I could say “blink and you missed him,” but you would have missed him anyway. At last Sunday’s Tony Awards, South African dramatist Athol Fugard received a special lifetime achievement award — just another of many awards for one of the two African playwrights (the other is Wole Soyinka) who achieved a measure of success and recognition in the West during the 20th century. A Fugard play has not been on Broadway since a 2003 revival of “MASTER HAROLD … and the Boys” at the Roundabout, following up on a Broadway revival of The Blood Knot (95 performances) in 1985. Fugard offered a very short speech thanking South Africa and the United States.
But you didn’t see this; it was presented during the “InterContinental Hotels and Resorts” Creative Arts Awards, in which Fugard’s recognition was sandwiched among the design and technical winners. I didn’t see the Tony Awards on Sunday (and the few excerpts that I have looked at exhibit all of the smarmy self-congratulation of previous awards shows); Garrett Eisler did, and even he noted: “But for god’s sake, if you can’t spare time on a program about theatre excellence to let Athol Fugard get his due, then what good is it?” Well, no good at all, really. But that’s all right because the Tony Awards are not about theatre excellence: they are a three-hour commercial for a bland, predictable product known as Broadway; the winner of the Best Play award was a Steven-Spielberg-ready weeper, the winner of the Best Musical award a snarky crowdpleaser. Indeed, it would be ironic if a program about theatre excellence hid an award to one of the greatest playwrights of one of the largest continents in the world behind a commercial (or, since this is the Tonys, behind a commercial within a commercial). But not if it was a program about selling a mass-consumption entertainment product instead.
Critical responses to the Tonys indicate that this year’s telecast was one of the most entertaining and successful in some time — but popular response is hard to gauge; the ratings for this year’s program were only one-tenth of a percentage point higher than last year’s, and viewership steadily fell through the telecast. The show was ranked second when it started at 8.00, it was dead last by the time it ended at 11.00, according to the overnights. So perhaps most of America didn’t miss Fugard at all. But let’s be clear: the Tony Awards are not about theatre excellence. They are about commercial product and pointless and empty self-congratulation; and this includes those who have been ballyhooing the show’s success this year. Fugard would have been mere window-dressing amidst all that — if they’d put him in the window.
Those were the days: Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton in the opening credit sequence of "All in the Family."
I seem to have missed, along with the rest of the popular culture machine, an anniversary which should not have gone unnoticed. Forty years ago, on 12 January 1971, Norman Lear’s situation comedy All in the Family premiered on CBS. The debut episode was prefaced by a nervous on-screen disclaimer:
The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are.
The show itself ran for nine years, ending on 8 April 1979. When the show premiered, Carroll O’Connor, who played paterfamilias Archie Bunker to a group including his wife Edith, daughter Gloria and son-in-law Mike Stivic, was only 46 years old; the controversial role itself — a working-class bigot from Astoria, Queens, who never graduated from high school — made both Bunker and the character actor O’Connor household names.
Looking back at the show four decades later (reruns from the show are currently aired nightly on the cable channel TV Land), it is surprising to see just what an achievement All in the Family was — not only in the sit-com form, but in drama as well. In the years since, the dynamics of working-class family relationships and the ways in which the outside culture impinged on the intimacies of this family life have never been as thoroughly scrutinized and dissected. While the later program Roseanne was also a socially-conscious series of comic realism, it couldn’t hold a candle to All in the Family‘s broader scope. Launched in the waning years of the Vietnam War and progressing through the catastrophic Nixon administration, the series demonstrated that Archie and his family, while holed up in the Bunker living room (the location of the program rarely strayed from this single location, and indeed the Smithsonian Institution holds both Archie’s and Edith’s living room chairs in their permanent collection), were affected by not only the war but by racism, sexism, student protests, crime, miscarriage, anti-Semitism, domestic economics, male impotence, sexual violence, homophobia, transgressive sexualities, labor unrest and marital infidelity. As the conservative Archie battled with his progressive son-in-law Mike, the show attracted a huge audience from across the ideological spectrum, Archie’s supporters cheering every time he scored a point against his meathead son-in-law, Mike’s supporters (and show producer Norman Lear, along with most of his writing staff, shared Mike’s progressive politics) enjoying his seemingly incontrovertible put-downs of Archie’s prejudices. All in the Family was #1 in the Nielsen ratings over the five consecutive years 1971-1976, averaging 20 million households per week; when the show ended in 1979, it was ranked #9.
