THE VERY HIGH COMEDY OF PHILIP BARRY

...Second Threshold, when it opened in 1951, doctored by Robert E. Sherwood, came as coda...

...Linda, his defender, says, "We're all grand at seventeen...

...According to Gill, Barry once "told Katharine Hepburn that he would be unable to get up out of the chair in which he was sitting if he weren't able to believe in some sort of God...

...Adrian tries to stage life as he would a play and fails when living people refuse to be as predictable as his characters are...

...The "Oh Lord" of Tom's line is not gratuitous swearing...

...A joke that is more than a joke, it defines that quality in Tom-"your damned integrity," Cecelia calls it-which is almost destroyed by the corruption of a marriage that is less than a marriage...

...in a marvelous image in War in Heaven, the novel version of Clowns, Clancy forces Pabst to exit through the stage traps, emphasizing that this Devil is only an actor...

...It is easy-and a comfort to reviewers-to reduce Barry's plays to restatements of conventional Broadway ideas...

...The most fascinating figure in In a Garden is the secretary who transforms herself and disrupts Adrian's past-a less ponderous version of the wise, mad old man who stage-manages the encounters in Hotel Universe...

...In Here Come the Clowns, written thirteen years after In a Garden, it is only distantly God's province...

...It's after that that the-sickness sets in...

...My own fascination with the production had more to do with Margaret Phillips, who played Miranda, than it did with Barry...

...When Lissa leaves at the end of In a Garden, to escape being put "through my paces" by the manipulations of either her husband or her would-be lover, she says, "you can't do that with people, Adrian...

...Nor to comment on the peculiar difficulty of Barry, who uses a phrase, a word, an intonation to define characters or underline meaning...

...At the Little Church Around the Corner, the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company has revived John, Barry's static but interesting play about John the Baptist, which has not been seen since its eleven-performance run on Broadway in 1927, but the production-the limited run will be over long before this essay is in print-scarcely does justice to the play...

...Yet as early as 1925, when Eliot was just beginning to think about the theater, Barry wrote In a Garden, his third play and one of his most impressive, a comedy which- verse aside-might be called Eliotean...

...Having rescued his young artists in his first two' plays, Barry uses an artist-the author of high comedies-as his chief manipulative force in In a Garden...

...In the years since Second Threshold, Philip Barry pretty much disappeared from the American theater, lingering as a name in the textbooks, a generic example in the anthologies...

...To be truly alive, in Barry's sense, is to avoid the rigidities imposed by society, tradition, family, one's own personality, to find one's own way without letting that way become a new imposition, to leave oneself for ever open to spontaneousness, to surprise...

...The flurry of theatrical activity which Barry admirers hoped might follow that event seems not to have come...

...Themes, ideas, concepts-what a way to talk about plays that, at their best, are alive, funny, affecting on stage...

...Tom Ames, one of the bedeviled souls of Hotel Universe, says, "Oh Lord, if only I'd died at fifteen," and Pat Farley suggests, "Maybe you did...

...Sometimes in Gill-a residual pettiness that is much more obvious in Here at The New Yorker-grace almost seems like taste, elegance, good manners, but for Barry, although I do not remember his using the word, grace is a quality of life, a fidelity to one's self and one's possibilities, which provides the major theme of his work from You and I (1923) to Second Threshold...

...so my generation of incipient drama critics- whether we subscribed to the Barry-light or the Barry-heavy theory-saw him as a figure from the past, a playwright in search of his pigeonhole in the history of American drama...

...After reading The Youngest, in which the heroine who schemes to sav.e the hero turns out to be the benign underside of the harshly restrictive family, I suddenly saw that Holiday was much less a life-versus-money play than the story of Linda, who finally freed herself to go to her Johnny when she quit trying to make over Ned and Julia in her own attractive image...

...Naturally...

...I have left no room to explain why the comedies seem more effective than the more obviously ambitious plays like Hotel Universe and Here Come the Clowns-that they imply rather than tell or, when they tell, do so in a context that is more dramatic than expositional...

...Filtered through Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, George Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart, Barry's work lived largely in the revivals of the delightful and for the most part faithful movie versions of Holiday and The Philadelphia Story...

...Philip Barry deserves a great deal better than a pedestrian revival of a minor work...

...That's one of the good things about life," says Josiah at the end of Second Threshold, "it's so unexpected...

...John, bound by the inflexibilities of Judaic law, cannot see that Herodias is his natural ally, that they share a vision of an avenging political Messiah while off-stage Jesus is fulfilling John's prophecy in a way that he could never understand...

...gerald weales is Commonweal's drama critic, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Religion in Modernenglish Drama (Greenwood Press...

