THEATRE CHRONICLE
91
somewhere in the Pacific during the present war and deals with an old
seaman, a pharmacist's mate with a religious turn of mind, who, stranded
on an island with a few companions, and suffering from fever, imagines
that a stray Marine who appears in a boat is the Lord Jesus Christ
come to the rescue. This play has biographical ties with
What Price
Glory,
which Mr. Stallings wrote with Maxwell Anderson, and like
Mr. Anderson's
The Eve of St. Mark,
it demonstrates that the authors
exploited the First World War, but the Second World War exploited
the authors. When
The Eve of St. Mark
was produced two years ago,
some of its harsher critics concluded that the realism and humor of
What Price Glory
must have been injected by Mr. Stallings-the pro–
duction of
The Streets Are Guarded
imperils this position. The third
play, as everybody knows, is a dramatization of John Hersey's novel
about the Amgot administrator who brings democracy in the shape of
a bell to a demoralized Sicilian town. It has been transported with the
greatest care to the stage of the Cort Theatre; yet it remains more at
home in the pages of
Life
magazine, where several pages were recently
devoted to it. The conventions of the theatre are not those of the Luce
magazines, and it is rather startling to hear characters on the stage
talking to each other in that patient parental style (explaining every–
thing so very, very carefully, look, dear, here is a picture of it), which
may be appropriate to the relation between the editors of
Life
and their
presumably semi-illiterate readers, but which does not suit the theatre–
goer's idea of relations between ordinary human beings. The t..'lird dimen–
sion, moreover, makes us apply the test of truth to what is in actuality
a fable, and Frederic March's Major Joppolo
is
infinitely more convinc–
ing in glossy black and white, as a photograph.
But what is interesting about these three plays is not their artistic merit,
for they have none (though
Harvey,
which appears to have been heavily
play-doctored, gives evidence of mutilated fancy), but the fact that they
all tell exactly the same story. In each case, there is a man (the pharma–
cist's mate, Elwood P. Dowd, Major Joppolo) who believes
in
a super–
natural object (the Marine, Harvey, the Bell). Other more pedestrian
characters question either the efficacy of the object or its actual existence.
There follows a drama of faith and resistance. In every instance, the
man of faith is regarded by most or all of the other characters as crazy.
"You're raving," the sailors tell the pharmacist's mate. "You crazy boss,"
the Italians tell Major Joppolo, and Elwood P. Dowd is actually incar–
cerated in a lunatic asylum. But in the end the rpan of faith wins out.
Resistance is abandoned, belief embraced, indeed, by the more susceptible
characters positively wallowed in; at this point, happiness is achieved.
Now this is an old enough pattern of drama or fiction; it is, after
all, the story of the New Testament. What is remarkable in these three
plays is that the virtue resides, not in the object, but in the believer.
