The creative world is suffering from a stifling malady, Elia Kazan told an audience of more than 1,000 people in the New Lecture Hall yesterday afternoon. Delivering the second annual Theodore Spencer Lecture, the noted stage and cinema director declared that over-sensitivity to the Communist threat has created a problem which hampers theatrical practitioners at the very roots of their work.

"Actors are afraid to act, writers are afraid to write, and producers are afraid to produce," Kazan said, and then began to tell of a "painful crisis" which he had recently experienced.

"Without freedom, I can't work, I can function," he said, relating the drama of an artist who has been made to answer for a decision he made more than decade ago.

"I was a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936. I felt I was a misfit. I had a sense of inadequacy, and the Communist Party gave me a reason."

He told of how he came to realize that the dogmatism of the Communist Party meant an absence of freedom for the artist, and how he severed his connections.

Faced McCarran Group

And then he told of the problems he faced today. "My story begins in October of 1951," he said. Shortly after he had met with the "undercover boycott"--threatened censorship of "Streetcar Named Desire" by the Catholic League of Decency, he was called before the McCarran Committee to testify on his Communist activities.

At that time, Kazan admitted his membership, but refused to give the names of other affiliates, except for two men he had considered especially dangerous at that time.

Feared Unfairness

Kazan explained that he refused to name the others because he felt that it would be unfair to force men to give up their livelihoods for what they had once believed. "Why, at that time," Kazan said, "cries of a Communist threat were called 'Hearst propaganda.'"

He pictured a friend of that period, a tall, thin, innocent man who played the guitar, and questioned whether such a man could be considered a threat to democracy. "I did not feel that I should cause such a man, a man with a wife and a child, to lose his job."

But following this episode, Kazan had further experience with the fear that Communist secrecy had brought-to his field. George Tabouris, author of Kazan's recent Broadway production. "Flight Into Egypt," was almost denied a visa to the United States.

Contracts for two pictures he was to direct were dropped when a Hollywood column reported that he had testified before the committee and refused to name his former Communist associates.

"No Middle Ground"

Darryl Zanuck told him. "The chips are down, there is no middle ground." "I was a nominee for an Academy Award." Kazan said, "and yet I knew that no studio in town would give me a job!"