44
PARTISAN REVIEW
hand to remind the boy that Ann would have wished him to pursue
his studies. Once his duty to the deceased is brought home to him,
Abraham embarks, in his own lackadaisical fashion, for Springfield and
the White House.
This plot, while not so good as the real one, might have served
Mr. Conkle at least as well as it has served others had he been able
to see in the love affair anything but a worn, genteel daguerreotype of the
village queen and the bashful beau. This flabby courtship is too deficient
in sinews to hold the play's sketchy scenes together, so that the work
lacks in the end even the coherence of its own convictions.
Mr. William Du Bois' play,
Haiti,
though it is not in its details
historically more accurate than Mr. Conkle's, has spirit, color, and, above
all, focus. The difference between the two plays is well illustrated by
their different treatments of the stage set. In both cases, a good deal of
action takes place offstage. This offstage action is vitally important to
Mr. Du Bois' play, where a revolution is going on throughout the story,
and foolishly irrelevant to Mr. Conkle's play, where a stranger passing
down an offstage road is of sufficient interest to distract the characters
and the playwright from the boredom into which events on the stage
have plunged them. But, waiving the question of relevancy, and turning
to the conception and construction of the sets themselves, one sees that
the set of
Haiti
has been beautifully planned to relate the stage to the
imaginary world beyond
it,
while the set of
Prologue to Glory
has estab–
lished no connection at all. The scene of
Haiti
is a room in a country
house which is used as a headquarters first by the Negro officials of the
island, then by the French. Directly across from the house are the
mountains in which the insurgent Negro army is hiding, and to the
audience's left is the harbor. A relation between the house, the moun–
tains, and the harbor, has been created, very simply, by the use of a
balcony, upstage center, which becomes the focal point of the play, the
point at which the inside and outside worlds converge and communicate.
There is no such point in
Prologue to Glory.
Papier mache trees fade
into a backdrop of fields and hills: the stage is wide open; the characters,
rubber-necking toward the wings, dangle aimlessly in space.
As the diffuseness of Mr. Conkle's play manifests itself even in the
stage set, so the tightness of Mr. Du Bois' triangular setting reinforces
the wedge-like concentration of his script. The play is merely a glorified
melodrama, but it has Liberty for its theme, and it is acted with superb
and consistent style. It tells of Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean
Christophe, who wrested Haiti from Napoleon; but this is only half
its story. The drunken, brutal French commandant of the island gar–
rison has for his wife a lovely Frenchwoman, who is, unknown to herself,
the daughter of the Negro butler who serves her. The butler, also, is not
what he seems, but is actually one of Christophe's officers, set to spy on
his employers. Signals flash out at night to the rebel army
in
the moun–
tains; the mistress abets her father-servant; a correct and sympathetic
young French officer woos the mulatto lady; Jean Christophe pops out
of a secret panel; and the island is won from the French. This
is
not
