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"'Musicals Filling 'Emotional Lag'
Left by Current Drama,
Rogers Tells Forum"
Harvard
Law Record - December 6, 1951 - Page 1
reprinted by permission
"It's a very potent business this playing music in conjunction with dramatic situations," Richard Rogers said last Friday night in his attempt to explain why musicals and musical plays have currently pre-empted the position held by serious drama. Mr. Rogers spoke at the fourth regular meeting of the Harvard Law School Forum.
Mr. Rogers pointed out that musicals are trying to fill "an emotional lag." "There hasn't been very much emotional fare for us in the serious theater. ... Two things are happening at the same time. The serious drama has stopped feeding that need, and the musical started filling it. The minute a dramatic play which satisfies that need comes along, it will be just as hard to get tickets for it as it is now to get tickets for a musical," he said.
"We have to encourage young people to write for the theater before we will have the great era of the Twenties again," John Chapman said. For the lack of new playwrights, he blamed too few dramatic groups and courses in colleges which teach writing. "Colleges are missing the boat in not trying to find faculties to instruct students in playwriting," he declared.
Introduced by Elliot Norton as a professor of playwriting (until last June) at Yale, "a college in Connecticut," Marc Connelly dealt mainly with the esthetic benefits to be derived from theater-going. Of the musical play he said, "The fact that four or five excellent, gifted, imaginative craftsmen happen to be contemporary is a very good thing, but it doesn't indicate anything at all about public taste. The musical play is a part of the theater; and it has a definite place in our cultural life."
Lillian Hellman observed that there is a shortage of new plays by established dramatists and works from unknowns. She commented that, "We don't know what we are for, and it seems we don't know what we are against. Such a world is an uncomfortable world to live in, and few writers can find their way out. Those who can are in their forties and fifties and had developed in a freer atmosphere."
In general the speakers were agreed that the musical, either musical comedy or musical play, was not going to replace serious drama in the American theater, but all recognized the deficiency in straight drama at the present. While Miss Hellman and Mr. Connely did not make concrete suggestions for fostering new talent, Mr. Chipman called upon colleges to make use of their facilities and Mr. Rogers spoke of a project now underway in New York to teach "semi-professional" dramatists theater craft and production methods.