THEATER CHRONICLE
The Federal Theater Settles Down
T
HE FEDERAL THEATER is settling down. In two years it has passed
from an experiment into an institution, and its first young nervosity is
gently subsiding into mature, carpet-slippered ease. Its current produc–
tions, whatever their merits, show a relaxation of standards, a suspension
of effort, an aesthetic fatigue.
Prologue to Glory,
at the Maxine Elliot,
is a type of "little," sentimental play that the WPA has never previously
stooped to offer-at least not on Broadway, though I understand that a
number of hokum, patriotic works on Jefferson and other American
statesmen were sent to tour the provinces in the early days of the Pro–
ject.
Haiti,
at the Lafayette, which is stunningly successful on its own
terms, is yet by no means as original or as enterprising as the Negro
Macbeth,
and
((one-third of a nation,"
at the Adelphi, is a retrogression
from
Power.
Prologue to Glory,
Mr. E. P. Conkle's play about the young Lincoln,
is the least prepossessing of the new WPA offerings. It is a trivial pastiche
of Lincoln myths, moral platitudes, and dialect humor, messily stuck
together with the gum arabic of a conventional love story. Like all the
other plays and films which set out to show the "human side" of our
national heroes, it has humanized its subject out of all heroism. The
best one can say for it is that it is thoroughly democratic, since it illus–
trates with a vengeance the infinite possibilities for self-advancement
that are supposed to lie open to every man under .our system of govern–
ment.
If
this dull-witted, tractable, comical yokel, said by the play–
wright to be Abraham Lincoln, could rise to be President of the United
States, why so, one thinks, could you and I and the village idiot. There
is no hint in Mr. Conkle's play of the almost monomaniac ambition,
the driving power, the passion, the violence, the harsh intelligence of
the real Lincoln. Here there is only a droll, awkward, lovesick boy, strong
and stupid as his father's ox. The audience is invited to love this boy,
not for his genius but for his absurdity; and, audiences being only too
susceptible to such indirect flattery, a spirit of teary patronage toward the
Great Emancipator is nightly wafted across the footlights.
Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, declared that Lincoln "never at any
time abandoned the idea of becoming a lawyer. That was always a
spirit which beckoned him on in the darkest hour of his adversity." Mr.
Conkle prefers to believe that it was the spirit of Ann Rutledge that
did the trick. The climax of the play shows Lincoln demoralized by
her premature death, determined to abandon the law and to return to
his father's farm. (He had previously thought of the law, it seems,
chiefly as a means of buying Ann the "purties" her beauty and charm
demanded.) Fortunately for the Union an older and wiser friend is on
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