The Autumn Garden: Mechanics and Dialectics

THE AUTUMN GARDEN: MECHANICS AND DIALECTICS I Probably no play of the American theater (and I am including that feeble adaptation The Wisteria Trees) is more completely Chekhovian than Lillian Hellman's recent and most charming original drama, The Autumn Garden. Although the piece was only mildly successful when presented during the 1950-1951 season on Broadway, to the discerning (and here I quote Alan Downer) it is "Miss Hellman's most original play." The Autumn Garden is remarkable for its skill. Miss Hellman herself (in her Introduction to Four Plays) lists the two faults most enumerated by her critics: that her plays are "too well-made" and that they are "melodramas." These two limitations are strikingly absent from The Autumn Garden. As a matter of fact, the play successfully contradicts Miss Hellman's own statements about the nature of drama. In her Introduction, she states: "The theatre has limitations: it is a tight, unbending, unfluid, meager form in which to write." But The Autumn Garden is just the opposite kind of drama; it is loose in structure, bends easily but without breaking, is fluid and, far from being meager, overflows with characters and situations; indeed, so diffuse is the play that a first reading presents the same difficulties as does The Cherry Orchard: one must keep a finger poised to search out identities in the cast of characters. In all of Miss Hellman's first six plays, the initial situation is presented in terms of some kind of problem, and in three of these pieces (Days to Come, The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine) the first actors the audience sees and hears are servants behaving in the traditional opening scene fashion. The Negro servants, Addie and Cal, who are on stage in the first scene of The Little Foxes, are there to give us a feeling of elegance and richness and a sense of power, all of which help establish the character of Regina Giddens before her delayed entrance allows her really to dominate the stage. In The Autumn Garden, the opening is quite different. "On stage at rise of curtain" are six of the main persons of the play. They do not direct their conversation or their actions toward anyone situation, but indeed are behaving in a manner which we have come to call Chekhovian. Each is concerned with himself, his own problems. We, the audience, seem to have interrupted a series of activities which have been going on for some time: the marital problems of Rose and Benjamin Griggs; 191 MODERN DRAMA September the complex emotional and financial relationships between old Mrs. Ellis, her daughter-in-law and her grandson; the grandson's involvements with a novelist friend and with his fiancee, the refugee, Sophie Tuckerman; Edward Crossman's peculiar and lonely position. Finally, t.here is the setting itself, "the Tuckerman house in a summer resort on the Gulf of Mexico, about one hundred miles from New Orleans." The house serves a symbolic function, just as do the houses of Madame RaneVSh)1 in The Cherry Orchard, of Sarin in The Seagull and of the Prosorovs in The Three Sisters. It is the old home to which cling many memories but which has grown somewhat shabby with the passage of time; it is the autumn garden where flashes of brightness only emphasize the proximity of vlintery sterility. In both The Children's Hour and The Little Faxes, widely regarded as Miss Hellman's best plays, once the initial situation has been established , the whole movement of the plays is direct and without embellishment toward the climax. Both are '\vell-made" plays in the narrow sense that in neither are there any characters or any actions which do not contribute directly to the unfolding of the central incident . Here we might consult Miss Hellman's definition; "by the wellmade play," she writes, "I think is meant the play whose effects are contrived, whose threads are knit tighter than the threads in life and so do not convince." But all art is contrived and better organized than life. The trouble in The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes is that the contrivances are too obvious...