Theatre Design & Technology - May 1972 - 27

The author is a past president of the
Federal Bar Association of New York, New
Jersey and Connecticut-now the Federal
Bar Council. He is currently chairman of

its Committee on the Theatre, and in addition, has written extensively under the
pen name of "Addison Webb."

Love is by no means a new revelation: it has
always had a strong hold on people. Especially on
those of them who listen to that Serpent ever
present in our midst.

This "New," is crass, open, uncontested sexuality, and audiences with a perversity to applaud it.

This short article on the subject comes at a
point when we are being over-run by an overproduction of homemade barbarians, and are being
brought by it to a state of social chaos. We have
been brought to what, not so long ago, was moral
and legal and unrestrained licentiousness.
We have been storing up misery, wretchedness,
and a curse.
We have set a strange power at work: creating a
new soil and trying to grow a new cult on it. Its
center is the easy life, aloof from the busy world,
and with ecstasy as its goal. When its devotees
babble of "love," they are in the kingdom of their
addictions: a passing realm, individual, and antisocial.
They prate that this has been the grace of their
lives.
It is their vanity, that this has added a lustre to
them.
They even permit it to make of them a "funny
he," or a "funny she": those foolishly fond people
who become vampires, or their victims.

Theatre is speaking out for this "New," and encouraging the teaching of it, and granting dispensations for the doing ot it.
The first victim has been The Nude, and its
debasement.
The Nude, once a high form of art in painting
and sculpture and glorification, has been stripped
by theatre of her art features and cast as The
Naked.
She has been reduced from ecstacy to passion;
from Spirit to Body.

The theatre of any time is a mirror of that time.
As the one changes, so does the other. As the
one emphasizes an area of life, so does the other.
As the one becomes obsessed with a topic, so
does the other.
Either of them can throw a time out of dimension. Together, they can frustrate it for generations.
A new concomitant is not necessarily born because the old one has in some way been a failure,
and has created a problem. The basic problem in
today's New is that it does not show a base or a
capacity of development.

Man needs somebody, or something, to make his
life complete. The disagreement is as to the
identity of that somebody, or something.

While decency is ever concomitant to virtue, an
attack against the one will always induce a change
in the other.

The ancient Hebrew looked and continues to
look for completeness to the mate God created
for him.

In today's area of love, or in the area of its
absence, the "in-crowd" prod each other, with:
"one can not be good, and simultaneously in-

The Church that split off from the Hebrews said,
and continues to say (with some dissents) that the
noblest duality is man and his Church: is in the
love of God.

teresting.

Now we see a new concomitant come to birth.

The "Establishment," to the contrary, is trying
to inform them that one can be "bad," even so
very much so, and yet be so very, very "uninteresting."

Now, something is being preached that is neither
Hebrew nor Christian. Within it, there is neither
the dignity of a mate, nor the splendor of celibacy.

Not long ago, a college drama department coach
informed his associates in the field, through the
pages of one of the profession's journals, that:

THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

MAY, 1972

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