THEATRE
CHRONICLE
N. G. Chernishevsky wrote in
Life and Esthetics
(see
International
Literature,
10, 1935): "Only subject matter
worthy of the attention of thoughtful man (sic) can save
art from the reproach that it is the empty amusement which
it all too frequently is. An artistic form will not save a work
from contempt or a smile of commiseration at best, if the
underlying idea does not give a positive answer to the ques-
tion, 'Was it worth bothering about'?"
This comment is so pertinent to the drama-New York,
1936---that
it scarcely requires elaboration.
Most of the
productions one sees on the American stage are just not
worth the attention of intelligent audiences. If a production
is not worth bothering about, it seems pointless to practice
diplomacy in order that the feelings of a playwright or of
his friends go undamaged.
There are plays, such as
Dead
End,
which mrrit critical contempt. Others, like lVlaxwell
Anderson's muddle-headed
lYinterset,
deserve, at best, a
smile of commiseration. Still others,
Parnell
for instance, are
worth no more than a yawn, if that much.
The revolutionary movement promises to alter this condi-
tion in the contemporary theatre. But if it is to fulfill this
promise to the degree that it should, it must protect itself lest
it become infected with the vices of the commercial drama.
One of its instruments of protective innoculation is criticism.
Criticism and reviewing should be, primarily, the means of
judgment,
interpretation,
and evaluation.
If the critic or
the reviewer sacrifices this function in order to become an
agent of professional encouragement,
he will quickly become
indistinguishable from many of the bourgeois critics whom
he projesses to despise. If he places the task of judgment
subsidiary to that of filling theatres, and sending his readers
to bookstores to buy books, he is on the way to becoming a
sheep herder. For when he does that, he treats his readers
like sheep, and as nothing else. If he assumes for his readers,
an intelligence equal to his own, he will then argue his judg-
ments and evaluations. In order to do this, it is not always
necessary to be sanctimoniously noble, ponderous, heavy, or
polysyllabic; criticism and reviewing can well perform their
tasks and still rely on irony, satire, sarcasm and yes-even
contempt. Finally, if criticism and reviewing in the revolu-
tionary cultural movement are going to play their parts
properly, critics and reviewers must realize that they cannot
have one set of criteria for "bourgeois" authors, and an-
other for their "own" \vriters. If anything, they should be
more severe upon revolutionary writers than upon others.
We must not forget these words of Lenin: "But can anything
more 'shallow', be imagined than an opinion of a world ten-
dency that is based on nothing more than what the repre-
sentatives of that tendency say about themselves?"
There are plays worth bothering about, plays like, to
mention a few; Albert Bein's
Little 01' Boy
and
Let Free-
dom Ring, Waiting for Lefty
and
Awake and Sing,
and
The Children's Hour.
But when a play or a book is not
worth bothering about, I think that they deserve only one
kind of treatment-annihilation.
Hence, as long as I write
this chronicle I do not intend to practice the dull-witted
affectation of balancing plus and minus signs over inept
plays so that I might arrive at a painless zero.
24
It is rewarding,
then, to remark that the two plays I
shall speak of in this particular chronicle are, whatever else
may be said of them, worth bothering about; at least, they
are worth some attention from an intelligent audience. And
I think left wing audiences that have appreciated and ap-
plauded as fine a playas
Sailors of Cattaro,
can be consid-
ered intelligent. I do not assume for myself the impertinence
of treating such audiences like sheep.
In
Russet Mantle,
Lynn Riggs dramatizes the conflict
between an older and a younger generation of the middle
class. The action takes place on aNew Mexican ranch.
The owner, Horace Kincaid, is a Babbitt who has made
money back east in real estate, and lost much of it in specu-
lations; he busies himself with an apple orchard, the daily
reports on the stock market, and he wistfully desires to re-
turn east. His wife Susanna is childless and unhappy as the
result of a marriage for security rather than for love; she
raises chickens. Her sister Effie, and her niece Kay, are vis-
iting them from Louisville. Effie is languorous,
and empty-
headed, a characteristically shallow middle class southern
matron. Her daughter, Kay, is blindly revolting against the
traditions of her elders; the girl's rebellion manifests itself
in a ruthless and discomforting honesty, and a sexual pro-
miscuity that veers toward self-conscious but uncongenital
nymphomania. John Galt, a poet happens along, seeking any
kind of employment. Susanna hires him to help her with the
chickens. The elder people treat him like a freak-a poet;
they confide in him their secret dreams; and Horace at-
tempts to imbue the lad with the ideals of a Babbitt. John
and Kay take turns resisting each other; then they fall in love,
and Kay becomes pregnant. The elders act in pattern, and
denounce the young man. After a moment of hesitancy, Kay
declares that she is going off with him. Whether life in de-
pression-America be good, or ill, they will live in it.
Mr. Riggs has written a sprightly and amusing comedy.
It is held together principally because of the playwright's
success in his characterizations of the older people; his two
women, Susanna and Effie are effectively drawn. Effie (played
by Margaret Douglas so that everything is gotten out of the
role) is a perfect delineation of the female product of the
Southern upper classes. As a comedy the play is both rich
and amusing.
However,
Mr. Riggs attempted to write more than a
comedy. He constantly veers from his comedy vein to one
that is more serious, without satisfactorily integratmg the
two. Thus, he writes excellent if light dialogue; suddenly
this vein will be weighted with "poetic" lines, which are
usually out of time and off character. Attempting to endow
his people with more significance, he gives each of them a
"dream." He allows his young people to talk seriously of
their plight, their world, their future in a manner that is
familiar;
it becomes rather adolescent philosophizing.
In
contrast to the excellently depicted older people, the hero is
a self-confident Moon Calf, and the heroine is one of the
Beautiful and the Damned. And they sometimes seem to echo
unfresh banalities. Even from the viewpoint of "social" con-
tent, this side of the play is less rewarding than the straight-
forward characterizations of the older people, particularly
Effie.
Russet Mantle
remains an amusing and sprightly com-
edy with some value for its
implicit
social comment.
I am somewhat reluctant to speak of
Love on the Dole.
by Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood,
in much detail
because I discover that Stanley Bumshaw has competently
said most of the things about the play that I should mention
APRIL,
