Volume 7, Number 10 · December 15, 1966
The Theater of Sentimentality
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Sentimentality—it is always there, in our theater, like an usher at the back, yawning, but not quite asleep. And, like the usher, sentimentality represents the claims of a commercial culture. It is a presence, inescapable, not an attitude. But our theater does not function very well, commercially. The actor, the director, the playwright, the practical critic, the audience, the repertory, and the Broadway musical: they are all second or third generation Welfare clients, born into insecurity. Rehabilitation grows harder. The student of American drama, the witness to the American experience in the theater, can only surrender to a kind of respect for a mood so deeply institutionalized. Often the most moving thing about an evening in the theater is the bitter-sweet sense of another drop-out, or of something good and true, months ago, years ago, possible and now lost, caught in some desperate repetition of history. Sentimentality is retroactive: the Lincoln Center production struck the splendid ice of The Alchemist like a ray of tropical sun. A puddle of water was left.
Feature, 1835 words
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