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By Root 1070 0

shocking idea. But Mr. Wilder has nothing artistically subversive in mind; on the contrary, Our Town is as hypnotic, in the usual theatrical sense, as East Lynne. The stage manager is its heart, and he is such a nice, pipe-puffing, cracker-barrel philosopher—pungent yet broad-minded—that only a highbrow can resist his spell (or, of course, a lowbrow). He comments on the local cemetery:

This is certainly an important part of Grover’s Corners. It’s on a hilltop—a windy hilltop—lots of sky, lots of clouds—often lots of sun and moon and stars....Yes, beautiful spot up here. Mountain laurel and li-lacks....Over there are the old stones—1670, 1680. Strong-minded people that come a long way to be independent. Summer people walk around there laughing at the funny words on the tombstones. It don’t do any harm....Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves. New Hampshire boys...had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it. All they knew was the name, folks—the United States of America. And they went and died about it....Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.

Guess there just hasn’t been anybody around for years as plumb mellow nor as straight-thinking neither, as Mr. Wilder’s stage manager. Nope. ’Cept mebbe for Eddie Guest out Detroit way.

J.B. resembles Our Town in its staging—no sets, symbolic action accompanied by commentary—but in little else. Its language is high-falutin’ where the other’s is homespun, the comment is delivered by no village sage but by God and Satan in person, and its theme is nothing less than the relationship of man to God. It is Profound and Soul-Searching, it deals with the Agony of Modern Man, and it has been widely discussed, often by the author, in the Midcult magazines.[11] Mr. MacLeish mixes advanced staging with advanced poetry (“Death is a bone that stammers.”) with family stuff (“J.B., forking wishbone on Rebecca’s plate: ‘That’s my girl!’”) with tough stuff (“Four kids in a car. They’re dead. / Two were yours.”) with melodrama (“No! Don’t touch me!”) with a Message of the grandest inconclusiveness. The question of God and man is chivvied about for two hours, no decision, and is then dropped in the last scene and a new toy is offered the audience, one they are familiar with from other Broadway plays, namely Love:

Blow on the coal of the heart.

The candles in the churches are out.

The lights have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we’ll see by and by....

Robert Brustein in The New Republic and Gore Vidal in Partisan Review have lately had some good things to say about the tendency of our playwrights to bring in love as a deus ex machina to magically resolve the problems raised by the preceding two hours of conspicuously loveless dramaturgy, so I merely note the fact here. The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard made many mistakes in J.B., but one was fatal—intermingling with his own versification some actual passages from the Book of Job. It is true that Elia Kazan, who directed the play with appropriate vulgarity, reduced the effects of these passages considerably by having them delivered over a loudspeaker in an orotund voice reminiscent of the fruitiest manner of Westbrook Van Voorhees on the March of Time. Even so, the contrast was painful between the somber and passionate elevation of the Book of Job and Mr. MacLeish’s forcible-feeble style. It’s really too much to go from:

Hast thou given the horse strength?

Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder!

He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha!

to:

Job won’t take it! Job won’t touch it!

Job will fling it in God’s face

With half his guts to make it spatter!

The clever author of Our Town would never have made such a gaffe.

Finally, Mr. Benét’s 377-page orgy of Americana, much admired in its day and still widely used in the schools as combining History and Literature. The opening Invocation strikes at once the right note, patriotic yet sophisticated:

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart

So many