THEATER CHRONICLE
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least two possible interpretations. And one may take the attitude of Elvire
who, as a woman, ought to know what it is to have her thigh felt, or
the attitude of Tartuffe. Tartuffe has many followers in the literary
world.
Mr. Eliot's plain lines are intended to lead the spectator's mind into
purer realities. But is this intention enough, and are we not also entitled
to passion, or even to diversion?
If
Mr. Eliot says, as I think he does,
that our earthly fathers and mothers do not matter so much has he
entirely discharged his duties as a dramatist? These parents and children
renounce very little because they desire very little, and desiring very
little they cannot interest us very much. It is odd, by the way, that the
coldest, the very coldest of these personages, Colby, should be the one
drawn to the Church. Is it because he is humanly the most impossible?
Is the author trying to tell us that the good Christian is he who is freeest
from the bonds of this world? Are the very best, then,
in articulo mortis?
This is very strange for so young a man as Colby. I should have liked
to see him desiring, striving, deserving his wisdom. He might at least
have tried aerial photography or playing the piano for a fan-dancer,
first. Instead, in pious imitation of his earthly father, he will play the
organ badly all his life and this wiIl put him on better terms with
his Heavenly Father. Somehow it doesn't seem altogether right.
My news of the theater is not wholly discouraging. In the Village
I saw three plays which gave me the strength to continue my investiga–
tions on Broadway. At the Cabaret Theater a small company with very
few props brilliantly played Sartre's
No Exit.
The play had not im–
pressed me deeply when I read it. "Hell," Shelley wrote, "is a city
much like London." For Sartre it is a city much like Paris, a Paris of
lesbians, nymphomaniacs and collaborationists, of smelly rooms and end–
less conversations.
If
I must end in such a hell I can at least, while
stiIl alive, read about better ones. But on the stage, superbly directed
by Theodore Hoffman, the play was exciting. Mr. Hoffman refused to let
the philosophical element devour the theatrical, and Sartre for all of his
philosophizing does have a sense of theater. Not even his stubbornest
admirers can read his novels, but his plays can, as Mr. Hoffman has
just shown, be stirring.
In the Artists' Theater on Bleecker Street I spent two of my happiest
evenings as a playgoer. I saw two new comedies there which deserved
much more attention than they have so far received. The first was a
one-act play by Lionel Abel called
Th e Death of Odysseus.
This is a
rather French play with an old Odysseus in the role of
raisonneur,
very
