By Now, even to those whose passion for the drama encompasses no more than an annual theater party, critical gossip has intimated that the second stage in the launching of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company was as unpropitious as the first. The fresh blood from San Francisco, while not tainted with old commercial notions of success, seemed to all at hand to be far too thin a sustenance for an ambitious body of work. Walter Kerr, an ofttimes henchman for Broadway expertise, called Mr. Blau and company “amateurs”—a, to him, ultimate epithet—and looked back almost fondly to the old triumvirate of Kazan, Whitehead, and Miller as being, at least in professional potential, far better suited to the management of a national theater. Literary sensibilities were heard from when Elizabeth Hardwick, who last year excoriated the founders of Lincoln Center for their insufficient attention to the written word, indicted their successors for defacing a masterpiece. It is pleasant to hear a writer defended against his production, but Miss Hardwick was so vehement in her exoneration of Georg Büchner and his play from any guilt over the torpid evenings at Lincoln Center that one had the feeling she thought the German playwright was anxiously pacing the Elysian Fields, praying for good first-night reviews.

Engaged as I was at the time in a faltering production of my own, it took me until the last week in the run of Danton's Death to see just how this new company had outraged it. I went feeling that I would be witness to an absolute theatrical nadir, to crimes compounded by commission against a noble play that had already had more than its share of difficulties with the sensibilities of the last century. I feared some modern interpretation—a production that would busy itself with sets, costumes, and, perhaps, an odd movie slide or two which would italicize the contemporaneity of Büchner's work. I was chary of finding performers who could not speak a set of English words without torturing them into incomprehensibility. I was prepared for what the theater has always been at its worst: inadequacy inflated by hysteria into embarrassing grandiloquence.

Instead, I observed a group of actors, obviously by no means yet an ensemble, who offered an adequate presentation of a play that would be far beyond the combined talents of what popular opinion holds to be our best men of the theater. It was no better or worse than the period dramas one sees every year shuffling about a Broadway stage; except that since the company is, by founding principle, an American repertory company, no foreign actor could be imported to take on the main role—no Olivier, Scofield, or Finney was present to disseminate a little magnitude and make lesser actors on stage seem grander than they ever were before or ever will be again. When I remember our completely national productions of Shakespeare, of Brecht's Mother Courage, of The Changeling, and consider the standards that they presented, I am surprised that so many people should only now discover that we do not have an over-supply of actors with a sense and style of history. Except for Alan Bergmann, who to all, sans-culotte and monarchist alike, was no Danton, and one or two very minor performances that froze the blood with their ineptitude, this Lincoln Center company was, relative to what is considered professional American theater, no disaster. To be more positive, I will even say that most of the actors are at least free from those mincing poses and smug countenances endemic to American and English performers when they become aware that the men they are depicting have important things on their minds and a felicitous way of expressing them. The main actors in Danton's Death, even including Mr. Bergmann, seemed capable of giving, if not oversubtle, at least direct and understanding readings of roles which, historically and theatrically, are elusive. Yes, there is much for this company to learn, but the important question is whether or not it is up to the curriculum. My feeling is that it showed as much promise as any chance collection of actors in this country could. Unlike the Lincoln Center Company of the past two years, these performers are not yet frozen into a narrow style which precludes at least three-quarters of dramatic literature. They are, for the most part, young, and, given time—I would say at least five years of it—they may do another Danton's Death that could astonish us.

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So much for the actors. The direction, the conception of the production, must rest with Mr. Herbert Blau, and what can one say about it except that it didn't exist? If Büchner considered the dramatist a historian, Blau seems to feel that a director must be an antiquarian. He is content just to collect on stage the personages of a play he admires and show them off proudly to his audience. I never felt he really came to any conclusion about the play, the French Revolution, the Lincoln Center stage mechanisms, or the amount of make-up his actors were to wear. Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Lacroix, Camille moved across the boards with nothing but nuances of rhetoric to distinguish them. The motives peculiar to each man, the idiosyncrasies of spirit that might have given particular purpose to his actions, were never allowed to peek through the dense battle of litotes and oxymorons of the text. Danton swaggered, Robespierre walked like an office clerk—that was the only ostensible difference between two so different characters. Philippeau and Camille, though one trembles and the other shrugs at death, remain indistinguishable in my mind because their lives throughout the play, their lives of calculation and discourse, were not informed with any but superficial individuality. That the mind has its personality and the intelligence its passions, seems as alien a notion to Mr. Blau as it does to most directors. He seems to respect thought so much that he hardly considers it a human process, and thus he gives us a French Revolution that never seems more dramatic than a gathering of club philosophes.

This seemed to me to be the most serious flaw in the production, and yet I do not believe it was a fatal one. In the theater, sins of omission can almost be counted as virtue compared to the havoc heaped upon good plays by inexpert boldness out to be definitive. If Blau presented us with little illumination, neither did he conjure up an ignis-fatuus to lead us astray. Except for a few not injudicious cuts and the addition of an awkward pantomimic opening scene and an inapposite final line for Danton, the text did not suffer the disfiguration which is the fate of so many classics whose authors had the cheek to be oblivious of the Broadway two-hour limit. The translation, faced as it was with the difficulties of political and German rhetoric, was a fair success and managed now and then to turn up real touchstones to the power in the best moments of the original. Helped by not being mortally hindered, Danton's Death, as a play, filtered through the production drop by drop until, by the evening's end, a clear idea could be had, if one bothered to form one, of what the nature of this work, written over one hundred years ago by a twenty-one-year-old German genius, was.

