On Stage
BALLIF, ALGENE
On STAGE By Algene Ballif 'Compulsion' Is Not a Play, But a Badly Adapted Novel IF IT is possible to find anything moving or meaningful in the story of the infamous Loeb-Leopold murder of 1924,...
...Our culture specializes in the stockpiling of hundreds of such altruisms...
...His assertions about justice, mercy, religion, science and juvenile delinquency amount to a pocket-sized summary of the American liberal pieties, and in this play, as in most others today, we sense them purring quietly behind the scenes like the contented household cat...
...The only direct didactic assault comes from the defense counsel in the last act (Clarence Darrow in the actual case), and what he has to say we have all long since been persuaded of...
...The performances of Roddy Mc-Dowall and Dean Stockwell as the young murderers squeeze all the theater they can from this sort of appeal...
...But if what the play presents of Darrow's passion and eloquence is somehow connected in its author's mind with a significance for our times, I fail to discover what it is...
...On STAGE By Algene Ballif 'Compulsion' Is Not a Play, But a Badly Adapted Novel IF IT is possible to find anything moving or meaningful in the story of the infamous Loeb-Leopold murder of 1924, the new play at the Ambassador Theater has managed not to find it...
...The pronouncement in the first scene that the crime contains a meaning society needs to know is all the more embarrassing for this, for the play then proceeds on the assumption that, if the story is enacted as gaudily as it must have been reported in the national press 33 years ago, that meaning will generate itself spontaneously...
...We see that there is something very wrong with them, in their relations with each other and everyone else, and that they are miserable, homosexual and psychopathic...
...The play consists of an endless succession of scenes (16 of them in Act I, and several more that take as long to get through in Act II) exhibiting the youthful murderers in every mood and situation that can be hustled out of the novel and onto the stage...
...Beyond that, they seem to have nothing to do with the case, hardly even with the characters in Levin's novel...
...As is usual in Broadway productions these days, the set is ingenious and terribly effective, a crushing, expanse of structural steel silhouetted against a lurid, glowering sky...
...But their portrayals lack the same thing the script does — a believable characterization of the two precocious Jewish students from typical well-to-do families who for six months planned and then carried out the slaughter of a 14-year-old boy...
...their girls, with members of their families, with their interrogators, in jail, at the trial, together and apart...
...Raymond Rosenthal and Diana Trilling are among our guest critics in coming issues...
...Its failure as a play has partly to do with its reliance on the novel's techniques rather than on the very different ones required of good play-writing, and partly to do with the inability of the author to find a genuine dramatic conflict, a "problem," to which to address himself...
...As psychopaths and homosexuals, they come across in a kind of hackneyed, abstract way...
...The technical negotiation of the abundance of activity that takes place upon it—the montage effects, the portable platforms and simultaneous sets, the multitude of actors— is very skillfully accomplished, and it is too bad that all this ant-like industry cannot make up for the tedious frenzy and unintelligibility of what is being dramatized...
...To do this would not seem very socially responsible, to be sure, but it would be considerably more honest about any success the play might come to enjoy...
...It ought to be clear by now that the revival of interest in the Loeb-Leopold affair has little to do with social meanings, but rather much to do with the murder and the murderers themselves...
...What keeps bothering one afterward, however (if one is inclined to be bothered about such things), is just what "meaning" Levin and his producer had in mind...
...We see them in the flush of their crime, in a speakeasy, with Algene Ballif, our guest drama critic this week, has written on the stage for Commentary...
...What is wanting in Compulsion is something intelligent, or at least imaginative, to be conveyed about them...
...If the production at the Ambassador could pull itself together a bit and shed its threadbare moral cloak, it might survive a while on the strength of that interest...
...Compulsion, adapted for the stage by Meyer Levin from his best-selling novel, and re-adapted from this by the producer Michael Myerberg, has not even the detective-story fascination of the book...
...By means of the widely imitated techniques of that supernaturalistic school of acting conjured up by Actors Studio, they manage to hold our attention for a good part of the show...
...But all these theatrical distractions only tend to reinforce the impression that the play has run very fast and got nowhere...
...But what we see is so mechanically conceived, so banally expressed, and so hysterically performed that about all the spectacle can generate is a little of the decadent fascination some people find in watching wretched people suffer, cause suffering, and generally go berserk...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 45
