CORRESPONDENCE

...To the Editors: Two comments in reference to Gerald Weales's welcome remarks about Philip Barry [Aug...

...Barry seemed incapable of devising a set of actions that would adequately dramatize the profound psychological, religious and metaphysical issues that were the impulse to these plays...

...Barry was one man...

...As one of America's most thought-provoicing and creative dramatists, Barry belongs with O'Neill and Wilder as the best that America had to offer before World War II, and I believe that history will bear out this judgment...

...Although he offended some Catholic critics with his plays, his approach was a most sincere form of artistic and intellectual probing...

...Weales calls it "Eliotean...

...cyrus hoy College of Arts and Sciences The University of Rochester...

...By providing the basis for an easy metaphor with his crack about Barry's successes and failures-a "lightning bug," "now he lights up, now he doesn't"-Frank Nugent did Barry far more harm than he imagined...

...If it had been successful in the theater, which it was not (it ran for 73 performances), Barry's future work might have been more of a piece, and the dramatist might not have been confirmed in the invidious tendency to think alternatively in what for him seemed to be the mutually exclusive terms of comedies and "serious" plays...

...With its complex interplay of artifice and passion, it might better be termed "Pirandellian": the husband in In a Garden, in particular, is a distinctly Pirandellian creation in his propensity for mistaking the boundaries of art and seeking to extend its powers of selection and control into the domain of life...

...To the Editors: "To take Barry seriously"-that is certainly an intelligently novel idea [Gerald Weales, 'The Very High Comedy of Philip Barry," Aug...

...The doubts expressed in both plays would be given far more radical statement in the work of later dramatists, and yet, with the knowledge of hindsight, it is interesting to find Here Come the Clowns anticipating the shape of things to come on the stage...

...First, it is good to see attention directed to Barry's brilliant third play, In a Garden...

...What principally strikes even the most sympathetic reader of these plays is the impoverishment of their dramatic invention...

...Like him, they wonder and they question...

...It is stimulating to read an essay which resists that tired interpretation of Barry's plays and considers his attempts to reconcile man with that "divine force within or beyond him...

...And if some of his plays are obtuse and others spark-lingly clear, he was only trying to make sense of the different attitudes of man which touched his imagination...

...Everything that Barry wrote, for that matter, is consistent with that one man as he considered the question that bothers all thoughtful writers: What is it all about-this life...

...The play is unfortunately not included in Brendan Gill's recent collection, though in his introductory essay Gill quotes Barry's boast that in In a Garden he had written "the most sophisticated high comedy that ever came from a native-born American...

...In its treatment of a central figure waiting for the arrival of a mysterious someone who is presumed able to shed light on life's dark questions but who never comes, Barry's most innovative play is tending in the direction of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, written a decade later...

...The endings of both Hotel Universe and Here Come the Clowns beg more questions than they answer...

...27] at a time when Neil Simon is the successful dramatist in America and other playwrights seemingly ape his techniques, experiment in a manner that is defiantly presumptuous, or take advantage of the latest tastelessness...

...WALTER J. MESERVE Department of Theatre & Drama Indiana University Rochester, N.Y...

...A sense of freedom was essential for Barry as well as for his characters if he or they were to realize any answers...

...He never managed to solve the basic problem that faced him as a writer of "serious" plays: how, by invoking traditional Christian belief in a divine order, to provide an effective ending for a play that has fully acknowledged twentieth-century doubts about life's meaningfulness...

...His problem as a dramatist must here have been compounded by his religious convictions...

...Weales quotes Gill concerning Barry's belief "in some sort of God...

...Not a philosopher, he was a creative artist something of a loner on New York's Broadway, a thoughtful man who is, as Weales carefully points out, frustrating to consider seriously because he opens up so many different avenues of study with characters caught up in religion, art, business, thoughts of love and death...

...It deserves to be better known...

...Dramatizing moments of despair, {Continued on page 798) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 771) he also retained a basic optimism which eventually led him to accept and have faith even if he never found a conclusive answer to his questioning...

...From The Youngest through Second Threshold he refused to play God or to allow others to do so, and he did not easily accept answers-even those of the Catholic Church whose teachings he explored in his plays...

...In fact, Barry had done rather more than that, and in the annals of American drama In a Garden is a uniquely "European" sort of play in its capacity for making the art that it exhibits function as its own critique...

...Which brings me to my second comment, prompted by the problem which Weales did not leave himself room to explain: why Barry's "comedies seem more effective than the more obviously ambitious plays like Hotel Universe and Here Come the Clowns...

...In writing plays like Hotel Universe and Here Come the Clowns, Barry as a believing Christian had to devise plots that could ultimately be resolved in such a way as to bear witness to a divinity shaping human ends, and this imposed a particular strain on his gifts of dramatic creation...