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Certainly, in our time, Büchner's play needs no help from scholarly addenda. If one is ignorant of the particulars and persons of the French Revolution, there have been enough recent examples of similar political procedure to turn the characters in Danton's Death into our coevals. That, as Danton says, revolutions, like Saturn, devour their own children; that the conjunction of terror and idealism is no longer a stylistic surprise; that blood spilled for freedom may very well guarantee its opposite; that human life, no matter what social structure buttresses it, will still be shot through with the terrors of pointlessness, boredom, and death—these form the theme of Büchner's play. Sartre, Camus, Malraux, Silone, as well as lesser writers, have made themselves the heirs to these problems, and in a raw century, when every secret of mankind seems to have been uprooted and exposed, they have perhaps offered us more subtle analyses of them. But it was Büchner who sounded the major chord for these works, and we have lived, unbeknownst to so many, within his strange harmony ever since. No less remarkable than the young dramatist's insights into history is the language he expressed them with. I said before that Mr. Blau's translation offered solid hints of what the original dramatic prose has to offer. Unfortunately, these have proved insufficient for some, and many seem to have concluded that the author of Danton's Death was really a young Schiller when in fact Büchner held that poet in very low esteem.

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It is not hard to understand why. Where Schiller's dramatic language was an abstract rhetoric swept along by noble, daring concepts, Büchner's is locked solidly in particularized images. When Büchner speaks of death it is not as a vague terminus, a noble end for tragic lives. He treats it as an almost tactile entity, something that, for all its corporeal horror and fascination, is a familiar object in men's lives. Thus Camille utters the following when threatened with an official state execution:

Aber so in alien Formalitäten wie bei der Hochzeit mit einem alien Weibe, wie die Pakten aufgesezt, wie die Zeugen gerufen, wie das Amen gesagt und wie dann die Bettdecke gehoben wird und es langsam hereinkriecht mit seinen kalten Gliedern!

[All these formalities make death like marriage to an old spinster—the agreements are drawn up, the witnesses called, an Amen is spoken and then the bed covers are pulled back and in she creeps with her cold limbs.]

Or take the description of “the people” which Büchner gives to Danton:

. . . das Volk ist wie ein Kind, es muss alles zerbrechen, um zu sehen, was darin steckt.

[. . . the people are like a child who has to break everything in order to see how it works.]¹

This instinct to include grandeur in the common stuff of concrete and sensuous metaphor was Büchner's contribution to the German language. Indeed, if there is such a thing as modern dramatic rhetoric, then Büchner, in Danton's Death and Woyzeck, created it.

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With all these points of admiration stated, there is one reservation to be made about the play, not as presented by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, but as written; namely, the character of Danton. If Büchner's play is to be more than a brilliant historical tableau, if we are supposed to focus on a particular man who embodies a high moment of history, then I feel that there is a certain inchoateness in Danton that no production could disguise. Büchner himself stated that he considered his play unfinished, but he did not, to my knowledge, comment on where he thought additions were needed. I have no intention of offering him posthumous help, but I would wager that it was the main role that would have had his attention. I say this not because I feel Danton is shallow or anemic as a protagonist. Just the opposite. He seems to me far too complex for the space allotted him. Oddly enough, Büchner was more successful at presenting the inactive side of his hero. The lassitude, the indifferent debauchery, the nihilism earned from revolutionary politics—these, the hardest qualities to extract dramatic life from on a stage, are stroked vividly. It is the other Danton, the second half who must dress, eat, and sleep with the first but who has a fierce hold on life and its own fame, that remains a shadow. Because of this, even astute critics have seen in Danton only a raisonneur with a death wish. But obliteration, le Néant, fascinates only one side of him, and even that side is not certain of its sincerity. “Ich kokettiere mit dem Tod,” Danton says, and he is not using the phrase “flirt with death” in the manner of a modern sports writer. He is actually teasing death, leading it on, hoping almost to make it suffer the way a courtesan might torture an unpleasant suitor. He talks of nothingness but has an ego so grand that the thought of surrendering his memory of himself, even the terrorized memory of his revolutionary crimes, makes him want to fight death “the way a Christian fights the devil.” He is capable of pride—“The people! My name!” he cries on learning of the threat against him—and his passions for the pleasures of this world drive him to take up with eloquence the charges against him.

In short, it is the revolutionary that Büchner only hints at throughout the play. The two images of Danton never really join together in action, and he seems to fade from importance in a general blaze of historical rhetoric and mass executions. If we could have seen at least as much of the man who threw Europe the head of a king as we do of the man who ruminates on the desire to lose his own, Danton's Death would have been a theatrical masterpiece.

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It Is perhaps always so with a great play that one wants more of it, and those of us who spend a great deal of time haunting the New York theater should be even less greedy than most. To have Danton's Death on the boards at all is enough for almost unqualified gratitude. And as for that company at Lincoln Center—well, it is attempting what has never been done before in the theater: the establishment of a repertory theater with no central aesthetic to bind it together. It is not a Comédie, a Moscow Art Theater, a Berliner Ensemble, or any other group that grew on the nourishment of a particular mind. It is only a collection of actors and directors who want to put on theatrical evenings that are a little better than those we have known. It is a modest ambition. Perhaps it will be realized.

¹ My translations.