An emergent alternative press championed works establishment critics rejected

Evidence

Ranting soliloquies alternated with prolonged musical improvisations. When not nodding out or ragging on each other, the members of the racially integrated cast questioned their roles and mocked the straight world for its unacknowledged addictions; they not only scrutinized the audience but followed them into the lobby during intermission. While not unaware of The Connection’s clever gloss on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which had arrived on Broadway in 1956, or Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, successfully revived off-Broadway the same year, the daily press was dismissive. According to the New York Times’s second-string critic, The Connection was “nothing more than a farrago of dirt, smalltime philosophy, empty talk and extended runs of ‘cool’ music.” But the Village Voice made the play a cause: Jerry Tallmer’s long, analytical review was seconded in the letters column with endorsements from Allen Ginsberg as well as the Voice’s co-founder Norman Mailer. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The Village Voice anointing a play the dailies dismissed is a mechanism for scene-formation — a receptive gatekeeper turning a marginal work into a cause. Relevant to reader’s question of what conditions allow invention to be recognized and amplified.