B'WAY CONTROVERSY- OTHELLO AND THE CHERRY ORCHARD
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
B'WAY CONTROVERSY- OTHELLO AND THE CHERRY ORCHARD By JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY THE hits of a season come, and go. Moat plays fade within what seems a few short hours (counting performance time) of their...
...The authoi of "The Golden Bough" used to say, Scratch a gentleman and you reach a barbarian...
...for tleep in the human dream is the recognition of nobler things, that will rite above human spirit, with consciousness of the potential wisdom and good of man...
...Wittmer sees in this the plsy's symbol: "the peasants are going to take possession of the land on which their forefathers, the serfs, had worked for centuries...
...AH Russia u our orchard," says the student Trofimov...
...he might have added, Give a man power and you create a tyrant...
...It ia perhaps natural that both the presence of Paul Robeson and the nature of American society should point up the Negro aspect of the Moor Othello—not, of course, really a Negro...
...And that thus may survive, and even make these real...
...The vaunted Miss Webster has alwaya been lifted by expert actors...
...And there is more to mankind than concern with who shall eat it...
...We welcome the signs that an author likes hit characters...
...It is this that makes the more poignant his discovery that the whole movement of events is a hideous mockery...
...Another phoenix...
...But Miss Webster, by her cuts and selections and emphases, has obscured the notion that the play is far from a drama of revenge: the Moor of Venice, sadly and still deeply in love, moves against his own heart's desire to deal ouj justice...
...Moat plays fade within what seems a few short hours (counting performance time) of their opening...
...Wittmer points out that "within his atmosphere of subdued tones, Chekov depicted the clumsy Lopahin, the man of the new age, as he only misbehaved and almost vulgsr character" . . . and that this play, picturing' with tender affection the fading aristocracy in a dying Russia, was composed in the very year in which "Lenin and his friends, anticipating the collapse of Tsarist Russia which would result from the pending Russo-Japanese War, founded- the Bolshevik Party...
...On the second mishandling, the failure to use to full advantage the great organ voice nature has given Paul Robeson, we cannot take time to dwell...
...When the phoenix dies, what rises out of its ashes...
...The exceptions can be tossed aside—as events have tossed them...
...Among the revivals, you can tell the more lasting plays by the controversies they rouse...
...but at the present moment I am in New York, in the midst of an inchoate world...
...It lacked sensitivity, it cared not, not even knowing that it lacked them, for subtler appreciative powers...
...And not even in his most lucid moments could Chekov have guessed how closely accurate a picture he wts drawing of the master Russian of the days ahead, of Commissar Joe Stalin, of the Communist...
...Instead of subduing this at first, so that it may rise to tragic poww, the director permits its bodeful depth in the first uttered syllables...
...A few outlast the season...
...Several of the daily press, lukewarm in their immediate praises, have more heartily greeted the work in later expressions...
...And a few of these are revived...
...nor is there evidenced any dislike in the portrait of the hearty upstart...
...here, save for what credit she deserves for the uneven but often brilliant work of Joee Ferrer, she is left with the responsibility her own...
...There is lacking the final lift of the great tragedies...
...w iL , " Our own opinions are based upon the thought that no play is sacrosanct, to be encased through the changing years in the changeless purity of iU flrit presentation...
...great comedy, too, in its different way, brings an exalting thrill at the close...
...Miss Webster loses the power and growth of this idea...
...how could it otherwise...
...Its chief purpose, in the darker moments, ia to lend added plausibility to the speed with which Othello accepts logo's charges against Desdemona...
...It is honest: the new peasant generation that was rising through the days when Chekov was dying (along with his Russia) was ready to grasp whatever it could by whatever means were at hand...
...I mentioned some in my first review of the play, and "Othello" rises superior to such trivia...
...this was the man that would take things over...
...TTHE CHERRY ORCHARD," perhaps more troubling, has roused even greater controversy...
...although these are indeed well enough planned and pointed...
...Yet Shakespeare is even more right...
...Two major objections, nonetheless, arise...
...thereafter change is subterfuge and weakness, instead of greater strength...
...The play's great limitation, and that is Chekov's, not the producer's, is that it remains in the doldrums...
...it was good-natured when moving smoothly toward its ends, ruthless and unscrupulous in its drive...
...One is "Othello...
...the other, "The Cherry Orchard...
...Two such plays are now on Broadway, with rigorously debated opinions in reviews and indignant letters...
...This, understand, was not the revolutionist...
...but the situation of Moors then had certain parallels —but there ia no question that this problem both originally and today, fades into the background as the action advances...
...and it seems to me that the very incoherence of the present Le Gallienne production, assuredly not accidental, and not unintended by Chekov, drifts, and spurts, and dashes on light-hearted tangents, and mourns, quite as do we ourselves...
...Minor details of direction it is not my present, purpose to note...
...The conception snd the direction of the play seem to me unimaginative, routine...
...I, too, have been in Arcady...
...and Dr...
...Thus the writer of the "comedy," looking at life around, is the pessimist...
...genially condescending and ready to be a good fellow toward those it was overcoming, so long as they properly understood their receding destiny and accepted its rise...
...Both these men look back at earlier presentations of the play, to the disadvantage of the current showing...
...Indeed, the play is called a comedy, though it is certainly not that...
...But there is more to orchard management than growing and picking the fruit...
...My own feeling, that it is a depressing play well presented, has brought diverging opinions, from the headshake of The New Leader manager, Sam Levitas, sighing for a real Russian production, to the lengthy discussion sent me by Professor Felix Wittmer, of the New Jersey State Teachers College...
...The best production of "Othello" in our generation, therefore, finds no complaint from me on the mere score that it does not show what Snakespeare intended...
...it might be called an irony—the deepest note of which time has itself added...
...My reservations are on other grounds...
...here the whole tone despite a surface lightness and spangling of humor is of oppressive gloom...
...For Chekov is right in his drawing...
Vol. 27 • March 1944 • No. 12
