Irrelevant Questions

...When Cain is born, God, with characteristic inconsistency, is delighted...

...Consider the first question: "Since God made everything and God is good—why did he make Lucifer...

...Both Shaw and the Broadway bards give the subject no more than the equivalent of a single act...

...The others just go around sycophantically emitting Hallelujahs...

...Significantly, the most interesting scene in this play is the one in which Lucifer tries to thwart the tyrant by urging Abel to appease Cain and avert bloodshed...

...Indeed, along with the program of Mourning Becomes Electra, we get a note from O'Neill's biographers, Arthur and Barbara Gelb, to the effect that this play, like every O'Neill work, really portrays the tragic history of his family...

...Still, I cannot resist observing that Shaw, in Back to Methuselah, not to mention two Broadway bards, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, in a musical called The Apple Tree (that derived its Adam-and-Eve episode from Mark Twain), recognized one salient fact about the story: It yields usable dramatic material for only part of an evening...

...Am I too cheerfully assuming the sophistication of Miller's intentions...

...After wrestling mightily with these questions, I have concluded the only way to make sense of their presence is to consider them as oblique, ironic pointers to the senselessness of the drama: They are not answered by the action, and that is why they are there...

...Not so...

...The comedy's sophistication falters when we get to the verbal humor and the characterization...

...Most of us, as delighted as we were surprised, hoped to see more of the same coming from Miller, but The Creation of the World indicates that the dramatist and his critics shared a false hope...

...The whole sequence is utterly pointless, unless it means—See how nasty the boss gets when a junior executive shows a little initiative...

...Question Two: "Is there something in the way we are born which makes us want the world to be good...

...This eminent dramatist, justly honored for Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and The Price, has made the natural mistake of overestimating his comic talents...

...Thin out the innocence," Lucifer advises...

...uestion Three: "When every man wants justice, why does he go on creating injustice...

...In this play, the existence of Lucifer has nothing to do with ethical good, merely with good conversation...

...I should have been grateful for some overt sign that Eve's wretched situation is not taken to be natural or desirable...

...Suddenly illuminated on the nature of good and evil, Adam and Eve are ready to start multiplying in accordance with God's command...

...Eve goes on being meek, and God and Adam go on ordering her around...

...Yet I confess to a nagging fear that the irony I detect is mine, not the dramatist's, and I wish Miller had made his meaning more pointed and more explicit...

...Nobody, but nobody, could seriously pretend that these idiotic questions really apply to the actions on stage...

...God, however, far from being omniscient and pleased, seems genuinely surprised and furious...

...Adam and Lucifer share the role of Everyman, striving to live with the paternalistic tyrant who wields complete power...

...Just one of these jests makes the rest unnecessary...

...With the best will in the world, I cannot give Miller full marks for the ironic effect of his second question...

...Surely not...

...How did Miller's predecessors handle it...

...On Stage IRRELEVANT QUESTIONS BY HENRY POPKIN A / j^_rthur Miller's new comedy, The Creation of the World and Other Business, is not very good, but there is certainly no necessity to be unpleasant about it...

...In short, Gregory Solomon seems now to have been a fluke whose brilliance had the effect of making him a sinister influence...

...liberation has come too late for her and for them...

...The characters' names may be God or Gideon or an American equivalent of Agamemnon, yet their qualities and motives are likely to be those Miller or Chayefsky or O'Neill would have created in any case...

...That, too, may be irony, but I suspect it is a mistake...

...No, but there is something in the birth shown in the second act that makes us want to reject the honor of being born...

...While I am willing to give Miller the benefit of the doubt on his three questions and assume that they are intended ironically or even farcically, I cannot fathom his treatment of Eve and what used to be called the woman-question...

...The Old Testament deity favored Abel's offering over Cain's because, well, because he did...

...It was not only the comic muse that beckoned to Miller when he wrote The Creation of the World...

...At an unexpected sign of divine favor, Adam exclaims: "We must have done something right...

...For he has inserted into the program "Three Questions on the Human Dilemma," each of them attached to one of his three acts...

...God is the heavy father, by turns tyrannical and indulgent, but equally arbitrary in both roles...

...He tells Eve: "You are my favorite girl"— apparently forgetting that this poor drudge is the only girl around...

...Eve meekly obeys Adam, going wrong only when she disobeys by eating the apple...

...Besides its universality, Miller has been drawn to the creation myth because of its illogic...

...Elsewhere Lucifer is told: "Go to hell...

...Adam thinks of calling his firstborn Frank...

...And by the third act, he has become the heavy grandfather, compelling his grandsons to compete, with their sacrifices, for his affection...

...Nothing in the entire act has any reference to this question...

...The characters in this play are stereotypes, and its laugh-getting machinery follows one excessively simple formula...

...I wish the Gelbs had stated their formula a little more flexibly, but I grant it has some validity...

...Miller has chosen to dramatize the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel story—peculiarly difficult material because it is so sweet, short and simple in the Book of Genesis...

...In fact, he is the only angel whose presence God can tolerate...

...Their relationship to God recalls any number of father-and-son incidents in earlier plays by Miller...

...The former consists mainly of putting modern lines in a Biblical context...

...Gerald Freedman's straightforward production gives the play little credit for any subtlety, concealed or otherwise...

...Other playwrights— among them Paddy Chayefsky and Clifford Odets—have been no better able than Miller to withstand this lure...

...He was succumbing also to a temptation as insidious as the serpent's in Eden: the impulse to dramatize, explicate, and gag up an episode from the Bible...

...Getting no support from the world's stodgy Creator, he goes down to earth himself and sells Eve an apple...

...Lucifer answers God back once in a while and even makes creative suggestions—as in the matter of Adam and Eve, who have been ordered to multiply but are too naive to make love...

...Eve is a typically goodhearted but obedient drudge out of Miller's old repertoire, like the wives in All My Sons and Death oj a Salesman...

...Boris Aron-son's set design is no less bleak in its first-act view of Eden than it is in the subsequent deserts where Adam and Eve are exiled...

...Curiously, though, the chief lesson taught by Chayefsky's Gideon, Miller's The Creation of the World, and such excursions into classical myth as Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (currently being revived with moderate success at the Circle in the Square's new uptown home) is that the use of traditional material is not so much ill-considered as superfluous...

...The pregnant Eve assumes she owes her swollen belly to something she ate, and, of course, she is full of guilt...

...Only a mean-spirited bully would go around using the weighty example of Bernard Shaw to clobber any current dramatist who presumes to recreate the Biblical tale...

...To punish her, God decrees that man shall rule over woman...

...At least that appears to be the case...

...Cain and Abel both demonstrate a desire for justice according to their lights, but since in the play injustice turns out to be exclusively a divine, not a human, prerogative, this question also has no point...

...Miller's God, on the other hand, prefers Abel's sacrifice because preferring it is unjust and he wants, in the colloquial phrase, to start something...

...Bob Dishy's naive Adam and George Grizzard's intelligent Lucifer divide what acting honors there are...

...Then, getting more than he bargained for in the murder of Abel, he responds in as un-Godlike a manner as he had to the eating of the apple and the birth of Cain...

...Four years ago, in The Price, Miller created his first authentic comic character, the bizarre but charming Gregory Solomon, an aged furniture dealer...

...A certain limited, highly selected irrelevance can be ironic, but the irrelevance of the second question is well-nigh total...

...some ironists in the audience applauded, perhaps expecting that this piece of male chauvinism would instantly be countered or at least labelled for what it was...

...The characterization is all too human, too commonplace...