The Play

...Certainly Marc Connelly has not produced this effect intentionally...

...This is a sin against real simplicity-and it is this which mars what might have been the great beauty of Mr...

...Connelly's work...

...Connelly, "to present certain aspects of a living religion in the terms of its believers...

...With terrific spiritual hunger and the greatest humility these untutored black Christians- many of whom cannot even read the book which is the treasure house of their faith-have adapted the contents of the Bible to the consistencies of their everyday lives...

...His is an art derived from sources so ancient that it is bound to convey universal impressions...

...and throughout the play there is a lack of that solemn grandeur which, in my limited experience, even the most uneducated Negro mind attributes to things divine...

...Mei creates images beautiful in themselves and not demanding a comparative standard of appraisal...

...This, I submit, is an unusual state of affairs...

...Yet the play which has done this, and more, is simply a representation of the Negro's idea of heaven and of the world in the days when "God walked the earth in the likeness of a man...

...The preacher replies that no one knows exactly, but that he himself has always imagined God must look like the Reverend Mr...

...The veil between the finite and the infinite will always be such that man will seek to represent the unknown, whether in art or in the recesses of his mind, as somehow like the known...

...At various incongruous moments in the play, one feels very much as if their inner integrity were being violated and exploited...

...I can only compare them to the rich man's idea of "roughing it"-to that deliberate effort at simple living which consists in traveling back to nature in a Pullman car, in hiring an expert chef as camp cook, and in calling a steam-heated log cabin a "shack...

...I understand that Mr...

...At least seven hundred years of unbroken tradition lie behind the conventions of classical Chinese drama...

...Philosophers living in space and time have had the utmost concern in trying to find words to describe concepts of God in terms that imply neither space nor time...

...It may be, as Mr...

...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Green Pastures NO PLAY of recent years has loosed such a torrent of emotional praise from at least one section of the critical press as The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly...

...The sureness of his artistry surmounts the barriers which exist between East and West...

...The detail of his gestures has inherent beauty...

...We may discard all thought of irreverence in the gentle familiarity these images imply with things divine...

...Our press critics are not easily reduced to an emotional pulp, nor easily prodded to a sincerity of praise which, by their own confession, beggars words...

...They reflect the substance of a faith in their every action, and this alone, in a day of doubt and unbelief, comes almost with the impact of a revelation...

...Even the most abstract philosophers and the most advanced scientists cling to the need of objective illustration of their ideas...

...From then on, we follow the scenes of creation, of the fall of man, of the Deluge and the Ark, of the exile in Egypt and of the winning of the promised land-all in terms of supposedly Negro images in which the modern and the ancient are mixed with a forced naivete...

...It is the boy brought up in the slums who imagines every rich man's house to be a marble and gold palace...

...One of them asks what God looks like...

...His grace of movement is a universal grace...

...It is the powerful and sturdy directness of their work, I am sure, which has done the most to stir an emotional response...

...The Green Pastures impresses one, rightly or wrongly, as being written by a playwright who undoubtedly has a deep respect for but does not share the essential qualities of the faith of the Negro people...

...In view of some objections I shall have to make to the method and to certain underlying ideas of the play, it is only fair to let the author state his purpose in his own patently sincere words...

...It is this perfection of execution, added to certain personal innovations, which the Chinese audience most admires, and to which a western audience can also respond as it might to the perfection and style of an exquisite Chinese print...

...We are not asked, as in much modern art, to see beauty within ugliness...

...Now the most conspicuous failure of The Green Pastures lies in not achieving this very simple theme which Mr...

...But faith, no matter how humble, can never be truly and honestly conveyed except by those who share it, if not in its pictorial images at least in its flaming essence, if not in its particular idiom then certainly in its universal language...

...The religion is that of thousands of Negroes in the deep South...

...The Art of Met Lan-Fang THE rather sensational success in New York of China's famous actor, Mei Lan-Fang, may be attributed to two things besides mere novelty or curiosity...

...Du Bois, as our Sunday school teacher speculates in the play, or He may resemble another believer's own grandfather...

...In other words, many of the scenes have a spurious simplicity forced upon them, a feeling which is not simple at all but, under surface appearances, highly complex and mentally exacting...

...At the Mansfield Theatre...

...This, however, is a very fine distinction even if it is, in any sense, a true one...

...The play is an attempt, writes Mr...

