On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Dying in Theory IT is a relief to find that in Incident at Vichy (Anta Washington Square Theater) Arthur Miller has avoided the torpid selfdefensiveness that...
...A serious playwright like Rolf Hochhuth lifts himself above such criticism...
...But the Doctor, a desperate man, might well kill the Prince and steal the pass...
...Yet the secondary figures seem to be on stage to fill out the scanty playing time of 90 minutes...
...And they argue from their beliefs because Miller has given them very little else to use...
...Morts sans sépulture does not spare the audience...
...The Doctor shocks the Prince by telling him that, like all Christians, he hates Jews whether he knows it or not: "Each man has his Jew" just as "each Jew has his Jew...
...Six Resistance fighters are captured by the French collaborationists and threatened with torture unless they reveal the whereabouts of their leader...
...By forgetting about him Miller jeopardizes the play's conclusion and therefore its point...
...Of the 10, eight are supposed to be Jews...
...Miller does not demolish the thesis...
...There are good reasons to have doubts about Incident at Vichy...
...So the prisoners miss their chance...
...Similarly, Boris Aronson's muted brown setting (with its frosted detention-room window allowing the shadow interrogations within to contrast with the ritual of waiting outside) confers on the play a genuine external reality...
...The new play resembles his work written before the fall in that it is both a drama and an exhortation...
...A boy is choked dead by another prisoner to prevent him from talking—this with the consent of the Resistance leader and the boy's sister...
...Those found to be Jews or of other "inferior" extraction will probably be deported to a concentration camp...
...in one or another of its guises it has thrived in our society on partially-ingested popular psychology and anthropology, and has become dangerous because it melts down ultimately into an assertion that what is must be, and a denial that man has any role in shaping his own life...
...In the course of the play Sartre shows one man being beaten and tortured on stage...
...In moral heat, the Doctor shouts, "It's not your guilt I want...
...There is no reason to doubt in the play's context that Pius would have granted an audience to the young priest Fontana, although the meeting is avowedly fiction...
...He comes out of the detention room with a clearance pass, gives it to the Doctor, and lets him escape in his place...
...His argument and action work in partnership...
...the man who strangled the youngster falters between self-justification and remorse...
...Curtain...
...This isn't so...
...that would be asking for too much...
...Sartre's battery of dialectic hardly ever lets up...
...They include—in addition to the Actor, the Doctor, and the Prince— a painter, a businessman, an electrician, and a 15-year-old boy...
...The guilt/responsibility line quoted above represents only too faithfully the theoretical pitch of Miller's writing in Incident at Vichy...
...The Prince responds by serving up his guilt, responsibility, and everything else in the form of his head...
...Miller's exhortation, then, is an okay message...
...He swears by his affirmative values...
...Why, for instance, does the Gestapo assign no guard to watch over the prisoners, other than the one at the gate who is out of sight...
...He will not believe that the Germans would waste lives...
...The Deputy is naturalistic but it is transfigured by its fearlessness and supported by a rigorous marshalling of history and logic...
...The leader is actually one of the prisoners...
...they cheaply celebrate theirs and promise a reward for virtue...
...A careless omission...
...Besides, the Germans respect art and he is an artist...
...The dialogue is theoretical because the prisoners, all facing possible extinction, argue in terms of their respective beliefs, not in terms of their respective stakes in life...
...Today a high-minded dramatist who works the naturalistic vein risks comparison with Reginald Rose or Rod Selling earnestly promoting social justice or some other laudable objective on one of the networks...
...Not at all...
...David Wayne (the Prince), Joseph Wiseman (the Doctor), and Hal Holbrook (the Wehrmacht major) act hard and succeed in grafting personalities of a sort on to their thin parts...
...But so is the motto in a fortune cookie...
...The cause," says one prisoner, "never gives orders...
...But the French Jew is a Frenchman as well as a Jew...
...What about the drama that accommodates the message...
...Courage stares down Cowardice...
...But it needs to be assaulted more often...
...A trivial matter, that guard...
...instead, he has demonstrated the terrible truth of sacrificing oneself for a cause and the anguish of the choices that must be made...
...One must live the truth, even if the penalty, like John Proctor's in The Crucible, is death...
...I do not mean to suggest that Miller is no better than Broadway's and television's vendors of universal love...
...And he adds a corollary by taking issue with the thesis that it is natural for men to hate and fear other men and to call them their inferiors when the other men have some kind of collective identification—color, religious cohesion, or whatnot...
...The alternative—Willy Loman's and Eddie Carbone's and Joe Keller's— is dying for a lie...
...Sartre has not asked anybody to die for a truth...
...The play's ambitions and its straight-line progression (it is in effect a series of disappearances) demand that every character make some contribution...
...this created an uproar in Paris...
...He only assaults it...
...For Miller, telling the truth is not enough...
...One of them after another goes into the detention room to have his papers and his penis examined, and the action narrows down to the two prisoners left till last, a Jewish doctor and an Austrian prince who is a Christian...
...True, the Gestapo men would never believe that the Prince would hand his pass to the Doctor voluntarily...
...If, like these people, he has had a French upbringing and, by 1942, lived through the bitter interwar years, as well as over two years of occupation by les boches, I submit that he is a different man from the characters Miller presents and that he talks in a quite different language...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Dying in Theory IT is a relief to find that in Incident at Vichy (Anta Washington Square Theater) Arthur Miller has avoided the torpid selfdefensiveness that characterized After the Fall...
...Before they go they are not sure of what they have achieved...
...No such lapse occurs in Sartre's Morts sans sépulture, written and produced in 1946 and also a play about the interrogation of prisoners during the Vichy regime...
...Let the television writer slip on a fact or an interpretation and the studio switchboard goes berserk with protests...
...and he can be criticized for the same types of defect in authenticity...
...The three strongest prisoners could overwhelm the guard at the gate and break away while there is still time...
...The prisoners, having withstood their torments, are taken out and brusquely shot...
...He has always had the impulse to cry, "Do good and justify your existence," which is an ethical —or let's say ethical culture—step or two beyond the stringency of Hotspur's "Tell truth and shame the devil...
...Ten assorted men rounded up by French miliciens under the supervision of the Gestapo await interrogation...
...The play does not end, as does Incident at Vichy, with a splendid gesture...
...Incident at Vichy takes place in 1942...
...Like the cookie, it tends to crumble...
...they need workers...
...A second man, afraid he may give way under a repeated bout of torture, jumps to his death from a window...
...Miller must think that Jews everywhere are alike: Endow your brainchild with a nationality, a profession, and a behavior pattern, color him Jewish, and hope that he can play Everyjew...
...it gathers animation as the cast dwindles...
...Miller, for all his brazen ingenuousness, can always call up reserves of theatrical power, and Clurman's production follows the play's beat...
...It might be objected that Miller's play operates on a more intellectual level...
...The play ends in a silent tableau: The Prince confronts a Wehrmacht major who is disgusted with the interrogation but has not had the guts to dissociate himself from it...
...But one, an actor, refuses...
...it says nothing...
...Give your life for a fellow man, exhorts Miller, when that is the only way to raise a protest in the name of decency...
...it's your responsibility...
...They are a practical people...
...We are the ones who decide what it requires . . ." Harold Clurman has directed the Lincoln Center company with deference—almost reverence—looping long silences around the early lines to invest them with a significance they can rarely bear...
...Most of them are embodied as a single characteristic or idea and some are hardly even that...
...The question of verisimilitude arises—and pulls out with it other questions concerning credibility— only because the drama is rigidly naturalistic in the telling and the staging, and deficient in those leaps of the imagination that took Miller to the high points of his finest play, The Crucible, (An example is the scene in which Abigail "bewitches" the other girls in the courtroom...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
