Encyclopedia of the Theater
FAGIN, BRYLLION
Encyclopedia of the Theater Guide to Great Plays. By Joseph T. Shipley. Public Affairs. 867 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Bryllion Fagin Chairman, Drama Department, and Theater Director, Johns...
...and no matter how sensitive and informed his critical taste, the problem of omission and commission—common to all guidebooks—persists...
...reviewer's game of substituting my tastes and wisdom for those of the author...
...Shipley's subject is vast...
...yet other play...
...I for one found The Cocktail Party fully a- entertaining as Arsenic and Old Lace (which is included) and considerably moreenlightening...
...the scope of his undertaking is bold...
...The American representation is especially perplexing...
...The word "great" in the title is especially troublesome...
...Other questions occur...
...Yet even so, it seems difficult, except on subjective grounds, to account for some of his choices and non-choices...
...which many Hispanists are reluctant to attribute to him...
...Enough, however, of playing this...
...which in the history of the theater has provided great actresses with their most glamorous role—and Lope de Vega—the most prolific of all playwrights by The Star of Seville...
...Shipley has produced a book which synopsizes—succinctly and dramatically—close to a thousand plays, details their histories (dates of original production and revivals) and critical reception, and offers, often brilliantly, his own estimate of their historical, literary and dramaturgic importance and merits...
...Why should Maugham be represented by two plays, neither of which is his generally acknowledged masterpiece The Circle...
...We should be grateful to him for making available to us this enormous source of information and critical opinion...
...And—on the theory that T. S. Eliot may still be considered an American writer—is his playwriting adequately covered by Murder in the Cathedral...
...In that case, the following thoughts of another worker in the vineyard may perhaps be to the point...
...Admittedly many sacrifices had to be made in order to keep the work from turning into a multi-volumed encyclopedia...
...His own choice, he tells us, "has been based on the thought that a play should provide entertainment, enlightenment, exaltation...
...He must have read mountains of plays in all the literature of the ancient and modern worlds...
...Reviewed by Bryllion Fagin Chairman, Drama Department, and Theater Director, Johns Hopkins University This is an astonishing performance...
...I also think it questionable that a guide which places entertainment as the first of the virtues of a play need pay quite so much attention to "closet" plays, such as Milton's Comus, Hardy's Dynasts, Byron's Cain, Browning's Blot in the Escutcheon, Tennyson's Becket...
...of his—The House of Connelly (which started the Group Theater on its way), Johnny Johnson, his symphonic dramas—have received critical and popular acclaim...
...The author himself has anticipated the problem and has rightly prophesied as many different lists of "great" plays as compilers and—be might have added—reviewers...
...I feel, as perhaps Shipley does, that Odets has...
...which once entertained, enlightened and exalted a whole generation of theatergoers...
...Joyce's Exiles...
...Diamond Lil and such musicals as Chu Chin Chow, Florodora, Finian's Rainbow and Brigadoon...
...Paul Green is represented by one play, In Abraham's Bosom...
...for instance, should Andreyev be represented by three plays that do not include The Life of Man...
...In fact, this book seems to me so important a reference work that I confidently predict that it will in the near future go into a second edition...
...He must have consulted numerous histories of the theater, production chronicles, playbills, and contemporary dramatic criticism...
...If my prediction should prove correct, I am sure the author will wish to consider revisions...
...been overrated, but wouldn't it havebeen better to omit him altogether than to select only his Waiting for Lefty...
...This, of course, allows him considerable latitude...
...But if that was the case, why include five plays by Dekker, five by Clyde Fitch, six by Philip Barry, 11 by Maxwell Anderson, 17 by Shaw and 34 by Shakespeare (including Henry VI and Titus Andronicus) ? Nor, had I been the compiler, would I have found it essential to include Harvey, Kind Lady, Broadway, Gaslight, Mister Roberts, The Bat...
...For that matter, why should Racine be represented by Britannicus rather than Phedre...
...How does one define it to include both Shakespeare and Kotzebue, Sophocles and Boucicault, Aristophanes and Avery Hopwood...
...Lillian Hellman is represented by The Little Foxes—an excellent choice: but if George Kaufman merits space for four plays, why should The Children's Hour and Watch on the Rhine be ignored...
...Shipley has worked patiently, industriously and skillfully...
...The "book" of a musical seldom conveys anything of the impact of the play without the music...
...Whatever objections one may have to Awake and Sing or Golden Boy, either one of these plays strikes me as deserving more attention today than the topical one-acter...
...True enough, this play oncewon a Pulitzer Prize...
...with space at a premium, is A Sunny Morning by the Quintero brothers equally indispensable...
...I feel alsothat Tennessee Williams has been overrated, but here again I believethat to omit his Glass Menagerie is to do him injustice...
...Once oneacters become eligible, what about Chekhov's and Maeterlinck's and Strindberg's and Shaw's and Wilder's and Saroyan's...
...It is a measure of the significance of this mammoth guide that it raises numerous questions in the mind of a reviewer...
...And out of all this scholarship he has produced a volume which all scholars, teachers, directors, producers and librarians will henceforth find indispensable...
...One can understand the inclusion of Synge's oneacter Riders to the Sea, but...
...Differ as we may with him on one point or another, we must acknowledge his services to the whole field of drama, his devotion to its significance in a world which desperately needs entertainment, enlightenment and exaltation...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 32
