Stage
Weales, Gerald
There is a scene at the high table in which the conventional sympathy of his colleagues sets Jack off in an angry diatribe--the anger more apparent to me than the exact words were...
...Bridge (1959) but a sort of literary spouse of the earlier book: it presents many of the same events from his point of view...
...And not one of the family is able to tell any of the others about the sounds coming out of the darkness...
...And what about the missing Mr...
...In Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement, the usual autobiography was augmented in Gresham's case by an account of his life written by Joy Davidman, an affectionate portrait of a fascinating man--pulp writer, a Spanish Civil War veteran, a spiritual seeker...
...At some point, it occurred to me that Joy was talking about William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley (1946) so fascinated me in the late 1940s...
...The event, completely free of the maudlin trappings of comforting presences, is the trigger that lets Lewis accept his grief...
...100: Commonweal Ironically, the carnival-loving Gresham was a magician, but his was stage magic, not the Narnia-style magic that Douglas wants...
...The greater part of both novels takes place during the 1930s...
...She is a club- woman, a Sunday painter, an auditor of self-improvement lectures, a homemaker whose maid runs the household, a mother watching her children grow into strangers...
...There is a scene at the high table in which the conventional sympathy of his colleagues sets Jack off in an angry diatribe--the anger more apparent to me than the exact words were audible--which seems to have come from A Grief Observed---God as "the Comic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector...
...One up for the American barbarian, but the scene has little more substance than that gag...
...Many pages are comic...
...Bridge, the new Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film has been titled, logically enough, Mr...
...Bridge and Mr...
...Lights fade...
...I cannot help feeling that Gresham is the victim of someone else's sleight of hand in Shadowlands...
...Lewis answers no...
...Joy died in 1960...
...with the pantomime of blowing smoke out of the barrel of a six-shooter...
...The scene in its quiet theatricality is symptomatic of the weakness of the play as a whole...
...He may have been a drunk (Nightmare Alley suggests more than a casual knowledge of alcoholism) and he may have been abusive, but be was still a writer in the early 1950s when Monster Midway (1953) appeared...
...Gresham...
...How familiar...
...But the moviemakers might just as well have titled their project Civilization and Its Discontents...
...This artificiality is underlined by the fact that all Jack's colleagues are caricatures (perhaps all English dons are, but they should not seem so on-stage) and by the play's origin as a television drama...
...That Shadowlands left holes in my attention for Gresham to fill suggests that it is little more than an amiable exercise in the potentially dangerous territory where love, grief, and God meet...
...Well, as typical and familiar as an episode of "Father Knows Best" rewritten by Edward Albee...
...It was perverse of me to sit in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre and wish that Shadowlands were The Gresham Story...
...some are touching, even "heart-warming...
...By the time the Twentieth Century Authors statement appeared in 1955, Davidman must have been in England (she and Lewis were married in 1956), and the attractive man she describes has been transformed into an ugly impediment to the marriage of true minds...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN SHARP EDGES 'THE BRIDGES' & 'SCISSORHANDS' conflation of the two Evan S. Connell novels, Mrs...
...and Mrs...
...Mind, not 'soul' as we tend to think of soul...
...Lewis sits down next to an empty chair, reaches across to the arm ofit, and cups Joy's invisible hand...
...We know that Nicholson cut out one of Joy Davidman's sons, as a note in the New York Times (November 30, 1990) indicates, because David Gresham did not wish to be portrayed...
...All the conventions of the time, social and moral, are embraced by the Bridges, by him with a quiet, defensive ferocity, by her with a troubled con- viction that she must do as he does...
...Lewis, in 1963...
...We read a few pages of either book and may think, "How typical...
...When Joy puts down a condescending professor who says that women do not have souls, she follows her squelching remark ("I need a little guidance here: are you being offensive, or merely stupid...
...Gresham died in 1962, a suicide...
...He is dismissed in a single sentence as an abusive alcoholic and a writer who does not write...
...Connell's writing is plain, cool, seemingly non judgmental...
...Hawthorne's performance is wonderfully detailed in its donnish idiosyncrasy and Jane Alexander's Joy is an attractive figure of likable aggression, but my admiration for them as per- formers is never transformed into an acceptance of Jack and Joy as other than stage figures...
...It is, of course, not Lewis but Nigel Hawthorne--the actor not the character--who cups the hand...
...His office is both his batttlefield and his real habitat, with his home serving only as a sort of nightly bivouac...
...He is a workaholic Kansas City lawyer who loves his wife and children deeply but never lets the word "love" pass his lips...
...At one point in Shadowlands, Douglas asks Jack if he is a magician...
...he describes himself as "now an Emersonian free-lance, still trying to find out God's will for me...
...Bridge...
...Near the end of Observed, Lewis describes a sense of Joy's presence: "Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own...
...Mr Bridge (1969) is not a sequel to Mrs...
...As soon as a playwright starts to deal with historical figures--particularly recent ones--I find myself worrying about what has been left out...
...I have been told by trustworthy friends that Shadowlands was very effective on tele- vision, but the brief scenes which may have worked well there come across here as isolated, single-point scenes...
...Yet Connell finally planted this image in my mind: a family seated around a campfire, them- selves encircled by darkness, the darkness alive with monsters, the wife and children alternately shaken and attracted by the howls of those monsters, and the father staring and smiling into the fire, steadfastly unheeding, determinedly deaf...
...This scene is necessary to the movement of the play, but it is impossible to put on stage without sentimentality...
...Doubts about the play as play are complicated in my case by extratheatrical considerations...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 3
