Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
The Theater of Decadence
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Should we call it 'the end of an era'? In any case, it was 'curtains' this season for one sort of American playwrighting. Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge produced works of startling antiquity. Fashion, we suddenly saw, had moved on. Tennessee Williams's play were brilliantly directed and acted, but nothing stayed the flight of the restless audience. They shunned our trio of dramatists as if they had been last year's hemlines. No doubt it was 'Marat/Sade' that overthrew the reign. Goofy ladies in furnished rooms in New Orleans; Albee's chubby, inexperienced (in every way, including the professional) young boy, all concupiscent innocence, and literally screwed to death by a knotty little woman, a sort of prefiguration of Candy Mossler: These jokes could not stand up to Charlotte Corday and her spastic knife. The harsh idealism of Marat and the soul-destroying naturalism of the Marquis de Sade, the insane in their tub-gray institutional smocks, all spoke of the deepest sexual fantasies of our time, of our suppressions, our madness, our suffering, our cruelties. The delicate and decadent themes of our own writers seemed by comparison a tired midnight drag party that might better have been forgotten with the morning's hangover. This is not to say that 'Marat/Sade' is a model of dramatic art we would wish to see infinitely Xeroxed in the offices of our playwrights. But its appearance did, like any work of art, stand for itself alone and also as a critique of other works.
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