THEATER CHRONICLE
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quality in a commander, but only in moderation, as a deterrent to
military folly. So treacherous indeed are all moral footings where the
problems of war are concerned that the atomic bomb can actually be
represented as a life-saver by those who wish to defend it; it shortened
the war, they insist, and since no one knows precisely how long the
war would have lasted without it, the argument is, on this level, ir–
refutable.
Plays against war can evoke moral feeling, and plays about the
common soldier may also do so, but a play like
Command Decision,
which concerns itself with the higher military processes, the big strategic
decisions, has moved up into a sterile room from which ethical anxiety
is brusquely excluded. The word
operation
is the clue. These generals
of Mr. Haines's are really surgeons, disputing operational techniques
over the etherized form of an invisible patient; no one questions their
right
to make the incision, but they argue with each other as to its
medical
necessity.
The two congressmen hustle in like interfering rela–
tions of the patient, and the specialists show annoyance; these laymen
ought not to be allowed to wander unchallenged through the premises.
Professional jealousies intrude also but these are the
scandals
of a service
whose ideal is an absolute colorlessness, an instrumental efficiency. Like
Yellow Jack,
like
Men in White,
this play conveys, not feeling, not
thought, but information, in the manner of a feature article. With its
neat and clear plot line, its ups and downs of suspense, it holds the
spectator's interest without involving his emotions, and bears the same
relation to war that the temperature chart of a patient bears to his
human identity and his ethical worth.
In the academic life, as in the army, personal affairs are
a,
scandal,
almost by definition-that is why there is so much gossip in college
communities. That a teacher should have a wife or a mother, to say
nothing of a vice or a weakness, is
unthinkable
to those who look up
to him; his· very bodily existence, his shaving, sleeping, going to the
toilet, jeopardizes his classroom standing from moment to moment; he
himself, the intimate man, is the perpetual object of his students' obscene
curiosity, for it both shocks and excites them to imagine him as human.
The indecencies of the academic position, the shame of being a man
when one would prefer to be a pure omniscience, the cowardly attempts
at good fellowship, the hatred and disparagement of students which is
the professor's revenge for the daily belittlement of his image that pri–
vate life imposes on him, all this is the subject of
The Druid Circle,
a
play that would have been better if craftsmanship had not fashioned it
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