Pattern of Self-Exposure and Self-Vilification in Two Plays
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Pattern of Self-Exposure and Self-Vilification in Two Plays Period of Adjustment. By Tennessee Williams. Directed by George Roy Hill. Presented by Cheryl Crawford....
...Advise and Consent...
...The President of the United States (at a time in the near future) is ready to perform any vile deed in order to have the Senate confirm his choice for Secretary of State...
...We take for granted the "slice-of-life" presentation, with writers slicing through the viscera, or just below...
...At the Cort Theatre...
...Or you may believe that man is swept along by the tides of the masses, with individuals appearing on top like foam on the breaking waves...
...You may believe, with Carlyle for instance, that history is made by individual men of power, saints or (more often) demons...
...Closely allied to such confessions are the sordid pictures in the drama which border on autobiography...
...Russia will also gloat over Advise and Consent, a dramatic and well-performed play pretending to be about another phase of our life...
...Manifestly, if second-hand stories of this sort could make money, first-hand accounts should reap a harvest...
...But there are lies and lies...
...The dramatic lie of Advice and Consent may be hailed as truth by cynics here and by our foes abroad...
...The author of The Balcony has spent perhaps more time in reformatory, jail and brothel than in respectable homes...
...By Loring Mandel...
...SOME PEOPLE BLAME it on Freud...
...The two couples that need a "period of adjustment" are troubled enough, but end on a note of reconciliation—Williams too has given us a "happy ending...
...Once more, the "happy ending...
...As always, Williams is theatrical, and he has his fans...
...The head of the Senate Committee is seeking an impartial investigation—which will reveal that the President's choice was once a member of the Communist party...
...Whichever "cause" you accept, it does not change the facts, two of which are presently significant...
...The vote on approval of the Secretary of State is a tie, and the Vice President snubs his party and his boss, breaks the tie and votes the man down...
...Directed by Franklin Schaffner...
...From the book by Allen Drury...
...Here again we may begin with Freud, on whose trail the "case history" became popular...
...First, there is greater freedom of expression...
...At the Helen Hayes Theatre...
...The old "penny-dreadful" has become the four-dollar dreadful, with that much more depravity...
...Advise and Consent has a large cast of good performers, and a deft production that makes it vivid and exciting—and it has enough truth beneath its overstatement to make it maddening...
...Former hush-hush words and topics are now openly discussed...
...The lie is an ethical instrument of government," says the President...
...This time the degeneracy, the worm-eaten moral fiber, the "fundamental corruption of the capitalist system" festers not in sex but in politics...
...The details of rottenness were "justified" by the final cure, the "happy ending...
...Detailed analyses of alcoholism, narcotics addiction, sexual deviations and excesses were written in the name of science but avidly read by the general public...
...Some say it is the natural breakdown of moral values that comes in the wake of war—and we have had two world-shaking wars and live in an atmosphere befogged with fear of a third one...
...In Tennessee Williams' current play, there is a happier note...
...after all, do we tell Russia the truth about all our resources and defenses...
...Some of them are in Russia, which would naturally hail his "representative picture of the degeneracy of American life...
...Presented by Robert Fyrer and Lawrence Carr...
...It is part of the pattern of self-exposure and self-vilification that has grown since Freud and the two world wars...
...What you call the "cause" depends largely on your temperament...
...And of course they do: There is a homosexual episode in the Senator's past and, threatened with exposure, he shoots himself...
...The Kinsey reports on the sexual behavior of the human male and female became best sellers...
...So the President says that if gold can't buy the Senator, they must "find a screw to screw him...
...There poured forth a spate of autobiographies and confessions by drunkards, dope addicts, brothel-keepers and their pals...
...Then "virtue" triumphs...
...And Williams' effeminate this time is a five-year-old boy, who doesn't even appear on the stage...
...I was reminded of those "comic" books that for 82 pictures revel with the villain in triumphant vice and violence and then in two final pictures have the hero win...
...all the four-letter words appear in popular fiction—though a few of them have not yet been uttered on the stage, Second, an increasing number of literary works concentrates on vice or crime, on the sordid aspects of life...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 50
