The hope for intelligence in the theater is not through conventional “seriousness,” whether in the form of analysis (bad example: After the Fall), or the documentary (weak example: The Deputy). It is rather, I think, through comedy. The figure in the modern theater who best understood this was Brecht. But comedy, too, has its enormous perils. The danger here is not so much intellectual simplification as failure of tone and taste. It may be that not all subjects can be given a comic treatment.
