IN ARTES PLASTICAS, one of the government cultural magazines spawned by the Castro revolution, Manuel Diaz Martinez writes that “the artist must learn to help purify the revolutionary conscience of our Latin American brothers without ceasing to be an artist, without submerging his art in politics.” These words — surely contradictory — bare the dilemma of culture in Cuba today. Like all other revolutions, the Cuban upheaval of social and political institutions has stimulated a companion effort to uproot cultural institutions and nourish new and vital theatre, music, art, movies and writing. But this new culture can also wither under the upheaval’s propaganda demands. In Castro’s Cuba, no one doubts that cultural life today is busy, almost frenzied, but no one can be sure it is vital. Havana offers abundant evidence of activity: commercial and government playhouses show a varied theatrical fare. Foreign ballet and musical troupes, some of the world’s best, visit the city often; seats are available for the government admission price of 25c...

MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restaurant doubling as a playhouse, introduced me to Mexican theatre. As I approached the place, several young people were milling about on the street in front, including a huge ruffian with a black eye. Spotting him, I thought that excursions to the Mexican stage were perhaps not for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open the door and jumped into the restaurant, the others rushing after him. My ruffian and his friends were actors waiting for their cues during the evening’s first performance of Las cosas simples (The Simple Things), a play by a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Mendoza. Inside, watching the second performance, I discovered that mistaking actors for spectators was part of the production’s charm. The play was about life in a diner near a college, and the Concordia looked just like that. The actors performed around a luncheon counter and five tables in front, while the audience munched their supper and followed the play from the other twenty-five tables. At times the actors moved into the audience to borrow a napkin or ask for a match — on one occasion, to kiss a bald patron on the head. The Concordia and Las cosas simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque atmosphere, are not entirely typical of Mexican theatre, but they offered a promise that the Mexican stage bristled with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-going have fulfilled that promise...

“NOBODY outside of New Orleans gives a hoot about Ewing Poteet,” claims Ewing Poteet, a smiling, rumpled ex-fiddler, as he goes about his business of trying to whirl the excitement of theatre into the heart of New Orleans. He plies one of the odd American trades. About 1,500 miles from Broadway, Poteet, drama critic for the New Orleans Item, covers the waterfront of theatre — the amateur clubs, the touring companies, the college shows. He covers the stuff few give a hoot about. No one seems to care if Poteet dulls or excites taste for theatre. No one cares if he is foolish or brilliant, if he upholds theatre or sneers at it, if he knows how to write. Yet most Americans turn to writers like Poteet when they want news and comment about theatre. At least 140,000,000 Americans do not read Brooks Atkinson every morning. The words of the New York Times drama critic or his Broadway colleagues make no impression on millions who, by harsh chance, live outside metropolitan New York. The forty-four-year-old Poteet, in his seventh year as Item critic, is more than just his newspaper’s theatre man. Most non-New York critics are the drama-music-movie-radio-television-nightclub-book-phonograph-art editors of their outfits. While Poteet does not dabble in all these beats, he does have an added chore: he spends half his journalistic hours covering the civil courts of New Orleans...

THE ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR OF A large metropolitan daily works in so special a field only students too foolish or confident or romantic to be deterred by reality can set out for the job. Even if they dare, students have little to go on. Where do entertainment editors come from? How do they get their jobs? What do they do? Recently while preparing an article more concerned with theater than journalism, I tried to find out something about these men. Questionnaires were sent to entertainment editors on the newspapers of the 24 largest cities next to New York, whose critics were ignored because enough has been written about them and their special function. Cities smaller than San Antonio, Texas, also were eliminated, for their entertainment writers, when they have any, find little theater to worry about. Twenty-one answered...