SOURCE: Gilman, Richard. “Versions of Dishonesty.” Commonweal (8 November 1963): 194.

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...