Like most monuments of the past in an America obsessed with its present and future, the extant plays of the three Attic tragic dramatists are works for which everyone expresses reverence, but which few read without compulsion. It is a commonplace that fifth century Athens, along with seventeenth century Europe, produced the most sublime drama the world has ever known; yet, stage performances of Greek tragedy are extremely rare, casual reading of the plays is almost unheard of, and, even in the colleges—where the spirit of the past is kept fitfully alive—the Oresteia is sometimes taught primarly as an introduction to Mourning Becomes Electra. All things conspire to keep Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides at a respectful distance. Present-day scholarship, when it employs the (often valuable) archetypal critical techniques, tends to analyze the tragedies as mosaics of mythical patterns rather than immediate, sensual experiences; and, on Broadway, the techniques of Greek drama are exploited only to give dignity to dramatic enterprises which have little importance by themselves.

In 1948, before writing my first play, The Bald Soprano, I had no idea of becoming a playwright. My only ambition, quite simply, was to learn English. The study of English does not necessarily lead to playwriting. On the contrary, it was because I had no luck with English that I turned to the stage. Nor did I write these plays to avenge my failure, although some have said that my Bald Soprano was a satire of the English bourgeoisie. If I had wanted to learn Italian, Russian or Turkish and not succeeded, they would have claimed, by the same token, that the play resulting from that futile effort was a satire of Italian, Russian or Turkish society. Perhaps I ought to explain. Here is what happened: nine or ten years ago, in order to learn English conversation, I bought a French-English Primer. I set to work. Conscientiously, I copied whole sentences from my Primer with the purpose of memorizing them.

There are, as Bailly has said, no conversions in Molière. To the end, Arnolphe remains a bigot, Harpagon a miser, Jourdain a parvenu, Argan a hypochondriac. Thus Molière remains true to a rule of comedy far more important than the conventions of time, place, and unity considered the hallmarks of classical dramaturgy: the rule of the unity of character. For, conversion would take the spectator into affective and moral regions where the satiric purpose—laughter—might be compromised. A repentant Arnolphe, a disabused Jourdain, an enlightened Argan might satisfy our sense of the pathetic or the propitious, but only at the expense of our pleasure. In fact, to make us feel sorry for such characters at the end of the play or to make them share our superior view of their previous conduct would come dangerously close to identifying us with them in that previous conduct as well. In leaving these characters “unreconstructed” Molière earns our gratitude as well as our applause.

In the theatre this is the time of prizes and awards. The less theatre we have, the more prizes are awarded. Perhaps that is our way of compensating through honor and esteem what we cannot supply in substance. It is certain that among devoted playgoers, the prizes for acting—even more than those for plays—create jubilation, discussion, even dispute. In any case, a good deal of genuine sentiment is expended on the occasion of the various awards.

The most awarded actress of the past season is unquestionably Shirley Booth. Miss Booth (Motion Picture Academy Award for her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba; Antoinette Perry Award for The Time of the Cuckoo) didn't steal it, as the French say, when they mean that someone got what was deserved.

In the plays of Tennessee Williams, as in the works of other able and prolific American dramatists, a pattern emerges that continues to appear, with minor variations, over and over again. Williams is remarkably loyal to his favorite archetypal pattern, and, for that reason, it seems to provide an indispensable key to the nature and meaning of his plays. The typical event is the meeting of a healthy, handsome man and a nervous older woman who is losing her looks. I call this couple Adonis and the Gargoyle—Adonis after the classical ideal of male beauty and the Gargoyle after the grotesque by-products of medieval architecture. The contrast between them is alone enough to enforce one major point: it is better to be a carefree man dian to be a worried, married woman. A second diought occurs: freedom is better than dependence, but, first, any examination of these plays must begin with close scrutiny of their protagonists.

In an essay, written in 1924, Mr. T. S. Eliot pointed to the effects in the English drama of an unlimited aim at realism. He saw that without a form to arrest the flow of spirit, without unrealistic conventions, the drama was bound to end in an “exact likeness to the reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind.” Perhaps in only one play, Everyman, he thought, we had a drama within the limitations of art. In fact, one may say that the unchecked attempt at realism, the attempt “to escape the conditions of art,” has paradoxically become a limitation for die artist. The realistic theatre itself developed in time such stringent conventions that modern playwrights, at least since Ibsen, have sought to escape them. And some serious dramatists have looked for more than purely formal solutions (like the techniques of expressionism) to liberate the stage. They wanted to enlarge the scene in order to regain the scope of the great theatres of the past.

A friend once told me that when he was under the influence of ether he dreamed he was turning over the pages of a great book, in which he knew he would find, on the last page, the meaning of life. The pages of the book were alternately tragic and comic, and he turned page after page, his excitement growing, not only because he was approaching the answer but because he couldn't know, until he arrived, on which side of the book the final page would be. At last it came: the universe opened up to him in a hundred words: and they were uproariously funny. He came back to consciousness crying with laughter, remembering everything. He opened his lips to speak. It was then that the great and comic answer plunged back out of his reach.

“There is always something new under the sun,” Christopher Fry has said, “because a mystery never ages.” The remark, set apart like this, itself may seem mysterious, but, when added to Fry's plays, it usefully annotates them. It redirects attention to the presence there not just of mystery but of kinds of mystery which affect the dramatic value of the plays.

I do not wish to exaggerate the differences, but when Fry speaks of mystery, directly in his essays or indirectly in the plays, the word may have one of several meanings. (1) Sometimes he (or the speaker) is saying of a particular moment of experience that, like any other moment, it is unique. It has, besides the familiar qualities that language can codify, an indefinable quality of its own, for, literally, “There is always something new under the sun.” It is as if creation were an infinite series of special creations or “miracles.” No event, therefore, is fully explicable. In uniqueness, there is mystery.

For some twenty years (1936-1956), Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic dramas with their symbolic distortion of objective facts to reveal inner experiences were more popular in South America and especially in the Scandinavian countries than they were at home. The dramatist who in the 1920s had been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes was regarded mainly as of historical importance when in 1936 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize. To many critics, it seemed a recognition (belated or, perhaps, undeserved) of work that might once have been exciting but that no longer seemed vital or particularly relevant. In the main, we failed to see in his work what the Scandinavians found in it.

Although August Strindberg is frequently considered to be the father of modern drama, contemporary criticism has not yet approached his expressionistic “Dream plays” with confidence. One group of critics maintains that the difficulty is due to the autobiographical nature of the plays; another asserts that it lies in dealing with a unique talent which cannot be judged according to traditional standards; and a third believes it resides in the esthetic of the dream-art relationship. It is this third category which I wish to examine in an attempt to locate the source of the difficulty and ultimate esthetic failure of the dream plays.

Strindberg, successful in at least two notable instances with the drama of naturalism, abandoned these conventions shortly after his severe mental illness, better known as his “Inferno Experience.” It is easy to suggest that the plays that followed were direct results of this illness and that they are difficult to understand chiefly because they are products of a sick mind.