It is also surprising, and rather sad, to see how little the program has aged. In the below clip from the 1973 episode “Archie Is Branded,” an anti-Semitic hate group paints a swastika on the door of the Bunker household in the mistaken belief that the house is still inhabited by its former Jewish owner; this leads to a visit from a representative of a Jewish vigilante group (played by Gregory Sierra, who would shortly join the cast of another fine but forgotten ensemble television comedy, Barney Miller), and a discussion of the danger of violence in political conflict — a discussion which goes on to the present day:
What is also clear to the present-day audience is the remarkable ensemble work that O’Connor, Jean Stapleton as Edith, Sally Struthers as Gloria and Rob Reiner as Mike exhibited through the show’s run. Only the fine performances of the cast (and an excellent writing staff, who each week for nine years created a tightly-structured one-act, one-set play) permitted the supple presentation of the show’s continuing issues. The show itself is constrained by its form — each week, Archie learns a lesson, and each week that lesson is forgotten in the face of the next new “situation” — but still, the characters themselves did develop considerable depth over the years. In the below clip from 1978′s “Two’s a Crowd,” Archie reveals to Mike the grinding poverty of his boyhood and the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his father:
I don’t want to claim too much for the show. Many episodes of All in the Family were formulaic variations on standard sit-com plots: Archie gets stuck on an elevator or locked in the cellar with only booze for company (though this latter episode was a tour-de-force of solo performance by O’Connor); Edith goes for jury duty or is hired to appear in a television commercial for a laundry detergent — and the program was often too willing to stray to the maudlin, sentimental and melodramatic. It lacks the glorious linguistic pyrotechnics of Yes, Prime Minister and the extraordinary physical farce of Fawlty Towers, two other classics of the genre. But at its best, All in the Family rose above its form and exemplified the finest traditions of American domestic comedy-drama, avoiding (as in the clips above and below) any kind of final moral lessons and willing to leave tensions unresolved at the end of the 22 minute episode; the program approached its themes with a refreshing (especially today) absence of easy snark, sarcasm or irony — it was a show that respected all of its characters and its audience as adults, not arrested adolescents. For me the series’ genuine conclusion was 1978′s season closer “The Stivics Go West,” written by series staff writers Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, when Mike, Gloria and their young son Joey finally separate from the Bunkers to move to California, breaking up the quartet that had defined the program since its inception. The conclusion of the episode, in which Mike and Archie both express and find it impossible to express their love for each other after seven years of living together, is one of the most memorable and affecting father-son partings in American drama, let alone American television, and though again I don’t want to claim too much for it, it shares with Chekhov’s best scenes a masterly control of misdirection and silence. O’Connor and Stapleton’s bravura, restrained performances come through even in this muddy YouTube clip, on a computer display a mere fraction of the size of the television screen on which it originally appeared:
In the late 1960s, the BBC began to commission a series of 13-part programs featuring “personal histories” of a variety of human endeavors. The first was Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, which traced the evolution of humanity through its art and culture. Future programs, which proved extraordinarily successful in both Britain and the U.S. when they were presented on PBS, included The Shock of the New (Robert Hughes on modern and contemporary art), America (Alistair Cooke), The Age of Uncertainty (John Kenneth Galbraith on economics), and perhaps the most popular, Cosmos (Carl Sagan).
In the early 1970s, the BBC commissioned Jacob Bronowski to write and host The Ascent of Man, which traced the evolution of humanity through the history of its science. Bronowski was a polymath: professionally a mathematician and biologist, he was also an editor, critic (an expert on William Blake), chess expert and something of a raconteur. In 1939, he wrote this poem about Viennese satirist Karl Kraus:
“The Death of Karl Kraus”
Kraus died in time: before the God
he honored as his equal, who shot
Lorca, and brutally smashed
Mühsam’s delicate ears, washed
Vienna with his cleaning squads.
Now becomes God the anger which
Kraus spilled upon the dunged and rich
ferment Vienna. God also saw
the Danube spawn this medlar culture,
and plunged to drain it like a ditch.
Would Kraus to-night think it given
him as a grace, if he were driven
by boors to clean latrines? Or would
that bitter Jew pray for his God’s
forgiveness, but would not forgive?
O yes, the age which he disowned
was easy, ageing, overblown.
Kraus prayed an age sharp as day
might etch his eyes: who, had he stayed,
would see an age like night come down,
and sharp and savagely blind
the poet’s eyes, and splash his mind
bloody from a knacker’s wall.
Hate and terror walk the malls.
Below the city, torture mines
the cellars. O Mühsam, Lorca,
I call to you across the dark
age, ere my voice too is dumb.
Give courage when the headsmen come.
Give to the desecrated God
who Kraus unleashed, once more his manhood.
Give light where only ghosts, your ghosts are.
He considered The Ascent of Man, which was transmitted in 1973, just a year before his death, his crowning achievement. Covering science from the birth of mankind 400,000 years ago to contemporary advances in genetics and cloning, Bronowski’s overview introduced a general audience to the remarkable advances of mankind in understanding the world in which it pursued its aims.
It’s unfortunate that these series are rarely re-screened (though episodes of The Ascent of Man are available online here); the 13-hour format allowed for a depth of analysis unavailable to shorter forms; while The Civil War, Baseball and other Ken Burns documentaries may have emerged from them, few have joined unique personal perspectives to broad historical surveys and lack the idiosyncratic touch of these original BBC presentations. My father, who would have celebrated his 81st birthday today, was a great fan of the shows, especially The Ascent of Man. At the end of the 11th episode, “Knowledge or Certainty,” Bronowski visited Auschwitz to consider the uses to which science and administration had been put during the first half of the twentieth century, and chillingly described the tragic marriage of science and power. Its final image also recalls Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground; it is almost as if the play extended this image to a sublime and terrifying consideration of justice:
