SUBURBAN THEATER
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anxious letter to Dr. Rose Franzblau ("Can a girl find happiness
in the arms of a man thirty years her senior?"), and, in answering
the question, each playwright assumes the function of a psychologi–
cal counselor, dispensing routine wisdom in dramatic fonn.
As
a re–
sult, the hero of these plays is involved less in conflict with the other
characters than in "inter-personal relations" with them. "Maturity"
is his ideal goal, and the climax of the play occurs when he is ad–
justed to the compromises and complexities of family life.
The psychodramatist displays his most striking gifts in his ac–
curate observation of commonplace facts; Chayefsky, in particular,
has a talent for communicating the way things look, smell, and
sound. Skirting the political issues of the past, the dramatist is also
able to avoid vague abstractions and simple-minded dialectics.
As
a
result, one finds a more complicated definition of character and
added dimensions of motive and feeling, for the
dramatis personae
of the psychodrama are no longer catalogued according to precon–
ceived social ideas. The psychodramatic hero may find his salvation
in "love" just as inevitably as the leftist hero found his in social re–
form, but this is now accompanied by a wistful and nostalgic under–
standing of the painful sacrifices involved.
On the other hand, the psychodrama achieves its added com–
plexities at the cost of a severe narrowing of vision and diminution
of energy. The typical play of the 'thirties opened out, concluding
with the hero leaving home to begin an independent life in opposi–
tion to the prevailing social system. The typical play of the 'fifties
closes in, for it documents the hero's hangdog return to the hearth.
The "maturity" he achieves is revealed as an extremely limiting
quality, for it leads not to independence of thought and action but
to restricted experience and knowledge- family security becomes the
extent of his ambitions. Seeking safety rather than danger, avoiding
all risks, he learns about as much about the heights and depths of life
as the passive spectator who contemplates his action.
Thus, Ralphie, the protagonist of
Awake and Sing,
could once
say, "I wanna make up my own mind about things ... be some–
thing!" Rubin Flood, in
Dark at the Top of the Stairs,
makes the
best of what he has because the outside world is dark and trouble–
some: "I dunno what to think of things now, Cora. I'm a stranger
in the very land I was born in." Absorbed in
his
hero's domestic
