LITERATURE ON BROADWAY
333
forced to do evil despite himself. The parts are well written, however,
and Claggart's has the advantage of fitting in with the general atmos–
phere of fatality, an atmosphere to which Captain Vere, with his hard
choice, is of course the main contributor. (Vere's part was finely played
by Dennis King).
I saw
Billy Budd
at a matinee performance which was then be–
lieved to be the penultimate one (due to close that night, the play was
later continued indefinitely). So good was the cast, under Norris
Houghton's direction, and so receptive the audience that no one laughed
when the final curtain got stuck halfway and a man in the seat next
to mine, a paraplegic, exclaimed loudly and with total solemnity, "The
curtain never comes down on the problem of evil!" All this
Billy Budd
took in its symbolic stride; and in fact, apart from larger questions, the
play is an admirable piece of plotting and writing, on which Coxe and
Chapman were at work for some four years, having begun it in 1947
when they were students at Princeton, and then presented it in an
earlier version at the Experimental Theatre in 1949. It represents a
peculiar success of collaboration between the two of them as well as
between them and Melville; for whatever they owe to his conceptions,
the excellent theater work is theirs, and so is most of the dialogue,
that of the crew being especially good; and in O'Daniel, an inspired
case of the stage Irishman, they invented on their own a minor character
of charm and force.
Th e Rose Tattoo
is based on no single book but it derives, how–
ever indirectly, from books. The successor to Odets and Saroyan as a
literary playwright, Tennessee Williams has his own vein of native
realism, which he naturally deepens by levying upon various novelists–
let us say Caldwell for racy detail, Anderson, Lawrence, and Steinbeck
for ideas. I have read that
The Rose Tattoo
represents an advance
over his other plays because the main character, again a woman, is
here more forcible than those Southern ladies with their exasperated
gentility who, in my innocence, I believed to be Williams' best creations.
Serafina, the heroine of
The Rose Tattoo, is
forcible and she is a good
character. I do not see that she is better than her predecessors, and
for the rest the play is pretty disorganized.
It begins well: Williams' ability, rare on Broadway, instantly to toss
together an intense human situation, is evident in the early scenes of
The Rose Tattoo,
laid in a sort of shanty town inhabited by Sicilians
on the outskirts of New Orleans. Serafina's husband is killed suddenly;
we know, as she does not, that h e has been unfaithful to her. We watch
her engaged in the orgiastic process of dedicating her life and sex to his
