Southern Drama, New Style
Tobin, James E.
WHEN Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom opened at the Provlncetown last December, there was none of the customary hullabaloo which strikes New York on the occasion of the birth of a new "genius."...
...These are typical excerpts: We have written and lauded one another, founded magazines to boost ourselves, drawn our boundaries around VIS and refused the caustic consolation of scholarship and criticism because it did not tickle our naive and foolish vanity...
...He has tried on all the masks of drama: Old Wash Lucas is a character sketch...
...In Three Plays, Colum gives us the rich brogue of the Irish peasant...
...we encounter hearts that are like the wild earth...
...In charge of the quarterly for a year, he contributed to each of the issues, and startled the literary circles of the district with a bitter denunciation of apologists posing as critics...
...He is not guilty of pulpiting...
...Both folk-dramatists—Connaughtman and Carolinian— sprang from the soil, and it is natural that each should write of the lives of those nearest them, those whose feet follow the plow and whose hearts the stars...
...His canvas has been admittedly small, but his work is large, and painted in strokes as cruel as the model...
...The production of The Field God, his second full-length drama, partly fulfills what might have been a promise...
...Lonesome Road and The Lord's Will...
...In Green there is language just as distinct, colorful and musical...
...Fixin's, another play of the tenant farmer, is a picture as harsh as the poverty it depicts, and so true to life that audiences have been hurt rather than pleased by its presentation...
...It is such who walk through Green's pages...
...and noting this, some critics have compared him to Synge...
...Few stories of the Negro have such insight, or such understanding as this tale of a black Galahad, led by a gleam of desire to better his fellows, marching to doom over a long and painful path, a "lonesome road," as the dramatist has termed it elsewhere...
...Green is comparable also to Eugene O'Neill...
...For one thing, he still is young...
...and in winter we see it frozen, unyielding...
...For more than a hundred years he has built roads there, leveled hill and forest, plowed the fields, sweated and groaned forth the great brag crops of naval stores, of cotton, tobacco and corn, with little or no reward, material or otherwise...
...White Dresses...
...there is humor, loud, rustic humor, and there is rage, more noticeable in the South than in the land of the Celts...
...He has used the clay of earth to mold figures of earth...
...Perhaps it was Green's fearless editorship of the Richmond Reviewer, as much as his play-writing, that made him widely known through the South...
...He is sympathetic in his realism...
...The best of his achievements in this genre are contained in his early volumes...
...Paul Green is another...
...This play (prize-winner in the Dallas Little Theatre tourney) was brought to New York in 1925, and in his first appearance here its author was awarded the Belasco Cup in the national tournament...
...And in the end, when the jeers have ceased, and the dreamer falls, the very heart of the audience is cut by the scream of his stricken wife, the faithful Goldie...
...When Green completed this play he said, "The story of the tenant farmer has yet to be written...
...He gives us a new picture of the land, just as O'Neill has sung a new saga of the sea...
...he has no message to peddle...
...Against the editors of the Library of Southern Literature and against "the thousands of pages . . . from some hundreds of authors sent forth unashamedly to convince the world that we are a wronged people, that our literature would bear comparison with that of any time and any place," he discharged sharp, biting barbs of sarcasm...
...The Last of the Lowries is the most popular of his "white" dramas...
...Perhaps he shows but a single fragment of life...
...However, he is far more like Padraic Colum...
...He lashes his characters, yet all the while he pities them, intensely, bitterly...
...He feels the cruelty and harshness in the life about him, seeing beauty, however, in the midst of its pain, and although in his classes of philosophy he may attempt to seek a reason, in his dramas he is essentially the observer...
...The people of the soil...
...It is unusual for a new and, save locally, unheard-of playwright to tell New York's dramatic staff that they are generally on the plane with space-writers, Interested not in the drama, but In the nod of the box-office Buddhas...
...Living in the vilest of huts, the prey to his own superstition, suspicions and practices, beaten and forlorn before God Almighty Himself, he has struggled helplessly in the clutch of affliction and pain...
