Walter Kerr

Walter Kerr is interviewed in his home by George O'Brien and Douglas Cooper.

This one-in-a-series of interviews with Walter Kerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama critic of The New York Times, goes off-road into valuable terrain, passed over by sophisticated cataloguers of Kerr's most provocative reviewing bon mots. The serendipity of pairing the hyper-insightful Kerr with an innocent-abroad interviewer yields comment containing 'Buckleyesque' articulation with 'nail-on-the-head' exactitude, which unveils a storeroom full of substance plus empathy for me, the young questioner.

We look at daily vs. weekly reportage; the influence of critiques vs. word-of-mouth; putting plays away while on 'sabbatical'; relevance vs. escapism; nostalgia and theatrical revivals, film retrospectives; the 'overnight success': a phenomenon of film vs. long-term skill, talent, training and stamina in the theater.

If there's a central premise in Kerr’s theater notices, it is the observation and analysis of the interaction between the players on stage and the audience. Does that interplay, unique every night because the performances differ in small ways, and because a disparate audience comes together every night, bring about a collaboration, a harmony, that works?

We deconstruct, with Kerr, the elements of that special concurrence called a play, and find that it requires concessions and accommodations on everyone's part. We start with the playwright's intent. Kerr accepts one psychologist's reasoning that the act of writing a play is not altogether rational, but a kind of soft hypnosis that unleashes the irrational. The producer and director are beholden to the creative premise and, for the audience, they must accept "what's up there" as the true intent, and he is certain that they will "get" most of what is important.

Kerr gives himself very little credit for an ability to see essences that the rest of us may miss in a play. Particularly since, unlike film where the performance is all past tense, each audience member, on any given night, brings something original to this multiplicity, which is welded into a unity or harmony which embraces this crowd of individuals who may have virtually nothing in common.

After twenty-five years in the theater, he concedes, he may know things about technique and craft, but he insists that each night is a fresh experience as susceptible of interpretation by the guy sitting next to him, as by himself. He asserts that he may see a play 20-30 times, and only the twenty-first time does he discover something he'd never picked up on before.

He's not disappointed in the theater, even if there's a turn toward nostalgia, revivals. He admits that that is the chief complaint he hears: that the theater is not "too real," it's "too trivial." But he calls this a phenomenological period, the development of human consciousness and self-awareness. And naturally, with that comes experimentation with the boundaries and the cultural groundswells of evolution.

Kerr is short-term pessimistic and long-term optimistic on Broadway. He sees attendance as a balance which may shift from downtown to the road (in fact, for the first time, "the road" had out-grossed Broadway in the past year). Dinner theater is doing well, while the City is getting a facelift. There's a balance, he feels."

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The Douglas P. Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection (1967-1974) contains rare interviews with influential writers, statesmen, artists, songwriters, journalists and others who have left their mark on our culture.

The Origins of The Cooper Collection

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