Lincoln Center's Oppenheimer
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Lincoln Center's Oppenheimer It seemed an innovation when writers such as Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss put recent history on the stage. Actually, the practice is...
...yet when I see the name, I think of Crookback Dick...
...Although the way things are currently, you might get more of an argument about mother...
...the effect of impersonal forces must be shown through the deeds of men...
...It is very nice to congratulate ourselves on being so much more enlightened than people were in those dark times, but it's a little too safe and cozy for really free spirits...
...Kipphardt presents this in a somewhat tragic light, and it was undoubtedly a mean, small-minded action for the government to have taken...
...Shakespeare used English history to point up popular political morals...
...A production of Richard II caused trouble when exploited by followers of the Earl of Essex during his insurrection against Elizabeth I, and Walpole instituted the censorship of the English stage in response to Gay's musical entertainment...
...Scholars have written tomes recently proving that, given the times, he was rather an enlightened statesman...
...This stripping away has reduced the number of witnesses at the 1954 Oppenheimer hearing from 40 to six, changed the order of their appearance, merged the testimony of several men into one, and attributed monologues, wholly composed by Kipphardt, to some of the characters...
...Issues are inevitably simplified...
...Innocence on this scale, by someone who has supposedly been involved in politics all his adult life, is not sympathetic...
...a complex situation has to be compressed into a simple design...
...We are properly horrified by the zeal with which examining lawyers inquire about the night he spent in a motel with a former fiancee who was about to commit suicide, and happened to be a Communist...
...His position is presented coherently, and since he never cast any aspersions on Oppenheimer's loyalty, real issues are present on the stage, producing a conflict whose outcome is not patently predetermined...
...and the prying and probing into Oppen-heimer's past by a troupe of busy little beavers trying to determine his loyalty often remind us of genial Joe's pernicious influence...
...The hearing took place in the middle of the McCarthy era...
...Although our responses are correct, it all seems somehow a bit old hat, unremittingly deja vu...
...To be sure, the very concept of history has changed over the centuries...
...John Gay's The Beggar's Opera showed highwaymen and jailers who reminded audiences of Sir Robert Walpole and his associates...
...A more immediately impressive performance is turned in by Herbert Berghof as Teller, a man not anxious to hurt a former colleague, yet eager to demolish Oppenheimer's position...
...After all this reshuffling and intensifying, we do not have any accurate record...
...I fail to see how opposing the excesses of the McCarthy era in the New York theater today is any more courageous than applauding apple pie and mother...
...Opponents are right to be wary of the history dramatists concoct, since they frequently substitute a plausible villain for a merely ignorant man, a knight in shining armor for an opportunist with the gift of rhetoric...
...Oppenheimer (and many other scientists) were horrified by the atom bomb they had produced...
...Early historians were inevitably moralists, and their approach to their profession did not differ markedly from that of the dramatists...
...Oppenheimer's evidently typical Lettish intellectual involvements during the Depression led to an attempt to slur him because of his friends and the causes he had supported...
...it has always aroused opposition...
...To most people, myself included, Richard III will always be the Prince of Punches that Shakespeare made of him...
...if the subject was going to be treated on the stage, this had to be done...
...Kipphardt is hardly being dishonest...
...It was fascinating for me to see this actor, who can move like a coiled snake and flame with colloquial eloquence, succeed in portraying a withdrawn intellectual...
...More recently, an Atlanta theater company was evicted following its presentation of Red, White and Maddox...
...We titter appropriately when a professional informer is shown up by a defense affidavit proving that Oppenheimer could not have been present at a certain "open Communist meeting" because he was in another state...
...Just as this practice is a hoary one...
...The play has a neat, sure-fire shape in the form of a trial-like hearing and provides the Lincoln Center actors with clearly defined roles whose generally modest demands they clearly meet...
...Heinar Kipphardt, author of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the current production at Lincoln Center, writes in his preface to the published version of his script that while it is "not an assemblage of documentary material," he "adheres strictly to the facts which emerge from the documents and reports concerning the investigation...
