Theatre Chronicle
We Must Have Faith
IF
IT
were possible to make any coherent remark about !he theatre this
season, you might say that this was a year of apparitions. Actually,
in 1944, the stage presents such a spectacle of confusion, disintegration
and despair that no generalization can cover the case. This is not a year
of musicals or of nosalgia or of war plays or of plays dramatized .from
New Yorker
sketches or of dirty plays or of sophisticated plays about
marriage, though single specimens of each of these genres can be found
listed on the dramatic page. Among theatrical managers there appears
to be no agreement as to what will go; they do not even pay each other
the sincere compliment of imitation. Money pours in, but each success
has a fortuitous character.
Harvey,
with its rabbit six feet tall, is the talk
of the country, but this will not insure the next producer against the
failure of a play about a short giraffe.
The real heroes of today are the play doctors, principally George
Kaufman and George Abbott; younger writer-directors have copied their
methods, with the result that in the Times Square district there are more
doctors than patients available.
Out of this chaos, during the current season three plays have
emerged that deal with the same theme. This does not, however, consti–
tute a theatrical trend, though it may be symptomatic of a social ten–
dency to which the three authors have been particularly sensitive. Su–
perficially,
Harvey, The Streets Are Guarded,
and
A Bell for Adana
bear
no resemblance to each other. The first, by Mary Chase, is about a
drunk who has an invisible rabbit friend named Harvey whom he finds
more human than the other characters on the stage. Of the three,
this is the only one which has any genuine theatrical tradition behind
it ; it reminds one intermittently of
Our Town, On Borrowed Time, Blithe
Spirit, The Devil Passes,
and a whole vague group of plays which took
the supernatural lightly and, in the interests of whimsy, defied the laws
of time and space. (Since the conventions of the theatre are, precisely,
concerned with time, space, and visibility, plays which violate these laws
are naturally of perennial interest to playwrights who enjoy the metier
and take its restrictions as a challenge, and it is interesting that Miss
Chase, who is a relative outsider, a lady from Colorado, is virtually
the only author on Broadway this year to find inspiration in terms of
the medium itself.) The second play, by Lawrence Stallings, takes place
