Theatre Chronicle
0
Broadway's Spring Offensive
F TWO
spring plays on war themes, it is oddly enough, the more
conventional one, the stodgy little play with a single, inexpensive set and
a small, inexpensive cast, that makes the more effective claims on its
audience's attention. Irwin Shaw's
Sons and Soldiers,
at the Morosco
Theatre, has Max Reinhardt, Norman Bel Geddes, Geraldine Fitzgerald,
Stella Adler, and a revolving stage, it has the tradition of Chekhov via
Clifford Odets, it has the modern urban sentimentality of the
New Yorker
magazine, it has a number of "terrific" scenes (a mother nursing a prop
baby onstage, chanting, "Drink, drink, when you grow up, you will go
to the best restaurants and make your own French dressing," a middle–
aged husband, drunk, laying bare his heart to his wife's young lover,
and the wife, under a symbolic street lamp turning off the young idealist
with a streetwalker's sneers), it has passages of the most strenuous rhetoric
!"I have swum in the Atlantic Ocean, I have read the poetry of John
Keats, and loved a woman to the point of madness"), it has all this.
and it is both too much and not enough-the audience sits squirming in
its seats, bored and embarrassed and uneasy, as though it had been
impressed by some unhappy chance into the role of eavesdropper on a
highly painful and intimate spectacle. That is the trouble with the new
sensationalist school of writers, which is headed at the moment by Mr.
Shaw: the impulse that produces the work appears to be purely ex–
hibitionistic, the subject of the play or the short story is not a character
or a situation or an idea but the author's own cleverness, his modernism,
his culture, his irony, his political humanity, and the audience is obliged
to complement his performance by itself assuming the part of the
voyeur.
Thus the spectaotor is condemned to remain the spectator, he is turned
into a pair of large round eyes; participation i!l forbidden him, the feeling
and the will are paralyzed, and it is all like a bad dream or like the
stories of atrocities in the Gestapo prisons where the victims are com–
pelled to witness the tortures of their comrades and can neither act nor
betray human sympathy. But of course this is a democracy, and the
playgoer,
if
he is not a dramatic critic, is at liberty to go home.
Naturally, to a playwright with Mr. Shaw's objectives, all the old
considerations, the principles of dramatic construction, of character draw–
ing, are irrelevant.
Sons and Soldiers
has not a single character who
is
plausible even as a stage figure; as for plot, the element of conflict is
present, theoretically, in the mind of the heroine, but it never reaches
the level of action. The point at issue on the stage is whether a young
woman in the year 1913 should go on and have a baby, at some risk to
her life, if she can look ahead and see what the world has in store for
him in 1943. The answer, of course, is Yes, and the audience is aware
of this from the beginning since it sees the young man's life unrolling and
lmows, therefore, that the choice has been made. The only possible
interest, then, lies in the Why of the decision. Earlier in the season,
Thornton Wilder tried to give a philosophical answer to the Why of the
human race's decision and found it in the male principle of intellection
279
