A Thousand Clowns (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

A Thousand Clowns was almost universally praised when it opened on Broadway in 1962. John McClain of Journal American called it "Merely the best comedy of this season," and Howard Taubman of the New York Times found the play "sunny and wistful, sensible and demented, and above all, unfailingly amusing." Some critics commented that the plot was a bit thin and predictable, but agreed that the play as whole was entertaining. John McCarten observed in the New Yorker that Gardner is

garrulous, repetitive, and undisciplined, but also pretty funny, and if you ignore the plot of his comedy, which never does resolve itself, and just watch his characters capering about, it should give you a pleasant enough evening.

A Thousand Clowns was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, and Gardner was named "promising playwright for 1961 – 62" by the New York Drama Critics on the strength of this, his first full-length play.

When the play was revived in 1996 and again in 2001, reviews were less favorable. Although Murray Burns was played by popular actors Judd Hirsch (1996) and Tom Selleck (2001) who created engaging performances, the characters and jokes seemed dated to many reviewers. Thirty or forty years after the play's first opening, audiences were used to more outrageous behavior and language on stage, and it was much more difficult to delight them with mild wackiness. Of the 1996 production, Irene Backalenick commented in Back Stage that "What might once have been seen as zany, unconventional behavior now seems tame." Charles Isherwood, reviewing the 2001 production for Variety, echoed Backalenick's judgment, noting that "much of Gardner's once-disarming irreverence seems tame and contrived."

Only one serious critical article has examined A Thousand Clowns, Thomas J. Scorza's "On the Moral Character of the American Regime" (1978). Scorza, a political scientist, uses the play to examine how American culture "understands itself" and finds that the play "ultimately defends the moral character of conventional American life." The article echoes the sentiments of those drama critics who, even in 1962, interpreted Murray's behavior throughout the play and his decision to get a job at the end of the play as reinforcement of the conventionality Murray purports to argue against. Harold Clurman commented on this idea in the Nation when the play was new, observing that "Gardner's merits are at the service of what they deride. The play's anti-conformity is but a reflex of conformity."