Lawrence, Kansas
Summer 1959
Dear Young Marvin (if I may),
Some professional advice from your older self, sixty-odd years in the future, now settled in New York City and recently retired from a much-loved career in theatre studies. Congratulations! You have been accepted into the PhD program in Theatre at Cornell and are preparing to devote yourself to a life pursuing your favorite activity. It is a great choice and I assure you, you will never regret it. I must warn you, however, that Cornell is not nearly as close to New York City as you assume, but nevertheless go down there as often as your energy and finances permit. You are lucky enough to be arriving at as exciting a time in US (and international) theatre as has been seen since the decades beginning in 1880. Take as much advantage of it as you can. Do not assume that you can keep track of everything interesting in the New York theatre by faithfully checking the New York Times. Important as the paper is, you will miss a lot of the most interesting and exciting work if you do not keep up with what is going on outside its scope. Brooks Atkinson is dimly aware of this, but he is a happy exception. The best way to keep up on this is to read the theatre section of the Village Voice even more thoroughly than you do the Times’, and when you are down in the Sheridan Square area (which should be frequently), check performance notices posted on the walls and in neighborhood cafes. Fascinating new work will be exploding in this area in the next few years, and even the Voice will not catch all of it. Some great stuff can be found only by word of mouth or on temporary posted notes.
Don’t restrict yourself to the dramatists you already know and to revivals of the classics, though of course don’t neglect those either. There is a lot of great O’Neill, Ibsen, and Shakespeare coming. Still, some of the most exciting things you will see are created by artists you have never heard of yet. You have a good academic background, but it has been mostly built on the premise that the best theatre is thoughtful and informed presentation of the great texts—Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. You can have a rich and full theatregoing career not moving beyond that basis, but you will be missing much of the most exciting and inspiring work that will be available if you broaden your horizons. Look into theatre using unconventional texts or no text at all! Some theatres, like La MaMa, will be especially good for introducing you to such work. Also, as a former English major, you have assumed that dance is a specialized form having little to do (except historically) with theatre and that, worse yet, musical comedy is an inferior popular form of no real artistic interest or merit. Forget all that and start going to places like the Judson Dance Theater, to Broadway musicals, and to the smaller musicals you will find down around Sheridan Square with the new theatres. There is an incredible world there awaiting your exploration. If you feel hesitant about plunging into an environment as unrespectable for a student of English as a Broadway musical, begin with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, now running at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village, and follow up next year with an irresistible small dose of the form nearby: The Fantasticks. By that time, you will be ready for the real thing—A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—taken reasonably directly from Plautus, a respectable classic, and with an actor (Zero Mostel) and composer-lyricist (Stephen Sondheim) who will surely complete your conversion to the full enjoyment and appreciation of this form immediately.
You have already taken your first trip to Europe and minored in French. That is a great start, but you still have little idea what delights can be offered by getting acquainted with other cultures, other languages, and, of course, other theatres. It is easy (and well justified) to love France, but look elsewhere as well, and not only to Western Europe and particularly Germany, which will steadily grow in importance in the coming years, but also to Eastern Europe. Even in 1959, this is not the monolithic Soviet-oriented closed culture it seems, but it will gradually become as rich and innovative a producer of theatre as the West. Don’t confine yourself to Europe and the US either. Once you have expanded your view of theatre to include work outside the Anglo-Saxon culture and not necessarily devoted to the text-based, realistically oriented, rationally structured tradition of much Western drama, you will discover an almost infinite world of fascinating performance experiences from every corner of the globe. One lifetime is not nearly enough to experience the richness world performance offers, but plan to pack in as much of it as you can. I guarantee you that it will be more exciting AND spiritually fulfilling than you can yet imagine.
Happy travels,
Old Marvin