Drama Off Broadway

Is Aesthetic Realism “a Village cult” or a powerful force bringing new dramatic interpretations to the stage? That is the question addressed in this 1970 edition of Seminars in Theater. Host Richard Pyatt speaks with actor Ted Van Griethuysen, who is performing in the Opposite Company’s production of Hedda Gabler. A radical reinterpretation of the Ibsen classic, this version of the play is grounded in the principles of Aesthetic Realism, a world-view propounded by poet and philosopher Eli Siegel. This proselytizing note being sounded not only in the production but apparently in the accompanying press material may have led the conventional critics, led by the New York Times, to pan the show (though not the actors.) Clive Barnes offered a particularly scathing appraisal. Members of the Aesthetic Realism community responded with a letter-writing campaign. When these letters were not printed, they picketed the Times’ offices in protest. Eventually, some letters were printed, and Eli Siegel himself was invited to publish a response. Van Griethuysen, both an actor and a practitioner of Aesthetic Realism, contends that the critics’ hostility was due to their feeling “threatened because they found they could learn something.” The main bone of contention seems to be portraying the play’s heroine in a positive light, claiming that she is an “essentially good person.” Van Griethuysen connects this to Aesthetic Realism’s emphasis on self-improvement, uniting opposites to form a harmonious whole. Although there seems to have been a fair amount of acrimony, he is more interested in educating than scoring points. And selling tickets, of course. The controversy had extended the play’s run.

Eli Siegel (1902-1970) is not heard in this broadcast but provides the background against which it takes place. Originally a poet and book critic, he soon found his true calling as the proponent of a self-styled philosophical system which he expounded in thousands of lectures given at his Jane Street apartment. According to the Aesthetic Realism website, these principles can be summarized as: 

1. The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.
2. The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it…. Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.
3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Unlike most cults (which Aesthetic Realism rejects being called, though it would seem to fit many of the criteria) Siegel’s followers did not press for rapid expansion. As the Hedda Gabler controversy illustrates, this may have had to do with an innate distrust of the media. A shroud of mystery surrounded the group and its founder, which extended even to his death. In its obituary, The New York Times reported:

Almost from the beginning of Aesthetic Realism in 1941, Mr. Siegel and his followers who prefer to be called students insisted that the philosophy was being boycotted by the press and that it was thus impossible for them to propagate their views and gain a wide following. The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, which teaches Mr. Siegel's beliefs, refused yesterday to give the clinical cause of his death. But it said in a news release that he had “died of a broken heart, having suffered for over 50 years from injustices of the press and literary world.”

In more recent times, Aesthetic Realism has gained perhaps unwanted attention for its claims of being able to reprogram homosexuals so that they will be attracted to the opposite sex.

When one goes back to the negative review that set off this brouhaha, it seems pretty mild. Barnes notes:

“Hedda Gabler” is a difficult play to give well—indeed, in fairness, it is probably a difficult play even to give badly. At first I thought all the actors, with the ice cold and blazing exception of Rebecca Thompson as Hedda, were atrocious. But as time ticked on (the evening is in fact only three‐and‐a‐half hour long, but it contrives to seem much longer) it occurred to me that this was possibly not involuntary bad acting but the conscious imposition of a bad style. It struck me that the misguided intention was to put the histrionic spotlight on one character — here, of course, Hedda—and to permit everyone else to drag and mutter out his lines like in articulate kids testifying before a public opinion poll. Certainly Miss Thompson gets half of a chance. No one else gets a quarter as much.

One senses that, however genuine the outrage generated by this and other reviews, the resulting publicity was being turned to good advantage. More generally, the interview provides an interesting picture of the theater-world in 1970, with its apocalyptic sense of values being threatened—or threatened with improvement!—on all sides. As Pyatt rather surprisingly remarks:  “I think it is one of the most wonderful things of the 20th century that the Opposites Company can generate that much activity and interest in a cultural event when the world is falling apart.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151298
Municipal archives id: T7418