirst. But as we approach the cabinet we remember that a weasel lives underneath, a creature we never see yet know is there. And hence the otherwise simple action of opening the glass door, reaching in and removing the bottle is not so simple. An actor himself, Pinter knows that it is this subtext, this unvoiced dialogue hiding just below what is actually there in the text, which actors crave and by which they, inventing it through their imagination, become co–artists, collaborators with the playwright. This deeper, often darker world is what makes Pinter's plays so fascinating, so full of "menace" as more than one critic has termed the effect. There is a profound "reality" beneath the stage illusion, beneath the surface of his dialogue which some have dismissed as meant for actors, clever, but void of meaning. For me, the meaning is there in the tension which Pinter establishes between what is said and what is left unsaid. No one in the modern theatre does it better, though Albee and Mamet often run him a close second.

Arthur Miller is in the tradition of Shaw and Brecht, a thinking playwright, and he is here not because he is an American, the sole American in fact, but because his concern is the common man, all the Willie Lomans of our everyday world. His characters, unlike those romantic, indulgent souls of the past century, actually have jobs and thus Miller treats the realities of the working world—earning a living, providing for one's family, dealing with neighbors, running business. Actually taking place in space and time before an audience, its characters not "words, words, words" but illusions of real–life people played by real–life people with their own feelings and emotions, the theatre is arguably the most real and immediate of all art forms. Miller underscores this fact. For this reason he stands for the best of American theatre, and in the process takes a place that, without him, would otherwise go to O'Neill or Williams.

Of the various modern plays I have directed, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has perhaps been the most gratifying, artistically and personally, and, in a moment of weakness, I am tempted to nominate Tom Stoppard on the basis of this single work, this extraordinary refashioning of Hamlet, with its focus on the tweedle–dum, tweedle–dee messengers charged with an enormous task—to "delve" into the mystery of the Prince—beyond their abilities, and then to deliver Hamlet to England on a mission which leads to his escape and their own death. Often dismissed as clever and witty, but too much so for his own good, Stoppard, however, is on the list not just for this single play, but for a body of work that makes him the clear master of profound comedy, a worthy successor to Shakespeare, William Congreve, and Oscar Wilde. A Czechoslovakian émigré, he has a facility with the English language rivaled (though ultimately surpassed) only by Shakespeare, but that skill is always cemented to a serious view of life, as his more recent The Invention Of Love makes manifest. There is a brilliance in Stoppard, but it is not just glimmer alone.

Now, I hand over the question to the reader. Who are your seven playwrights?