On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley A Mature and Challenging Drama The River Line. By Charles Morgan. Directed by Stuart Vaughan. Designed by Wolfgang Roth. Presented by Lucille Lortel, Sanford Friedman...
...Fast enough, I believe—just fast enough —to save mankind...
...First, that a play deserves sympathetic consideration because of all the labor (plus money) that has gone into it...
...But, if they're naught, ne'er spare him for his pains...
...As reported, she made two claims...
...Presented by Lucille Lortel, Sanford Friedman and Henry Boettcher...
...The play is a melodrama surrounded by a psychodrama, a drama of souls...
...Merely to damn or praise may befit the lay members of the audience...
...Two facts emerge: that the man killed was not a spy but a loyal Englishman, and that he was the half-brother of Valerie, with whom Philip is in love...
...It is not so, for this is not a political but a spiritual and personal problem...
...At the Carnegie Hall Playhouse...
...implicit in these times...
...Martin's Press) pulls the characters together as performance does not...
...but the unity of the author's view— that the richest things within us not even violence can destroy—gains added power in the reading...
...It is the critic's role to discern the shadings, to indicate the merits as well as the shortcomings of the play...
...Let him that is without virtue pick [ho first bone...
...The author (in his preface) sees us of the New World "inclined at first to regard the violence that torments the Old as an unreal devil which the educative and electoral processes might comfortably exorcise...
...it is to inform and stimulate the public...
...Milton found good even in Lucifer...
...This acceptance...
...The two men, through stern struggle, achieve wisdom...
...Nor should we mind that to some the play seems "talky," for it is wise, searching talk that not only reveals but helps to shape the spirit...
...Act II, in France in 1943, shows a French girl helping Allied soldiers escape the Germans along "the river line...
...Yet, the play rises to a genuine hope...
...The River Line bestows upon the receptive spirit the threefold gift of the theater: entertainment, enlightenment, exaltation...
...The world moves," we are told, "in the direction of responsibility...
...mankind itself...
...All come to see that one must face the truth and accept the guilt that is upon all of us...
...Damn him the more...
...Their names are On the one hand and On the other...
...At one point, it is remarked that one should prefer knowledge before power, wisdom before knowledge, and love before wisdom...
...The critic's duty is not to pity the poor playwright or rich producer...
...Acts I and III, in 1947, show Philip visiting the now-married Julian and Marie at their Gloucestershire home...
...This month, it was an actress who struck back...
...The actors— Beatrice Straight, Gene Lyons, Peter Cookson, Sada Thompson, Michael Evans, Hilda Vaughn—make them real persons, whose quality we sense...
...The critic should be aware that plays (like humans) are seldom all black or all white...
...most are some shade of gray...
...Miss Emerson's second point is sharper: that the critic should give reasons for his judgment...
...The American Philip is struggling for "some kind of reasoned balance between the activities and the acceptances of life—the crusading part and the quietist part of me," and he epitomizes the American dilemma...
...Plays, like Joyce's Exiles and Morgan's The Rii'er Line, that portray decent individuals tangled in basic problems of integrity may to some seem lacking in emotion...
...Reading (The River Line is published by St...
...But ultimately it is not any one country, as it is not any one person, that can save mankind, but only, through "an interior grace...
...Their passion is of a deeper sort, which tortured the Greeks and was luminous in Jesus...
...Faye Emerson let loose a teleblast at her critics...
...Reaching for such thoughts...
...the two women, by the grace of love, reach understanding...
...In the granary where they are hiding, the American Philip finds a letter addressed to Leipzig by one of the men...
...at Marie's order, the Englishman Julian instantly stabs the fellow...
...By which circuitous path we reach The River Line, a mature play brought to the stage by Lucille Lortel...
...Democracies, says the wise old woman in the play, have died many times: "The epitaph is always the same: 'Here lies democracy, who died of a sick conscience.' The funeral is attended by two pall-bearers...
...with the grace of love, may bring the absolution...
...The drama is rich in other challenging thoughts...
...Our responsibilities within our destiny select us, not we them...
...In America, you learn fast...
...This argument was spiked 250 years ago by Congreve, who has the prologue to his greatest comedy say of him: "He owns with toil he wrote the following scenes...
...That is your genius...
...We do not mind the coincidence, for what concern us are not the facts but the ways in which these intelligent and sensitive people meet them...
...have no commiseration For dullness on mature deliberation...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 4
