[In the following negative review of the 1963 New York production of The Rehearsal, Gilman contends that “we are supposed to be left with a troubled but gratified sense of how the world really goes, but what we are actually left with is a sense of how to use the theater exquisitely for the purpose of simulating art.”]

Art, Picasso has remarked, is the lie that leads to truth. All theater “lies,” the way all art does, pretending to be real in order to trap a hitherto unheard-of truth in the space between the pretense and reality itself. But in the commercial theater, where art is most often considered to be the province of stage designers and lighting experts (as in popular culture the interior decorator and the flower arranger are thought of as our most “artistic” types) the lies of the stage, its illusions and necessary deceptions, are practised for their own sakes; sterile reproductions of lies from outside the theater, from conventional fantasy or inherited sentiment, they result in nothing unheard of except an increment of ugliness. The difference is that between being unreal in order to be more than real and being unreal so as to be simply dishonest.

The forms of dishonesty that have exhibited themselves in this new season already constitute a map of deceit, a gazetteer of uninhabitable and impossible lands. And because mendacity in an institution inevitably infects everyone committed to its preservation, the biggest lie of all is that this is proving to be a superior season; on the contrary, it is precisely the “hits” which demonstrate how rapidly we are approaching a point where the true and the false will have become absolutely indistinguishable in our theaters.

I except Chips with Everything, the one new play on or off Broadway that deserves some of its honors, but I emphatically include Luther, a drama which grows steadily more unpleasant and unconvincing in the memory, and Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal, which is an example of the obvious given a high sheen and the daunted masquerading as daring.

Anouilh has a reputation I have never been able to endorse, although I can understand how his command of theatrical procedures, his gloss and perfect though stringently limited taste, commend him to professionals and to that “upper-level” theater-goer for whom elegance is revelation and genteel cynicism is apocalypse. The Rehearsal, which was first performed in Paris in 1951, is central Anouilh, a play of considerable surface charm and faultless technique, whose vision is of the dark fate of love and innocence in a harsh, unprincipled world. “Bittersweet,” has been, I think, the word most often employed to describe its prevailing quality.

Well, bittersweet is a word for dilettantes, for esthetic fence-sitters and moral hedgers, a word that makes experience palatable by jamming its contradictions together and thus robbing them of their terrors. In this play about the attempt of a notorious roué to regenerate himself through the love of a young innocent girl, Anouilh marches as though in the ranks of real fatality but is all the while preparing a denouement of breath-taking sentimentality and flaccid wisdom. A villain, who represents worldly inexorability and the hatred of the corrupted for the pure, sees to it that the effort is thwarted by convincing the girl that her lover has not changed and by seducing her himself, after which, mortally ashamed of himself—so that Anouilh may have it both ways, the “sweet” neutralizing the bitter—he arranges to get himself killed.

This is melodrama, but pretentious melodrama: it is to take the instruments and agencies of moral vision and make them the vision itself. Innocence corrupts itself, purity is inextricably involved with stigma, love carries the seeds of its own calamity: these are the truths which Anouilh continually and elaborately misses while he builds his fable of destruction from outside, of Iago without Othello and of ruin without choice. We are supposed to be left with a troubled but gratified sense of how the world really goes, but what we are actually left with is a sense of how to use the theater exquisitely for the purpose of simulating art.