Drama Was a Weapon by Morgan Y. Himelstein (review)

1963 BOOK REVIEWS 325 real contribution to acting was a splendid and fruitful impulse. Perhaps it may best be summed up in Miller's famous line, "Attention must be paid." ROBERT HOGAN Purdue University DRAMA WAS A WEAPON, by Morgan Y. Himelstein, Rutgers University Press. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1963, 232 pp. Price $6.00. Dr. Himelstein's Drama Was a Weapon is a thoroughly researched study which contributes a much-needed unraveling of the many threads that made up the leftist theater movement of the thirties. Dr. Himelstein performs that particular task with notable success as he recounts in his early chapters the evolution of the New Theatre League and the Theatre Union. He does not overlook the internal turmoil of the movement-the bickering, the in·fighting, the backbiting that went on among its leaders. The danger in any book on this subject is simply in losing perspective. While the author reminds us frequently that leftist drama comprised a very small percentage of the total number of theatrical productions of the thirties, he fails to indicate sufficiently the place of this drama in the theatrical history that preceded it. To some extent. this deficiency is remedied in John Gassner's excellent foreword ; Mr_ Gassner, who apparently takes no offense at being identified throughout the book as a "left-wing critic," shows much more clearly than Dr. Himelstein that the plays of the thirties were the outgrowth of a long, continuing process in American literature. A major drawback to this book is its dissertationitis. There is too much academic jargon, too many footnotes, too many statistics, too little anecdote_ The author naively asserts, for example, that "Unhindered by the Proletbiihne's language barrier, the WLT [Workers' Laboratory Theatre] had a chance for greater success because more New Yorkers spoke English than German." (p. 13) The middle chapters bog down too easily into a stylistic pattern: "The 1938-39 season saw ten plays of social significance." Only occasionally does human interest enliven the work: Frances Farmer and Phoebe Brand write an article for the Daily Worker in 1937 telling why they are wearing lisle stockings on stage in Golden Boy as a protest against the import of Japanese silk; Alvah Bessie suggests in New Masses that Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck. and Ernest Hemingway collaborate on an anti-interventionist drama. But these items are infrequent in the book. Compared with Harold Clurman's highly subjective The Fervent Years, this book has little general reader appeal. The author excuses himself from using firsthand interviews on reasonable grounds of objectivity, but an appendix of such material would hardly prostitute his scholarship and would certainly help make the book more readable. The author's main thesis is well documented: Communists attempted unsuccessfully to infiltrate and influence the entire range of American theater during the thirties. Where Dr. Himelstein's treatment becomes fuzzy is in his failure to define adequately his recurring term "social play." The phrase is a vague one at best, and as this book deals with such a wide spectrum of producing organizations , the term becomes less and less meaningful. In spite of the valid contributions of this study, therefore, little is done to make more clear the confusion that surrounds such terms as "politically significant drama" or "social protest play." Since Dr. Himelstein is content to submit his readers relentlessly 326 MODERN DRAMA December to paragraph after paragraph of plot summary, length-of-run statistics, and critical reaction from the left, this book must be regarded more as a reference work-and a very useful one--than as a general work. MICHAEL J. MENDELSOHN United States Air Force Academy CLIFFORD ODETS, by R. Baird Shuman, Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, 1962, 160 pp. Price $3.50. This study of Clifford Odets, the man and his works, is the thirtieth in the Twayne's United States Authors Series under the general editorship of Sylvia E. Bowman. As the author says in the Preface, this book represents the first fulllength study of Odets and of his plays. Following a brief biographical chapter, "Odets the Man," and a briefer one titled "Odets and the Proletariat," the sub· stance of the book is made up...