...In plot it is similar to Synge's Riders to the Sea, highly Americanized to reveal the passing of a band of outlaws, long powerful in the Carolina hills...
...And that was all...
...His first plays were written while he was a student, and have appeared for the past seven years at commencements and in the repertory bills of the traveling players of the college...
...Classes in philosophy, the writing and editing of books, and concern with the university playshop have divided his time...
...And as O'Neill loves the sailors who drink and sweat and swear in the grimy holds of his tramp steamers, and as Colum loves the queer old men, and eager, champing youths of his stories, Green loves the tortured humans who are driven across his pages...
...A more pleasant play of these people is his No 'Count Boy, a fantastic tale of a Negro pied piper of hearts, whose imaginative stories of far-away lands bring love like leaves to his feet...
...A few critics were openly understanding...
...Following two years of teaching in country schools, he entered the University of North Carolina, but his career there was interrupted by the war...
...He is a serious student of the drama, and has supplemented college research into the Greek and English stage with a strenuous program of work In the German and French tongues...
...Other Negro plays besides In Abraham's Bosom include The End of the Row, similar in theme, inasmuch as it portrays a girl intelligent beyond her fellow-workers, eager for higher education, torn between that ambition and the chance for a white marriage...
...Both men have created characters which are beyond nationality, yet which, were they transplanted to another soil, would wither and die...
...DuBose Heyward is one artist who essayed that task...
...Perhaps it was the sight of a tall, angular Southerner employing the premiere of his first full-length play to take the stage and attack the methods of the metropolitan reviewers, that made his way harder than It should have been...
...we hear the cries of their happiness and pain, their joy and their frustration...
...Through his early years he worked on his father's farm...
...In the present volume of 642 pages . . . we still have the loud ranting note, the usual rhetoric and spectacular hyperbole bestowed upon earth-departing spinsters, shave-tail poets, nine-day wonders, crossroads philosophers, minute Alfred Tennysons, and nostalgic, whimpering Poes...
...All but a few years of his life have been spent in his native state of North Carolina...
...For another, he never has claimed to do more...
...In the introduction to a volume of collected plays he writes: The Negro has borne the brunt of the brutal dirty work in the so-called humanizing of the wide expanse . . . of that vast and fertile coastal plain which stretches inland from the sea...
...Green refuses to talk about his experiences, and in tabulating notes for a biographical sketch he wrote laconically: "Served four months on the western front...
...we smell the warm turf turning soft, brown...
...In Abraham's Bosom is a consideration of that race, vividly characteristic, brutally tragic...
...He enlisted in 1917, rising from the ranks to a second lieutenancy In France...
...Paul Green Is now thirty-two...
...The Hot Iron is a searing page of married existence, and just as horror-revealing is the bare story of miscegenation...
...there is the same turf, but instead of bogs there are turpentine woods, and in place of cattle to be driven to town there are hogs to be killed...
...On his return, he was graduated from North Carolina (in 1921) and with the exception of a short period of graduate study at Cornell, he has been connected with his alma mater since that time...
...Both these plays reveal constantly that Green has come but recently from the one-act stage...
...Paul Green was not discovered until some months later, and was almost as promptly Interred...
...In Aunt Mahaley's Cabin, melodrama...
...It is said to be based on true facts...
...There was some mouthing on both sides when the Pulitzer awards were made, and two papers went so far as to print Green's likeness in their rotogravure sections...
...The Man Who Died at Twelve O'clock, rich humor...
...He was reared in an Intensely religious atmosphere, reproduced, it is said, in The Field God, and passed shortly Into the care of a "fanatical Baptist," owner and entire faculty of the "backwoods" academy at Bule's Creek...
...Unceasingly he has matched his strength with the earth that bore him, going forever in the end to rot unnoticed in the land he tilled...
...The heart, of course, is an organ peculiar to no one land...
...The Lord's Will is the story of a preacher and his struggles with the people of the soil...
...Like the other two, he is primarily a poet...
...Few men, with the exception of those who have long and intimate connection with the South as such, have dared to write of the American Negro...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 12
