The Connection marked an early step in commodifying avant-garde cool

Evidence

Dominating the Voice’s 1960 Obie awards, The Connection was named Best All-Around Production and Best New Play—in a season that included local premieres of Jean Genet’s The Balcony, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape—while Finnerty was singled out as Best Actor. The play was also an event in the commodification of cool. Grove Press published it in paperback, as it would Kerouac’s monologue for Pull My Daisy; Blue Note brought out an LP. If not a sensation, The Connection was at least a Thing. I know that because even my parents—Museum of Modern Art members and musical comedy–loving New Yorker readers—drove into the city from Queens to get a taste. And I remember that because my mother’s annoyed account of the actors panhandling the audience during intermission impressed itself on my eleven-year-old brain. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1842

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the book’s two-part structure (Subcultures becoming Countercultures): a subcultural artifact being packaged and sold to mainstream middle-class consumers.