...Yet, what remains is not, as Sergeant Friday would say, "just the facts...
...In the end, like every dramatist, Kipphardt gives us his vision of human experience...
...And we applaud heartily when someone cautions the investigators about "protecting freedom until there is nothing left of it...
...That some of the things said were uttered once upon a time by real men should not intimidate us...
...Yet Kipphardt admits the stage has limitations and claims to be following Hegel's advice to "strip away the circumstances and aspects that are of merely secondary importance, and to replace them with such that allow the essence of the matter to appear in all its clarity...
...The second act, however, considers matters of greater immediate interest...
...We have, in other words, only a fragment of the original investigation, and that has been considerably tampered with...
...It is frequently allied with propaganda, using the past to further a position in the present...
...I cannot agree with Kipphardt that such naive beings have an innate moral superiority to the blunt politicians they serve...
...Edward Teller, who did most of the key work on the hydrogen bomb, disagreed with Oppenheimer's optimism about reasoning together with Stalin, nor did he fear the results of further scientific work...
...At the end of the play, as in life, Oppenheimer loses his security clearance, more as a result of having taken an "incorrect" position than because of any doubts as to his loyalty...
...I become somewhat impatient when a man who takes part in a highly political business (such as developing an advanced weapon) discovers to his dismay that passions are stirred by the result, and then is surprised to learn that his personal integrity has been called into question by opposing zealots...
...To Kipphardt's credit, the play presents enough of both sides of the issue to allow us to think about it honestly...
...The investigators naturally try to link Oppenheimer's position to his fellow-traveling past, but more substantial issues emerge...
...When the Russians overcame our thermonuclear monopoly in 1953, some claimed that if he had enthusiastically supported a hydrogen bomb project we could have produced such a weapon much sooner and thus had a longer favorable power balance...
...The theater also has such a strong hold on our imagination that once this is done, it is almost impossible to refute successfully what the dramatist has wrought...
...The author's version of the case may contain "the essence of the matter," but his play must be judged like any other-either it is an adequate account of human beings in a particular situation, or it is not...
...Oppenheimer's problems were not only caused by his sympathies on the Left but by his persistent opposition to producing a hydrogen bomb...
...Oppenheimer also preferred to place greater hopes in negotiating with the Russians for a ban on nuclear weapons than on discouraging their ambitions with a superior arsenal...
...Historians today do not resort to (or at least won't acknowledge) such artifice, and the current crop of historical dramatists likewise claims to base its work solely upon the evidence...
...Since the physicist's reaction to a charged situation is to withdraw within himself, Wiseman must convince us that something important is going on behind the impassive countenance with which he confronts his accusers...
...History in the theater is not objective, of course, and generally does not pretend to be...
...The aftereffect, one of the witnesses remarks, was like a "hangover," and they wanted to go no farther...
...With the best will in the world, events which were years in the making have to be crammed into a few brief hours...
...he wrote in hot passion to prevent the further decline of his city...
...As the evening's central figure, Joseph Wiseman presents an aloof, physically stiff Oppenheimer...
...Tacitus, for example, did not sit down dispassionately to compose the history of Rome...
...Playwrights are manifestly unconcerned with scholarly niceties—the theater scarcely being a place where one can weigh evidence judiciously...
...too often what is arrived at is only a lurid superstructure instead of a core of truth...
...Actually, the practice is ancient: Aristophanes and other writers of Old Comedy filled the proscenium with the deeds of their fellow Athenians...
...Seeing the first act of the play is like reading last year's newspaper: Old battles, now no longer vivid and comfortably settled, are recalled...
...He was a propagandist and storyteller and not above improving upon the facts...
...In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer resembles other liberal propaganda efforts at flogging extremely dead horses...
...Berghof keeps the contradiction in uneasy balance and projects Teller's restraint and moral awkwardness, while simmering with the intensity of his convictions...
...Still, it does not get beyond a sentimental liberal view of Oppenheimer, and the fault is not in the documents...
...But I have some difficulty accepting the aura of injured saintliness Kipphardt spreads over Oppenheimer...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 5
