New Emphasis On the Individual
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE New Emphasis On the Individual By Joseph T Shipley EVERY MAY, the theater season summons us to a summing up. There is a lull on Broadway; late in June, Jones Beach launches its...
...Further instances might be multiplied among the season's dramas...
...The lawyer Greenwald, who has successfully defended the lieutenant charged with improperly relieving his superior of the ship's command, hated his assignment all the while...
...If you officers had given him sympathetic cooperation, the lawyer protests, he'd have come through...
...Not that you were undutiful subordinates, but that you were debased humans...
...They know what he means, but part of the public has failed to grasp the point...
...watched like birds of prey for the time to pounce...
...In the season we now survey, this emphasis is evident, from the prize-winner down to the merriest farce...
...And The Solid Gold Cadillac stirs gales of laughter with its picture of how one little woman-just one individual American, of no wealth and no very great brains, asserting her rights-topples the dishonest officers of a giant super-corporation...
...Totalitarians to the left, who themselves impose iron discipline, have hurled cries of "fascist...
...This return to the values of the individual extends even to the less serious plays of the season...
...The prize-winner is merry, too, for good will underlies the writing of The Teahouse of the August Moon, which won the Drama Critics' Circle award...
...Equally searching and more intense is the study of individual decency in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, although minds afflicted with the social pressures of our day have misinterpreted the drama...
...The Remarkable Mr...
...late in June, Jones Beach launches its scintillating extravaganza-this year, The Arabian Nights-and what used to be called the straw-hat season is upon us...
...each person makes his own choice and takes the consequences...
...On the surface...
...Within the theater, whatever one's philosophy without, lies the domain of free will...
...Even the plays of this season in which the relationship between a man and a woman has major importance-Tea and Sympathy, The Girl on the Via Flaminia-are not obsessed with sex: the latter is background not foreground-instrument, not end in itself...
...Here was a man, he says...
...These plays, too, are basically concerned with individuals, and the way individuals respond in the complex situations of the world we live in...
...But ultimately all human relations are a question of personal contacts, and life on Okinawa in Teahouse is brought down to just these personal terms...
...What impels Greenwald, however, is no more (and no less) than a sense of decency...
...Teahouse is a picture of the Okinawan natives' struggle to preserve their way of life under American occupation...
...Such emphasis on the individual must be a sign of a weariness with the pressure that makes men cogs in a totalitarian machine-an assumption of recent "social protest" drama...
...ou jotted down every weakness, tabulated every flaw...
...Instead, with supercilious civilian (draftee or volunteer) scorn...
...The vague inanities, comedies of sex, and heavy social dramas which for some seasons past have been disheartening playgoers were replaced by a number of provocative dramas concerned with the theater's natural and basic subject: the individual...
...with human imperfections and in a job (the regular armed forces) which is popularly scorned, but on hand to hold off the enemy in the desperate days between surprise attack and slowly mounted defenses...
...That is where democracy shines, for democracy is based on faith in the individual-as both right and left totalitarian patterns are not-and that is why the warmhearted Teahouse, beneath all its fun and satire, achieves rich significance as a study of the values of decency and integrity in a complicated world...
...Let us hope this distaste- for the totalitarian, this upsurge of individual decency and individual concern, moves from the theater into the world...
...In the last scene, he tells the ship's officers why...
...The Caine Mutiny Court Martial is not only strong drama, but a vivid plea for decency in a confused world...
...High among them is Elmer Rice's The Winner, which closed too soon...
...In this play, the basic problem of the heroine rests upon individual integrity, and the deeply moving plea of the judge is for decency in human actions...
...Pennypacker presents to delighted audiences a most earnest rebel against the matrimonial code...
...at the play...
...By contrast with hits of previous seasons, like The Seven Year Itch and Picnic with their almost exclusive exploitation of sex, the three dramas I have already mentioned ring with clear accents of human values...
...The 1953-54 theater was a rousing one...
...The drama still shares with its parent, religion, the attribute that its conflicts arise out of problems of individual decency, integrity and good will...
...One critic was not "convinced" by Greenwald's "rather mystical advocacy of the sacredness of discipline...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 23
