At all events the Gordons have lost their paradise, and they
are going out into the world, poor. Mr. Gordon brings down
the curtain with a long speech translating into bad poetry
Engels'
conception of the ascent of man from the kingdom of
necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
I submit that
Paradise Lost
is a burlesque ·on Mr. Odets's
work. What the play fundamentally lacks is understand-
ing. Lacking understanding-both
of the characters and
the social processes in which they are thrown-there
is no
motivation. The people are travesties. Many of the lines are
gags. Others are dull speeches and swaggering platitudes.
It leaves me in open-mouthed wonder. I do not understand
how the man who wrote
Waiting for Lefty
and
Awake and
Sing
could have written a play so consistently, so ferociously
bad. And it is mistitled. It should be known to the world
as
Lay Down and Die.
Albert Bein is remembered for his play of several years
ago,
Little 01' Boy,
a moving drama of the life of boys con-
fined to a reform school, and a social document of definite
value. It was a play with genuine feeling and understanding,
but it had only a short run. It was sabotaged by critics, and
badly advertised, and now it is in the limbo of unsuccessful
plays. This year, Albert Bein has come forth with
Let
Freedom Ring,
a dramatization of Grace Lumpkin's novel,
To Afake Aly Bread.
The pattern of events in this play is
a common and familiar one to workers in a capitalist
society. It tells the story of a people living in a simple
economy in the mountains.
By direct economic pressures
they are driven away from their native habitat and into
a factory system. They carry with them a sense of their
traditions and their dignity as human beings. In the factory
system they are treated as functions of a mill, crushed down,
until they die of pellagra, are maimed, broken and twisted
in many ways. Gropingly, they arrive at some understanding
of the process in which they are trapped. Driven to anger
more than to despair, they strike. Their strike is not simply
a fight for economic demands. It is also a defense of their
integrity as human beings. Their leader, a member of their
own clan, has returned to lead them in their strike. After
provocation,
their leader is. murdered,
but they continue
in their struggle. As a play,
Let Freedom Ring
is a moving
and solid achievement,
enhanced by the poetic language of
the mountain people. It is something which no one should
miss seeing.
Before presenting
Let Freedom Ring,
the Theatre Union
put on
Mother,
by Berthold Brecht, an adaptation of Gorky's
Mother,
translated from the German.
If I might judge
from the translated comments of Berthold Brecht at a re-
ception given in his honor, and by an explanation presented
by Stanley Burnshaw in the
New Masses,
Brecht has his
own theories of his plays and the theatre. In brief, his theory
is that the theatre is ~ kind of school, where people are
taught.
His conception,
then, is of drama as education.
Mother,
the story of the education of a working-class mother
in the class struggle and the revolutionary movement, can
thus be accepted as a kind of walking school-house. The
mechanics of the stage are all brought into the open, the
setting is the most simple, there are pianos on the stage for
songs that are interlarded between the scenes, there are elocu-
PARTISAN REVIEW AND ANVIL
tion pieces, there are old-fashioned asides and there is a screen
on which slogans and pictures are flashed.
Mother,
it seems to me, might have been a satisfactory
play to present to an audience which has not yet emerged
from illiteracy. It is over-simplified to the degree that every
em;lhasis which the author seeks to make is made in double
and in triple. The character will say in an aside what he or
she is going to say or do. Then, they do it. At the opening
of scene the screen will flash on the point of the scene, tel- .
ling the audience that Ivan's brother will not speak to him.
The audience knows that Ivan's brother will not speak to
him, because at this stage of the play Ivan's brother is a
school teacher with contempt for the revolution.
So the
audience deduces that Ivan's brother will not speak to him.
The screen tells it that Ivan's brother will not speak to him.
And the scene then proves beyond the ultimate indication
of a doubt that Ivan's brother will not speak to him, because
Ivan's broth~r does not speak to him. At another point the
teacher is instructing the workers in reading and writing.
He writes out for them the words "worker" and "exploiter."
The screen flashes these two words in large black letters
against a white background,
demonstrating to the audi-
ence that beyond the possibility of a doubt you spell out
worker in the letters W-O-R-K-E-R,
and that you spell
out exploiter in the letters E-X-P-L-O-I-T-E-R.
The
possibilities of the screen are completely thrown away, the
simplicity of the play is over-stressed and it is fair to as-
sume that Brecht, in insisting on this kind of an adaptation
of his play for an American audience, was simply indulging
himself. Such an effort is unnecessary revolutionary snobbery.
Mother
was an illustrated lecture which assumed that au-
diences in New York, audiences which had seen and under-
stood such a sound and moving playas
Sailors of Cattaro,
were capable of understanding very little. Its withdrawal for
Let Freedom Ring,
which had failed uptown, was wise.
Squaring the Circle,
a translation and an adaptation of a
Russian success by Katayev, is a farce of Russian youth of
eight years ago. Most of them are members of the Young
Communist League, and they live in an apartment house in
Moscow where there is much overcrowding.
This leads to a
farcical situation where two newlywed com pIes are forced
to live in one room. Their zealous over-seriousness about
their revolutionary duties adds much humor to the play,
until it is alive and crackling. Earlier this year there was
an attack on this play, begun by Michael Gold in the
Daily
Worker.
He contended that the play was anti-Soviet, but
in a symposium in which he, Dmitri Ostrov, the director, and
others participated,
all of his charges were, I feel, most
convincingly answered by the play itself and by the remarks
of Mr. Ostrov. As propaganda it is, I feel, of real value to
the Soviet Union. As a play it is consistently humorous, and
the humor rises out of a real situation rather than a phony
one.
Earlier in the season, The Group Theatre presented
Weep
for the Virgins,
a story of cannery workers in San Diego,
by Nelissa Child. The background of the play was such that
it could have been made into something. However, it was
just a mess. The most important character in the play, the
mother of the virgins who are forced along various destruc-
