PARTISAN REVIEW
617
Out of the Houseman-Welles collaboration came some of the most
original and stunning dramatic events of the decade. Houseman's
descriptions of the process by which these productions crystallized out
of chaos are maste rly, but they also bring out the political and social
tensions of the Depression age. The splendid voodoo
Macbeth
was both
a theatrical triumph and a victory in race relations. Black performers
heretofore confined to the most stereotyped Sambo roles, as Roi Otley
noted at the time, were "not lampooned or made the brunt of laughter.
We attended the
Ma cbeth
showing happy in the thought we wouldn't
again be reminded, with all its various implications, that we were nig–
gers."
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
was not only a revolu–
tionary staging of an Elizabethan play but (with the prodigious black
actor, Jack Carter, as a "contemptuous and elegant" Mephistopheles )
"an early and successful example of integrated casting." And the Mer–
cury Theatre's modern-dress
Julius Caesar
in which Roman aristocrats
dressed like Mussolini 's Blackshirts and the crowd "wore the dark, non–
descript street clothes of the big-city proletariat," paralleled the decaying
Roman republic and the contemporary dictatorships.
Houseman neither then nor later considered himself a member of
the "art is a weapon" school of drama and felt remote - probably for
dramaturgical more than ideological reasons - from "the collective and
exclusive world of the Group Theatre." All the same, some of the drollest
secti,ons of
Run-Through
touch upon his occasional dealings with Party
theoreticians. The spectacle of the CP's cultural expert, V.
J.
Jerome,
analyzing in public the political drift of MacLeish's
Panic
and summon–
ing the "splendid lonely poet" (who shared the stage with him) "to sing
the epic of the proletariat advancing through day-to-day struggle to
power" is surely a bright spot in the pageant of American Communism.
A second conference with Jerome, inspired by the Mercury Theatre's
production of George Buechner's
Danton's Death,
was more serious. To
Party officials, the Danton-Trotsky analogy seemed dangerously provoca–
tive, especially so since the ideological fires kindled by the recent Moscow
Trials still burned. Houseman managed to prevent an open rupture
with Jerome, but he could no longer count on the patronage of the
Communists and fellow-travelers wh:) had helped to sustain his company.
By 1939 when Congress torpedoed the Federal Theatre Project, it
was plain that the kind of classic government-supported theater House–
man hoped to establish was vulnerable to the attacks of radicals and
philistines. Harold Clurman and his friends found the Mercury Theatre
"sensational but not controversial." But if Houseman 's company held no
pronounced radical views, as theatrical innovators they were very con–
troversial and far readier than their radical critics to junk the "obstin-