...Du Bois, a famous Negro preacher of his own youth...

...The majesty and panoply of the throne are much more in keeping with the dreams of the naive and the humble...

...The pattern of the play starts with a Sunday school lesson on the book of Genesis for a group of Negro children...

...Anthropomorphism is purely a matter of degree and not-as those who gently patronize the illiterate Negro imply-a distinct cleavage in viewpoint between the primitive and the educated...

...The Lord may look like the reverend Mr...

...It is, of course, a Negro heaven, in which the Lord moves about in the dignified semblance of old Mr...

...He feels that Chinese theatrical conventions are the result of abstracting from a certain reality its essential pattern, whereas western symbolism consists more in representing some object or emotion by some quite different object...

...In this heaven, if one has been born in a district where fish frys are popular, the angels do have magnificent fish frys through an eternity somewhat resembling a series of earthly holidays...

...Connelly outlines with such clarity and sympathy-a theme, certainly, to which no one familiar with the mediaeval morality and miracle plays could take exception...

...Some of the scenes are simple and moving, the more so because of the dignity and directness with which they are acted by the Negroes who compose the cast, and because of the rich accompaniment of Negro spirituals...

...Only here and there- as in the conspicuous case of John Mason Brown of the Post- was the small voice of discrimination raised to point out the ways wherein Mr...

...It is precisely the sophisticate who suspects behind the trappings of royalty the banal domestic life of the king...

...It is characteristic of the truly simple mind to exaggerate greatness, to run to excess in hero worship...

...But what we can not aecept, either emotionally or intellectually, is a mixture of images, a scrambling of pictures we may easily ascribe to the Negro mind of the deep South with pictures obviously concocted, on behalf of the Negro, by a sophisticated mind of New York...

...Certain gestures, certain details of costume and make-up and certain stage properties have come to represent certain well-understood realities as clearly as if they were printed labels...

...The vocabulary of several of our leading critics seemed to crack under the strain of trying, for the first time in months, to express a genuine stir of feeling and intellect...

...Connelly mentions in his explanation...

...Moreover, there are many scenes in which the images, as I have suggested, are distinctly false...

...Further, they "accept the Old Testament as a chronicle of wonders which happened to people like themselves in vague but actual places, and of rules of conduct, true acceptance of which will lead them to a tangible, three-dimensional heaven...

...Mei's own work-which consists in portraying the universal elements in female characters-has, in general, the perfection of a highly traditional religious ceremony or dance...

...but I doubt it...

...Connelly indicates, that the Negro imagines the business office of the Lord to be a tiny room with a couple of stiff-backed chairs and a roll-top desk...

...But the general mood-and here is something whch must be felt even more than sensed through reason-is one of unconscious patronizing, as if the author were constantly asking the audience the question "Isn't this childlike simplicity utterly charming and captivating...

...None of these defects of authorship and idea can, however, rob the play of the deep sincerity of its acting by the Negro cast...

...I cannot imagine, then, that the Negro, even of the deep South, thinks of Jehovah in commonplace surrounding, any more than the Jewish people themselves expected the King of Kings to be born in a manger...

...The simple or the childlike mind conceives the king at breakfast in ermine and wearing his crown...

...It is quite sufficient to acknowledge that the Chinese drama seeks to convey the most universal elements of action and emotion, by not confusing them with particular time or place or form, and that this effort is successful even to occidental eyes...

...The upheaval in science today is largely due to the difficulty of creating mechanical models of the atom...

...Connelly had failed to achieve a masterpiece of classic proportions...

...In any event, His face will have an earthly familiarity to one who has come for his reward...

...Du Bois in a frock coat...

...The Lord Jehovah will be the promised Comforter, a just but compassionate Patriarch, the Summation of all the virtues His follower has observed in the human beings about him...

...Soon after this, the scene shifts to heaven-during one of those celestial fish frys Mr...

...At the National Theatre...

...It is also an art brought to life with such minute perfection that it stimulates the direct response of mind to ordered beauty...

...It is the person of Christ-with Whom this play does not deal-Whom the mind of the child clothes in the familiar simplicity of humble friendship...

...We can afford, then, to treat the mental images of the Negro with sympathy, understanding and tenderness...

...Other scenes again have a distinctly satirical twist...

...Mei objects to the word symbolism as describing these conventions and prefers the word patternism-largely because symbolism in western civilization has what he considers a cruder significance...