54
PARTISAN REVIEW
formity. All of the characters arc exhibited as specimens of class be–
haviorism, and the result is a series of satirical and sentimental
gro–
tesques. There is an element of horror in the perfect predictability of
these unicellular creations, and the little, white-faced, class-conscious
Columbine of a prostitute is nearly as repellent, consequently, as the
oversexed, overdressed, over-effusive Mrs. Mister. Larry Foreman, strike
leader and hero, is meant, I suppose, to represent the spirit of joy in
the insurgent working class, but he, too, has been stepped up into cari–
cature until he resembles a madcap master of ceremonies in a Broadway
night club, and his ultimate song of triumph carries an overtone of
savage hotcha which considerably detracts from the high seriousness of
the play's finale.
It is clear that Mr. Blitzstein's deterministic formula for playwriting
rules out the possibility of moral struggle within his characters. What
is at first sight more puzzling is that the class struggle itself is barely
dramatized. The two groups, workers and bosses, never clash, never
indeed really touch each other, until the very end of the play.
Then Mr. Mister tries to bribe Larry Foreman to sell out the strike;
Larry reaffirms his allegiance to labor; everybody sings a song; and the
house lights go up. It is as if two solar systems had been functioning
separately on the stage, and their meeting, which one might have expected
to be a major collision, turned out to be a passing and inconclusive
contact. Perhaps Mr. Blitzstcin was too well aware of the brittleness of
his puppet-people to risk them in any head-on encounter. His caution,
whether deliberate or accidental. was undoubtedly justified.
The abstract and heartless nature of Mr. Blitzstein's work will, I
think, set up an instinctive resistance in any normal American spectator.
The pleasure one takes in
The Cradle Will Rock
is the pleasure of feeling
one's native sensibilities violated. This play is having much the same kind
of vogue, and producing much the same response as the surrealist and
abstract art shows did at the Modern Museum. Though its setting and
subject-matter are American, it is essentially a non-indigenous plant.
Musically, it is very much indebted to the German, Kurt Weill. Dra–
matically, it shares a certain nco-primitivism with Auden and Isher–
wood, but it lacks the free play of public-school-boy fancy that one finds
in
The Ascent of F 6
and
The Dog Beneath the Skin.
Its real kinship
is with post-war German expressionism, which, except for Elmer Rice's
The Adding Machine,
never managed to take root in America.
The fact is that the tendency of American playwrights has always
been to particularize rather than to generalize. Even in the revolutionary
theater where the emphasis theoretically should have been on the mass,
not the individual, the American playwright's impulse was to write a
"problem drama" with proletarian characters, and leave the mass recita–
tives to the Europeans. The Federal Theater in its Living Newspaper
productions has been working with groups, but these groups have been
visibly atomized, each individual being endowed with such little eccen–
tricities as would make him "recognizable" in a sort of neighborly
