Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 39

Lessons From Hollywood

31

Although such conclusions are strained at best—especially as
they stand without any comment of agreement from the author in
question—Dolan’s most significant omission is her lack of interest in
the audience, and in whether or not this play was able to have any
impact despite the alleged constraints of the commercial theatre.
Critics, after all, are not members of the popular audience, and the
latter attended this play in great numbers. Dolan seems to ignore this
fact—even though 'Night Mother arguably reached a more mixed,
less politically committed audience (and certainly a much larger
audience) than the typical piece of alternative theatre, or the
typical performance art offering in the East Village, which Dolan
devotes a good deal of her book to celebrating.
Alleged political compromise aside, 'Night Mother did run for
388 performances on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer Prize, attracting
numerous press articles, and eventually being made into a film.
Although Dolan notes that this play’s popularity was so great that
it brought in $10,000 a day at the box-office, at the height of its
popularity, she uses its popular appeal as fuel for her theory of
institutional approbation, which completely ignores its significant
impact on a large number of theatre-goers. Although Dolan
justifiably criticizes the tendency of the press to focus on Norman's
femininity (especially her love for knitting), the fact remains that a
work with feminist sympathies did attract the attention of the
popular press. By virtue of its success in the commercial theatre,
'Night Mother perhaps reached the uncommitted, the unacademic
and even the non-middle class.
Although I do not mean to imply that Dolan’s revelations of
latent sexism are not accurate, I suggest that any critique of the
allegedly nasty commercial forces, and their ability to subvert a
successful play's political or feminist ideology, should be
accompanied by a consideration of what the play actually achieved.
'Night Mother played to thousands of people, yet that seems not to
arouse Dolan's curiosity. She also appears uninterested in what
accounted for its popularity, whether a subversive (or at least an
ambiguous) read ing can be made of the production and whether the
commercial production was, at least, better than nothing. It is
unreasonable to view a sexist response on the part of male critics as
negating the worth of an entire production—and there is a danger that
the critic who is unsympathetic to Broadway will find evidence of