...In the last ten years, for instance, although there have been brief off-off Broadway productions of Here Come the Clowns and The Philadelphia Story, New York has seen just one ambitious revival of a Barry play, the Phoenix Holiday (1973), which bypassed the substance of the play and went relentlessly and unsuccessfully for the stylish surface...

...Dexter echoes, "To behave herself naturally," and unless one can hear the shift in punctuation, as I did from Hepburn and Grant the other night on television, the quiet verbal gift of Barry may be missed...

...to the young-casually cruel-the event was simply the rounding off of a career already finished...

...Finally, last year, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published eight of Barry's best plays in a single volume, States of Grace, edited with a biographical introduction by Brendan Gill ($19.95...

...When Barry died on December 3, 1949-a man in his early fifties-there was no surprise...

...His plays are really Barry in quest of himself," Montrose J. Moses wrote more than thirty years ago, and Brendan Gill implies much the same thing in his essay when he discusses grace as the goal of the kind of people Barry wrote about ("grace of the body, grace of the spirit") and of the playwright himself ("the outward grace with which they lived was the sign of an inner grace that they never stopped seeking to possess in greater abundance...

...That's God's province...

...I had recently seen her as Celia in The Cocktail Party, and she came to Second Threshold trailing clouds of Eliot...

...Tracy Lord is saved in The Philadelphia Story by becoming human, flawed, fickle, freckled (who knows how...

...Whatever resonance Sherwood had left in Barry's play, I laid at her feet (she was a lovely performer), for I knew with all the arrogance and misunderstanding of the graduate student that, although T. S. Eliot, whom we thought of as T. S. ELIOT, might use drawing-room comedy as a vehicle for religious ideas, no one could expect such seriousness from a Broadway comedian, not even one who occasionally slipped into the robes of de'ep thought...

...Barry's ideas on marriage, for instance, or his sense of a man's dedication to his work, both of which are bound up with the escapes that his characters seek and temper them with responsibility...

...Taking his clue from Connie Ryan ("He gave us a will of our own, didn't He...

...As recently as 1945, Tallulah Bankhead had had a respectable run in Foolish Notion, but that was the reason that brought The Glass Menagerie and Tennessee Williams to Broadway...

...Clancy bests the illusionist, Max Pabst, by recognizing that the struggle between good and evil has become one between good men and evil men...

...In a number of the plays that context is on stage...

...After praising the beauty of his fiancee in The Animal Kingdom, Tom Collier sidesteps the conventional compliment she offers in return with "mine is entirely beauty of soul...

...Thus his first two plays, You and I and The Youngest, can be seen as the struggle of the incipient artist against the Philistine demands of society and family...

...But, please, only in a first-rate production...

...In that play, Dan Clancy, trying to get an explanation of his and the world's misery directly from God, finds that he is no puppet, that there are only tenuous strings attached...

...The alternate line was that he was a gifted writer of philosophical fantasy with an irresistible need to escape into the comfortable success of wit and elegance...

...Or his recognition that there are all kinds of manipulative forces and most of them dangerous...

...To persevere in the quest is to run the risk of being labeled adolescent, as Johnny Case is in Holiday with his amorphous desire to "find out who I am and what I am...

...There is something frustrating about beginning to take Barry seriously, particularly if one is working within limitations of space, for there are so many things that cry out for discussion at length...

...In this year of revivals, it would be rewarding to see In a Garden or Paris Bound or The Animal Kingdom or Holiday or The Philadelphia Story or Barry's own version of Second Threshold...

...However secular the force from which a Barry hero must free himself -Philistinism, the American success myth-the process takes place in an off-stage context in which the playwright, raised as a Catholic and always religious after his fashion, considers man in relation to some divine force within or beyond him...

...Even in John, there is the familiar Barry theme...

...Although words like "soul" and "salvation" can be read with traditional significance when Barry uses them, as they appear in his comedies they have a spiritual force of a more general kind, one that a secular audience can recognize, respond to, embrace...

...Yet the reductions have a way of slipping through our fingers...

...Or the thin, sad line of despair that runs alongside the note of possibility in all Barry's plays, a suicidal motif from Ned's escape into liquor in Holiday to Josiah's not so accidental accidents in Second Threshold...

...however casually the deity's name lies on a character's lips in a Barry play, it works as poetic ambiguity, providing a significance for the author that the character often does not suspect...

...For you, it's- it's blasphemy...

...THE VERY HIGH COMEDY OF PHILIP BARRY GERALD WEALES THE standard line about Philip Barry when I was in college right after the Second World War was that he was a gifted writer of high comedy with an uncontrollable urge to perpetrate significant drama...

...Whether these figures are forces or author's devices, they suggest an ambiguity by which Barry's major theme-the individual's need to free himself-is controlled by that force which lets Barry get up from his chair...

...But a man expects his wife to-" begins George in The Philadelphia Story, and Tracy finishes, "-To behave herself...