THEATER CHRONICLE
hesitates to recommend them to others; the experience has been too
relaxed, as it were, and domestic for public comment.
The Heiress
is an adaptation of Henry James's
Washington. Square.
It has a stage-set of such massive authenticity that it is almost a con–
tribution to the housing problem, a wind blowing in freshly from the
square, whipping the white curtains,
fine
intimacies of lighting, and
one of those evening scenes, simple, melancholy, and uncorseted, at
which Mr. Jed Harris, the director, excels, a scene in which the masks
of the day, the p()stures of action and decision, are laid aside for the
night and two middle-aged people, brother and sister, facing each other
wearily
in
a dishabille of gesture, yawning, intermittently conversing,
their voices slowly decelerating, acknowledge the failure of all things,
the daily death of belief. The interjection of fatigue, with its nullifica–
tion of "problems," has a peculiar poignancy in the theater, where
action is the
sine qua non:
Brutus
in
his tent, Emilia combing Des–
demona's hair and offering to go fetch her nightgown, Sonya and the
doctor, too tired to feel, sitting glassy-eyed over the samovar toward the
end of
Uncle
V
anya-such
intermissions of conflict are the musical
rests of the drama. There is the murmur of all those lingering good
nights in Dr. Sloper's conversation with Mrs. Almond; what is un–
fortunate about
The Heiress
is that its sound is less real than its silences.
It would be idle to complain that the authors of
The Heiress,
Ruth
and Augustus Goetz, had missed the point of James's story, if only they
had missed it completely. This, however, they failed to do. The vague,
l!irge, awkward figure of Catherine Sloper
is
still dimly there at the
center, embarrassing the playwrights as she embarrassed her father and
her aunt Lavinia, who, like Mr. and Mrs. Goetz, wanted to "make"
something of her. Her father wished her to be a sensible woman; her
aunt wished her to be a romantic heroine; Mr. and Mrs. Goetz wish
her to be a thumping Freudian case-history, a repressed libidinal
im–
pulse which, thwarted, destroys itself. But it is poor Catherine's fatality
that she cannot "be" anything; a great block of recalcitrant material,
she confounds all efforts to mold her. She has the stubbornness of inert
matter, lacking both the power to move and the power to resist move–
ment actively; she can be carried along, dropped, and retrieved, but
nothing can really happen to her-she is too unwieldy. Dr. Sloper's
failure to perceive this is the tragic error that keeps the story in motion;
he has observed that he himself cannot alter her, but, neglecting to rea–
son from experience, presumes that the fortune-hunter who courts her
can actually affect her destiny. His parental firmness, based on this
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