Barrie Stavis: Making History, Staging History

Born in New York City in 1906, three weeks before Clifford Odets and nine years before Arthur Miller, Barrie Stavis' life has spanned this century, but his vision shows no sign of being confined to it. One invokes fellow playwrights of the same generation with somewhat similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds because the artistic differences, as well as affinities, are worth attention. All three, initially responsive to the importance of family ties, responsibilities to a particular community, and to that larger entity that might be called the socially disadvantaged (a huge and multifarious group of victims in the Depression of the 1930's whose plight was brought home forcefully to each of the three writers at a crucial period in their lives), became politically conscious urban playwrights. Each in their youth absorbed from their environment the conviction that society not only could, but must be changed and that art, particularly drama, could be a significant agent of that change. The idealistic, predominantly leftleaning ethos of the Group Theater in the late-1930's probably comes closest to embodying the shared desire of all three to realize the exciting aesthetic as well as political hope of creating a new kind of "prophetic" theater. Subsequently, there has been a wide divergence, ideologically and biographically. Odets, turning his back on an earlier revolutionary optimism, wrote more cynically for a mostly commercial market in later years. Miller, disillusioned politically but still guardedly optimistic, has remained a socially responsive dramatist who continues to believe (as does Stavis) that human beings are inescapably social and that it is impossible to understand an individual without understanding his or her social context. Unlike Stavis, however, Miller appears to have lost the belief that he once possessed in the prophetic possibilities of the modern theater. Alone of the three writers, Stavis has remained a reformer writing primarily about reformers. Like Bertolt Brecht in this respect, he not only wants to alert spectators to the continuing need for change but to attune his art to the processes that make for its perpetual operation. At the same time that he shows how it comes